Author: Don Reynolds
I designed and led the development of a custom Learning Management System (LMS) to replace At Your Pace Online’s heavily customized and increasingly fragile Moodle-based platform. The new system met complex legal requirements across more than 600 markets, streamlined the student experience, reduced development bottlenecks, and became a key selling point in the company’s eight-figure acquisition.
Challenge
Over a decade of expansion, At Your Pace Online entered hundreds of markets, many with unique regulatory requirements. Some required features like limiting students to eight hours of training per day, while others mandated periodic identity verification such as uploading a photo every two hours.
Our existing LMS, a heavily customized Moodle build, had accumulated significant technical debt from years of piecemeal updates to meet these demands. Adding new functionality often broke unrelated features, and maintaining the system required increasing developer effort. To address this, the owner decided to build a new LMS from the ground up, and I was tasked with designing it and serving as product manager.
Approach
The project would affect millions of users, so I began by gathering legal requirements from all 600+ markets, prioritizing them by revenue and grouping them by website to allow for a staged rollout. This ensured we could meet compliance in each market without risking existing approvals.
With regulatory needs mapped, I engaged internal stakeholders to review what worked in the current LMS and where improvements were needed. We created mockups and validated proposed changes to ensure they would enhance the experience for both students and staff.
For the student experience, I relied on three data sources:
- Web contact logs that categorized student complaints about the LMS.
- Insights from the support and sales teams on features that influenced buying decisions or drove complaints.
- Dozens of direct student interviews to capture additional feedback.
Once the requirements were finalized, I designed the system architecture and entity relationship diagram (ERD), and wrote detailed user stories covering hundreds of features and functions.
We managed the build using an agile approach, breaking the project into sprints and testing at the end of each cycle. This allowed us to address any overlooked requirements while keeping the overall development aligned with the project’s long-term goals.
Impact
In two years, we delivered a functional LMS that launched successfully on two of our ten websites. It met all compliance requirements, sped up course creation, and provided a more streamlined, user-friendly experience for students. The system became a core part of our operational infrastructure and a major selling point in At Your Pace Online’s eight-figure acquisition.
Our Previous Successes
See more stories about how we have helped businesses like yours to achieve their goals.