Cobalt - Complete Training Platform

Online education is one of the most popular trends nowadays. And to have good platform to create your online training site is very important. In this article i'll highlight important possibilities you will have with Cobalt.

Great Platform

Cobalt is Joomla extension. Should you use Joomla for your training site? We all know what is Joomla good about.

1. JED - Thousands of additional extension that will allow you very quickly extend your site with additional features.
2. Themes - Thousands of ready to download beautiful templates.
3. Community - An army of developers who are ready to take care of your project if you stack or have no time to make it yourself.

And also Joomla is simple and easy to use quick learn CMS.

It is the smart decision to make your online teaching website based on Joomla.

Flexible Content

Cobalt is most flexible and advanced Joomla CCK extension. This will allow you to use single extension to create all needed sections.

1. Lessons and training series of lessons
2. Support ticket system
3. Forum and lesson discussions system
4. Homework system attached to lessons
5. Events calendar for online webinars or physical meetings
6. FAQ, Knowledge base, announcements, news, blog, ...

Built-in features

Al these sections will include all Cobalt great built in features. Let me highlight only few of them.

• Notifications - very important system that will keep your student informed when homework changes, or forum replay or any other event happened.
• Audit trail - if you grow into big company you do not need to change your platform. Audit trail is here. Log all important events, version control, restore deleted files or articles, switch versions, ...
• Search & Filter - allow user of find anything. Not only Cobalt use full text natural language search, it allow drill down to field values with filters. For example show all homework's that are waiting for approval.
• Moderators create helpers and allow then to manage lessons, homework's, forum or anything else on your site without changing they actual user group.
• General - This is set of feature like bookmark, follow section, category, user or article, personal home pages, change views, ...

Fields features

Fields make Cobalt limitless. You may create rich media articles with ease.

• Drip content field that allow combine articles into series. See below for more details.
• Video insert video from links, embed or even upload.
• Audio upload mp3 and allow users to listen online or download.
• Upload upload any accompanying material
• Gallery upload set of picture
• Text user HTML, markdown, BBcode or simple text to format your lessons.
• Paytoacceess one of the ways to restrict access to article based on payment. Purchase access to this particular article.
• Paytodownload upload any accompanying material and allow to purchase for download of material of this particular article.

This is only few of them. There are lot more fields that you can use to make you content media rich and highly functional.

Dripping Content

This is special Cobalt field that requires special attention. This is technique when you allow access to series of lessons one by one. This field allow create unlimited number of series in single section. User will not be able to open Lesson 2 unless Lesson 1 is passed.

You have 3 methods to indicate lesson as passed.

1. Time - For example you want that user get one lesson a day. You may set different time for each lesson. Something like open Lesson 2 after 2 days after Lesson 1 was opened and open Lesson 3 after 1 day after Lesson 2 was opened.

2. Manual - This is when admin or moderator manually indicate which user has passed which Lesson. For example you require submit homework and you check all of them manually and only then confirm that user have passed to the next lesson.

   You may also automate this process with Status Cobalt field, which can trigger SQL queries on status changed. This means that after you checked homework, you may change status to approved and access to next lesson will be granted automatically. Or you can change to Work more and notification will be send to user to work more on his/her home work.

3. Quiz - If you install Joomla! Quiz Deluxe Component by JoomPlace you can allow student to pass to the Lesson 2 after Lesson 1 quiz is completed successfully.

In addition you may mix all this methods. Open Lesson 2 after Lesson 1 quiz is passed and open Lesson 3 after Lesson 2 homework is done and open Lesson 4 after 1 day after Lesson 3 was opened.

Paid Access

You already know that with some Cobalt fields you may allow purchase individual articles or downloads, but in addition all this may be protected based on paid subscriptions. If you install Emerald - Joomla membership extension, you may protect almost anything with it.

Emerald will ensure not only access to lessons but file downloads protection. You can apply Emerald in so many flexible ways, it will blow your mind. Let me make examples.

Restrict lesson series

1. Use plan a to access training series 1 and plan b to access training series 2
2. Use plan a to access training series 1 and plan b to access training series 1 and 2
3. Use plan a to access first 3 lesson in training series 1 and plan b to access remaining lessons in training series 1 and/or training series 2 or any other combination.

Other restrictions

1. Restrict access to any article full view.
2. Restrict access to download a file.
3. Restrict assess to submit any article for example homework or support ticket.
4. Restrict to see particular fields. For example unsubscribed can only read, subscriber A read and watch video and subscriber B read, watch video and download.

This continues with almost endless number of combinations. You can create subscription plans that are really different by what access level they can offer.

Conclusion

I do not know more flexible and advanced online education platform than this one. Even among online educational standalone applications. None of them will offer you so many ways to create educational process with so many ways to pay for it.