Feature updates in Testpress LMS for the past few months (Oct 2022 to March 2023)

Promising to keep a blog up to date seems to be more of a hurdle than adding new features to our product.

While we genuinely wanted to keep it up to date, we simply couldn't.

Lack of motivation maybe?!

While it is no excuse for not updating, no apology is better than addressing and fixing the same.

So here are a few updates, which got shipped in the past few months.

CTET Template

A lot of aspiring teachers attend the Central Teacher Eligibility Test conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE).

One of the distinct features of this exam is that students have the ability to optionally select a section.

We've added support to conduct the mock exams in the same format as CTET.

Institutes that offer CTET coaching can make use of this functionality to add value to their students.

When creating an exam, the admin has to choose CTET Template and can add optional sub-sections under a section to provide this functionality.

Students can decide which sub-section to attend when taking the exam.

Display suggestions while creating doubts

We had added support for students to ask doubts directly from the learning management system sometime back.

However...

This created a new problem.

The same doubt was being asked by different students again and again.

And.. this was becoming an operational nightmare for the staff.

To mitigate this problem, we now display a list of related questions before the student tries to submit his doubt.

The student can view the same and see whether it already answers his query. If not he can proceed and ask his query by submitting the same.

This has drastically reduced the workload of doubts for the staff.

In addition to this, this also reduced the waiting time of the student to get his query addressed.

Ability to import videos from Vimeo to Testpress

A lot of teachers use Vimeo to host their videos.

However due to piracy issues and high cost, many wanted to use Testpress inbuilt video hosting solution which has DRM protection enabled.

We added support to quickly import videos from Vimeo to their courses.

Upcoming & Running Contents in Course detail view

In Testpress, courses can be made cohort based by assigning start and end time to each content inside a course.

Many times, students in a particular cohort would like to quickly go to the content which is currently available.

They also would like to have a quick view on what are all the exams and contents which would be available in the near future.

To make this easier, we have added two dedicated tabs which would show the currently running and upcoming content.

Students can make use of these tabs instead of trying to dig through chapters to access the same.

The same functionality is available in mobile apps as well.

Live Stream (HLS)

We had provided native integration of Zoom with our LMS for teachers to conduct live classes.

However, zoom had a few limitations.

1. With zoom, students cannot pause and play the live stream. This is limitation of the underlying WebRTC Technology
2. The maximum number of students who can join a zoom meeting would be capped to 300
3. DRM Protection of live stream would not be possible for Zoom meetings.

To address the above limitations, we integrated live stream functionality as a new content type in our course.

You would get an RTMP url to which you can stream directly using OBS Studio.

Unlike Zoom, this uses HLS Technology which addresses the above limitations.

The only downside is that there would be a latency of 15 seconds from the streaming time to the students watching time.

Assign products to Mentors

We added support for mentors in our LMS sometime back.

Mentors are a great way to monitor a limited set of students. You can assign few students or a batch to a mentor account. They'll be able to track this subset from their dashboard.

We have now extended this functionality for products as well.

You can assign a product to a mentor. And students who purchase that product will be automatically available for the mentor to monitor.

Product Category

Products are a great way for you to have an additional source of revenue from your content.

While the existing UI was working very well for a few products, it, however, became more and more difficult as the number of products grew in number.

To address this issue we have provided an option for you to group products into multiple categories.

Assigning products to categories would automatically provide a tabbed UI for students to filter the products based on the categories.

Offline Responses upload

Most of the institutes have certain tests which need to be done offline.

This is because the underlying exam for which the coaching is provided had few parts which are done in pen and paper.

There are also a few exams that are still conducted in OMR.

While online exam has all the advantages of ease of use and better analytics, these kinds of exams had to be taken offline for practice.

To get the best of both worlds, we now allow the admin to upload the offline responses via their dashboard.

Students can review the same from their accounts. The analytics would also be calculated if the offline responses were tagged properly.

Tighter ZOOM Integration

The earlier Zoom integration which we had provided had basic integration of Zoom SDK.

We've now upgraded the same to integrate tightly.

The UI is also completely customized for mobile devices to use the landscape view in a more optimized manner.

Chat functionality is now accessible from the side and the student can continue to watch the video while he is asking some queries via chat. This wasn't available earlier.