Background/Challenge
Parasites Without Borders, a trusted long-term partner of Ecropolis, approached our team with an ambitious vision: to create an open-access learning platform designed for medical professionals and students studying parasitic diseases in tropical environments.
Their project — The Tropical Medicine Curriculum — needed to function as a comprehensive, self-paced educational hub that could host multimedia content, flashcards, quizzes, and interactive learning tools.
Jorge, the pioneer behind this initiative, emphasized that accessibility and simplicity were key. The platform needed to be free, intuitive, and regularly updated to support continuous learning — without sacrificing the ability to collect feedback and analytical insights from users.
The challenge was to design a robust yet flexible learning management system (LMS) that felt both familiar and engaging to students, while remaining easy for the Parasites Without Borders team to update and maintain over time.
Our Approach / Solution
Our collaboration began with a discovery session that brought together our design and development teams alongside several tropical medicine specialists. This multi-disciplinary conversation helped us translate complex educational goals into clear user journeys.
From there, we focused on:
- Designing for clarity and ease of learning — a clean, student-friendly layout prioritizing readability and intuitive navigation.
- Building a modular LMS framework that could evolve — enabling Jorge’s team to easily request for our team to upload new lessons, quizzes, and flashcards without requiring technical intervention.
- Integrating analytics and feedback tools to monitor learner engagement, identify knowledge gaps, and guide future content improvements.
- Balancing aesthetics and function — we applied thoughtful UI design patterns to make dense scientific material approachable while maintaining the organization’s professional credibility.
Throughout development, our agile process ensured Jorge and his team saw working prototypes early. Feedback cycles were fast and collaborative — Jorge frequently remarked that our first versions were “nearly perfect” on delivery, requiring only minor refinements.
Results & Impact
The Tropical Medicine Curriculum launched as a fully self-paced, mobile-friendly, and globally accessible platform that’s already gaining attention among medical professionals and students worldwide.
Early outcomes include:
- Positive user feedback and adoption among early testers.
- Streamlined backend updates, allowing Parasites Without Borders to maintain and expand the curriculum without outside support aside from our team.
- Increased engagement through built-in quizzes, flashcards, and responsive course materials.
- Enhanced analytics giving Jorge’s team visibility into user behavior, helping them shape future modules based on real data.
What began as an idea to support global learners has grown into an ever-evolving educational resource — one that bridges expert knowledge and real-world medical training.
