NXplorers is Shell's CSR education programme, delivered with Learning Links Foundation. Teachers first learn the NXplorers methodology online, then take it into their schools to teach students through workshops and hands-on projects.
I designed an LMS that brought this entire blended programme into one platform:
Learn - Teachers complete courses containing text, video, documents, PPTs, SCORM content, quizzes and assignments.
Workshops - Teachers create and manage workshops, take attendance and capture programme data while facilitating sessions offline.
Projects - Teachers and students create, manage and develop projects, with a central catalogue for tracking participation and progress.
The platform also included a comprehensive admin experience for creating courses, managing users and roles, configuring the platform, publishing content, managing certifications and analysing learner performance.
My involvement started before the product existed. I contributed to the initial proposal and client conversations, then owned the product design from defining what the platform needed to be through UX, UI and development.
I designed both sides of the product: the teacher-facing experience and the admin platform behind it.
On the user side, this included the dashboard, course player, projects, workshops, attendance, data capture and profile.
On the admin side, I designed the course creator, content editor, course configuration, post-publish analytics, participant management, certifications, language settings and RBAC user management.
I worked alongside a junior designer, 2 frontend developers, 1 backend developer, a product manager and a senior client success manager, while owning the overall product design direction.
I studied existing LMS patterns across Udemy, Coursera and Moodle. Moodle was particularly useful as a reference because, while it offered extensive LMS functionality, its interface highlighted an opportunity to make complex administration more approachable.
The biggest challenge was that the platform had to support a large amount of complexity: multiple content types, course configurations, certifications, languages, user roles and progression rules.
I had to define not only how these capabilities should work, but which capabilities the product should offer in the first place as the client's requirements evolved.
The LMS is now a flagship product offered by our organisation, rather than a one-off project for Shell.
Shell is currently building its content on the platform, with a pilot planned across 100 schools.
More importantly, the project gave the organisation a reusable LMS foundation that can support different courses, configurations, languages, certifications and administrative roles.
For me, the biggest takeaway was that product ownership goes beyond designing the interface and helping define what the product needs to be in the first place.
Outcome: Flagship product · Shell's piloting this for 100+ schools soon!
