Raccoon Gang – Results 2021

This year, the world community has reached new, powerful opportunities for online learning, which has become an integral part of education at present. The turbulence of the e-learning market, which was caused by the sudden spread of Covid-19 and the sharp mass transition to online, has subsided.

Institutions and organizations were able to implement their ambitious educational plans, and we were honored to participate in some of them. Raccoon Gang witnessed some important transformations in this area. We were able to implement interesting projects, both service/customer and internal. And we’ve even received several useful and inspiring partnerships and rewards. Find out more about our results and plans in this article.

Our Achievements

We are an Open edX Preferred Provider. 

Raccoon Gang has been partnering with Open edX for a long time, and from the end of 2020, our company became an Open edX Preferred Provider.
In 2021, we tried to meet this high status. We are proud of this recognition of our level of expertise and experience working with the Open edX technology and active contribution in the reinforcement of this excellent platform.

“The Open edX platform, as an open-source technology created by Harvard and MIT provides scalable solutions to transform the learning experience of millions of learners in thousands of educational initiatives powered by this technology”.

It’s the top category partnership for leading Open edX providers, which meet the highest requirements. 

Raccoon Gang is one of the best eLearning solutions and service providers of Open edX, but we don’t rest on our laurels, we are constantly improving our expertise. This reward has strengthened our commitment to implement the best online learning technologies and to empower the world’s leading learning initiatives and institutions. 
We became a partner with the UNESCO Global Education Coalition 

Also, we are proud to become a partner with the UNESCO Global Education Coalition

Its crucial mission is to improve the quality of online education by delivering innovative learning solutions. We pledge to provide educators with the highest-quality tools to conduct education online using open-source platforms.

Also, Raccoon Gang took part in the UNESCO-NetEdu Learning Ecosystem Event, presented our research at specialized conferences, lectures, hackathons, and have participated in charity initiatives.

Raccoon Gang’s customers, 2021

New challenges and projects

We keep developing and launching high-quality projects and providing innovative solutions for the online learning industry.

In this year, we have successfully implemented dozens of international projects for some of the best private and government organizations in the world:

• University at Buffalo 
• Examus MSA
• King Khalid online University
• WEBSCIENCE S.R.L. 
• Vietnam USA Society
• LaQuest Philippines Inc
• Tech Soup
• Learning Tribes
• Keep
• Mobile School
• Zenith Arabia
• Flybits
• JPAS international
• and dozens more

53 RG’s New Projects in 2021

Changes always come with challenges and opportunities. We felt this spirit of changes in some distinctive shifts in expectations and goals of our new partners.

1. Universities were seeking new ways to encourage learner engagement, extended abilities to monitor learners’ performance, and efficiency (gamification, social learning, extended reporting).
2. Corporations required custom features to digitize processes that might have been covered by offline activities before.
3. Some of the requests were driven by a need to optimize costs by automation of learning processes and keep up with the competition.
4. Remote work for employees became not a temporary phenomenon, therefore it’s necessary to implement effective and engaging training courses into the workflow.

Below we are presenting some of this year’s projects that reflect the main trends in our world.

National eLearning platform and Mobile App

Customization for Open edX LMS 

Since the beginning of the pandemic, many countries have faced an urgent need for a nationwide distance learning platform. The government of one of the countries chose our team to develop the custom LMS and mobile app with several specific features:

• Manual registration and bulk enrollment process on a schools’ level. Ability to associate teachers with their schools and learners.
• Each teacher in the country can lead the course, invite their learners and monitor their progress.
• The ability for each teacher to duplicate ready-made “master courses” (prepared by methodologists according to the state program).
• Opportunity for teachers to supplement “master courses” with their own materials. 
• Custom reports and dashboards, including differing custom metrics.
• Custom Mobile Application, where learners can take all courses and see their progress.

We also provided prompt upload of content to the LMS and transferred about 800 courses in one single week. Our intuitive interface required no training for teachers.  Provided high bandwidth (hundreds of thousands of users), security, and technical support. 

Custom Mobile App for King Khalid online University

Turnkey solution

King Khalid University is one of the biggest public universities in Saudi Arabia, with nearly 60,000 students. The KKUx online web learning platform provides different courses and serves more than 2,500,000 visits per month. KKU approached Raccoon Gang as an experienced partner that can fulfill all the requirements in developing a custom mobile application for the existing Open edX platform.

• The KKUx eLearning web app uses a lot of custom features, so the functionality of the mobile app needed to be extensively customized as well.
• Provided support for translation into Arabic and proper “Right-to-Left” orientation.

Unique applications for iOS and Android were developed from scratch, which allowed to achieve a better interaction with other applications and to use a modern technological stack to ease customizing, maintaining, and improving the system.

Average score

Feedback on our work in 2021

We were very pleased to receive such feedback from customers.

Don’t forget that feedback on our work is always welcomed and appreciated, so you can leave your comments in the form below.

Products and Services Updates

RG Gamification

A new (even more convenient) design of the admin panel was created. Its in-studio implementation continues.
Screenshots & Mock-ups

Advanced customizations have been developed:
– Learners can now receive rewards for any continuous activity on the course for a certain period of time (e.g., badge for activity on the course for 10 consecutive days)– Advanced filtering by “frequency”, “interval” (calendar), “organization”, “course”. This allows you to create even more unique rewards for performing events only from a certain organization, on a certain course, with different frequencies, at different time intervals.
– Improved combination of badges for different events – this allows the creation of roadmaps and learner paths. For example, learners can receive a badge at the end of the final course only if they receive badges for the first and second courses, which must be completed within a certain period.

