John began his career developing e-learning and expert systems before moving into business application and web development. He co-founded Sereno with Rod fifteen years ago. John concentrates on developing digital strategies with Sereno's charity partners and leads on design.
A lot of readers of this blog will have seen the recent fuss over ChatGPT, the AI diriven software that's creating panic in the eduction sector as it can reputedly answer set questions and generate essays in ways that are undetectable to teachers and to plagiarism dectection software.
We’ve been continuing to build out a site using LifterLMS as our learning delivery platform. We are seasoned Moodle experts but wanted something lighter that would also integrate easily into the Wordpress ecosystem.
We tailor our hosting solutions to meet our clients’ needs. We host on 100% renewable Digital Ocean servers. We do everything possible to keep those sites secure and running at optimum performance.
Several years ago, Drupal 6 and 7 could probably have been considered the 'best' content management systems available. Of course, by 'best' I am being subjective here and I would have chosen Drupal over Wordpress, Joomla etc because of rigorous code standards, structured yet flexible building tools, configurable administration experience and so on.
If you are planning to rebuild your charity’s website, you are presented with a wide range of technology choices. This can seem bewildering but in point of fact I think you can make your choice by ansering a few simple questions and employing a couple of rules of thumb:
For many years, our go to learning management system (LMS) has been Moodle. Tried and tested, open source and more or less industry standard in the further education and not for profit sectors, Moodle is a sound platform with which to deliver your online learning.
A vital part of looking after your website involves an ongoing analysis of how well it is performing. I think most communications professionals these days spend some time every month looking at the stats. These are often used in reporting to senior management teams. They answer questions such as - how well is our site doing?
Anyone can install a Wordpress site - it’s that easy. However, not anyone can build a Wordpress site in such a way that makes it easy for site editors to control and extend their website effectively.
Many charities would like to integrate donations & newsletters into their websites. Alongside this, forms integrations can help streamline the process of transferring data between, say, an individual's donation and a record in a CRM.