Shika - an awesome new LMS extension for Joomla enters Labs

Update 

This first stable version of Shika LMS for Joomla was released in April 2016. You can find out more about the product and its features here . 

Shika in Marathi means 'to learn'. Like with many ideas, this idea started out of frustration of the lack of good LMS systems for Joomla. Sure there are a few but we saw a dire need of something different with a fresh approach.

Shika is a Learning Management System (LMS) for Joomla. Its been in development now for more than a year & is in production use at some of our clients. We are now beginning the process to generalize the development as a plug & play product for Joomla based eLearning.

I know I am blogging pretty late ! Frankly just didn't get the time to do it till now :) 

With this labs post, we hope to give you an outline of what Shika will be as a product when its released in a few months from now. We hope to get some early feedback from you & help us be more Agile in our development process while you get a product that's much closer to your every day needs !

Lets take a look at what features we have lined up for you !

Create Content your way !

As a teacher teaching students, you don't want to be limited in any way. The world is your canvas . Nice line but we are just getting there ;)

On a more serious note, we aim at building a system that will give you the flexbility to use any kind of content to aid your teaching process. On this, our motto is do anything & everything to make sure learning happens !

Video Content

A Picture is worth a thousand words & a video much more !

HTML Content

Keep it Simple & use HTML pages with WYSIWYG for content creation. Simplest & fast this allows you to create rich content & embed images, videos & whatever else !

PDFs, PPTs, Docs & More

Already have a nice PPT you made that you would like to use as course content ? No problem we support quite a few document formats you can use !

SCORM Content

Needed for the more serious eLearning system users, we provide support for SCORM 1.2 as well as SCORM 2002.

For those who are new to this, SCORM is a standard established so that E Learning course authors ( & authoring programs) can adhere to it such that these courses work in all LMS that support it.

TINCAN Content

A much more modernized standard, TINCAN does a great job

Intuitiveness Wins

Traditionally LMS's have been bulky, drab looking & extremely complex to navigate & use with their own verbiage which would take a dictionary to make sense out of ! We are changing all that & making a 'LMS for Humans' to copy from Mark Shuttleworth !

Awesome Drag & Drop Course Builder

Put your content into easy to understand Modules & organize modules into a course. Drop in a Quiz or two & your done !

Categories & Tags to better manage your courses

Get support of native Joomla categorization as well as tags

Find the course you want with our beautiful course browser

Present your course in an awesome responsive pin layout with Search & filters to help your users find things quick

You came. You Taught. Now its time to Test !

Just teaching isnt enough you need to check if its working. Are your students learning it right ? Time to test them ! Shika will have its own full fledged Quizzing system which will include an Intuitive Quiz Builder with the ability to ask Multiple Choice as well as Subjective questions. Plus we have cool features like Automatic Assessment etc.

Go Social. Engage & Reward

Learning is not done in isolation. It should be a social experience where networking enhances learning & takes it to a new level ! Plus learning is not simple .. its hard.. Rewards & peer engagement can go a long way in encouraging your users to learn more & perform better, 

Tight integrations with popular Social networking extensions

We integrate with CB, JomSocial & EasySocial on multiple levels to help socialize learning.

Avatars & Profiles

Choose to use profiles & avatars from your Social network of choice & make learning more personalized

Activity Stream Integration

Nothing like tight activity stream integration to take learning viral. Push important activities & achievements to the user's activity stream & help them get moral support from their peers.

Rewards

Grant your users points on various activities & achievements through the learning process & keep them motivated. Also give out automated certificates for successful students..

Groups

Tight integration with group systems to increase collaboration & peer learning. Groups associated with courses serve as a place to share, collaborate & grow together.

Friends

Friends integration lets the user know which of his/her friends have enrolled for the course, which increases the chances of their enrollment.

Jbolo Chat integration

Users can chat with fellow group members in a single chat group which will help them get some tips from their peers.

Where's the Money Honey ?

You have an awesome site up now with lots of great learning content. But how do you monetize it ?

Subscription Plans for Course Access

Create plans to let users buy access to courses.

Promote with freebies

Give a lesson or 2 free in a course to get users excited & let them try things out.

Reports

Extensive reporting with awesome graphing to let you get a top view of what's happening

Marketplace

All course creators can have their content at one stop and reach out to maximum crowd which would help them promote and make money. On other hand the users can excel by enrolling to any course of their choice. We are trying to make this happen in the first release. But it might just go on to the next. 

Phew ! That was a long blog !! What next  ? 

Now we want you to get all fired up & comment away with your questions & comments. Show us you want this ;) And also tell us what all you want. We'll do our best to make it happen. Also watch out in the coming few weeks for our super discounted early adopter announcement if you want to get more involved in this release. 

Update 

This first stable version of Shika LMS for Joomla was released in April 2016. You can find out more about the product and its features here .