RG Analytics

1. Gives many more reporting possibilities than standard Open edX Insights.
2. Quickly and easily converts online course statistics into effective actionable reports.
3. Allows course managers/ instructors to identify and make course improvements in real-time.
4. Provides actionable metrics both course-wide and statistics for each learner.

Improved algorithms for analytics and automated reporting, particularly for:
Enrollment Stats, Activities, Problems, Learners’ Info, Clusters, Progress Funnel, Suggestions, and Demographic Report.

Mobile app

Learning anywhere and anytime with convenient access from mobile devices is a must for modern online courses. Raccoon Gang provides one of the best solutions for Open edX courses: an innovative and technologically robust tool both for iOS and Android. 

We not only expanded the functionality of Open edX out of the box but also created mobile applications from scratch – with features that can be easily adapted to modern requirements.

Learners no longer need constant Internet access. Advanced content that can be viewed offline: 

• Video
• Text
• HTML 

Available Features:

• Supported content: text, video, discussions, surveys/polls
• Problems/assessments in the app
• Chromecast

RG Lilac

As a part of our homework, our team has adopted a new release of Open edX – Lilac – now it’s available to our customers as always with various improvements from Raccoon Gang. Stay tuned for the new Maple release.

Gang’s Top Content in 2022

We are happy to share useful and high-quality content that is worth reading and which can help specialists engaged in eLearning to understand issues of interest. These are our most popular articles for 2021:

1. How much does it cost to develop an online course?

Useful information that might be used to help course authors understand how much course creation costs in 2021 compared to 2020. 

Number of views: over 217 600* 

2. Ultimate Design Guide to eLearning Gamification in 2020 

This guide helps to implement eLearning gamification so that it can work and engage your online students.

Number of views: over 49 000 

3. How to create an online course: a step by step guide

The post describes information about a step-by-step online course creation guide to help you create a relevant, engaging, and successful online course.

Number of views: over 45 000 

4. Open edX: What Is It And Why Do 19 Million People Use It?

The article tells what Open edX is, explains several customized Open edX features that make the platform tailored for the customer’s needs and convenient to use, and why it is the greatest open-source LMS.

Number of views: over 64 700 

5. LMS Comparison: What LMS suits your needs best?

This guide could help you with choosing the best eLearning platform for your particular case.

Number of views: over 52 000 

*view totals as of 12/21

We Are Social

We support our thriving social audience by discussing the most important news and our own expert research in our social networks. We wrote 156+ posts and created 48+ stories. 

Our company continues to expand its presence in social networks. We strive to share useful information such as great eLearning infographics, Open edX related information, and eLearning statistics. 

There you can find ideas and solutions on how to enhance your LMS, integrate eLearning gamification and analysis tools into your educational process, thereby increasing eLearning performance and ROI, and much more.

By following us on social media, you will be able to chat directly with us and keep up with our latest news.

We will be thankful if you can share your feedback about our social media profiles and don’t hesitate to tell us what would be interesting for you to read about in 2022.

Follow us and let’s keep in touch:

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The Gang’s Growth

The Raccoon Gang population increased by 23%. We are glad to be surrounded by 146 smart raccoons in our team! To satisfy a growing demand for Open edX hosting and to provide top-notch support services, we have expanded our DevOps, Support, and Business analysis team. We’ve also scaled up our team of Python Developers to provide advanced Open edX customizations, data connections, infrastructure development, etc.

Despite the challenging times, our team is getting ahead and having fun.

This is the second year in the pandemic, so working from home became a new normal. Some raccoons got used to it and enjoyed it, while the others preferred the office, which was also always open to the gang members. 

We’ve continued to arrange such fun parties as International Women’s Day, Summer party, Hackathon, Bicycle Marathon, Table games, Chinese tea ceremony, International Raccoon Day, International Men’s Day, New Year Party. Also, we’ve conducted over 40 lectures offline and online during the year.

And one more pleasant fact: Raccoons traveled a lot during this year as soon as borders reopened – the USA, Seychelles, Egypt, Turkey, Portugal, Georgia, Spain, Greece.

Our plans for 2022

• Raccoon Gang will keep developing expertise with a proven track record of successful projects across many leading organizations worldwide. 
• We plan to provide our customers with extraordinary e-learning solutions and expand our services. Expect significant improvements in RG Analytics, RG Gamification, and eLearning automation. 
• We are ready to face new challenges, explore new opportunities as well as conquer new heights in the educational technology industry. In particular, we plan to develop the areas of training business and corporate training.
• We will continue to be honest and reliable partners with a strong team ready for the most innovative projects that will meet and exceed customer expectations. As our expansion continues, we plan to increase our headcount by at least another 15%.
•  We will continue active contributions to the reinforcement of the Open edX platform in partnership with the community. And we will make every effort to make online learning even more powerful, in-depth, and revolutionary. 

Custom LMS is easy with Raccoon Gang.
Would you like to be with us in 2022?