Cite Them Right Tutorial
Interactive citation training with structured assessments and automatic grade passback to university systems.
Interactive tutorial platform complementing Bloomsbury's main Cite Them Right reference site — delivering structured citation training with modular learning paths, practice activities, assessments, and grade passback to university VLEs.
The Challenge
Cite Them Right is one of the UK's most widely used referencing guides, with its own reference website (citethemrightonline.com) built on Bloomsbury's own system. Bloomsbury needed a complementary tutorial platform that could deliver citation training interactively — not just reference material, but structured learning with practice and assessment. Universities wanted it embedded in their existing VLEs, and grades needed to flow back automatically. Each institution subscribes to specific citation modules, so the platform had to restrict access per institution while supporting hundreds of universities simultaneously.
- Deliver structured citation training (Modules → Topics → Resources → Practice Activities)
- Assess student understanding with module assessments and pass grades back to VLEs
- Restrict module access per institution subscription
- Embed seamlessly into Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace, and Moodle via LTI
- Track student progress through learning paths
- Support paywalled and publicly accessible content on the same platform
The Solution
Built a modular learning platform on Drupal with a hierarchical content structure designed around how students learn citation skills.
- Modular learning paths: Citation styles (Harvard, APA, etc.) organised as Modules, broken into Topics, containing Resources and Practice Activities — each with completion tracking
- Assessment engine: Module assessments with H5P-based questions, automatic grading, feedback comments, and grade passback to institutional VLEs via LTI
- Access control: Custom node access grants restrict content by institution subscription — each university sees only the modules they've paid for, with a paywall system for unauthenticated visitors
- LTI integration: Full LTI 1.0 and 1.3 support with grade passback to Brightspace and other VLEs, automatic user creation, and institution/course group mapping
- Interactive content: H5P interactive exercises, practice activities with feedback, and 30 paragraph types for flexible content assembly
- Multi-tenant institutions: Custom branding, email domain-based user assignment, instructor group management, and bulk user operations
- Progress dashboards: Student homepages showing completion status across modules and topics, with institution admin dashboards for monitoring engagement
The Results
A mature platform that's been in continuous use since its initial launch, upgraded from Drupal 8 through to Drupal 10. The grade passback feature — where assessment scores flow automatically from Drupal back into the university's VLE gradebook — was a key differentiator for institutional adoption. The shared module architecture means core features like LTI and authentication are maintained once across the entire Bloomsbury platform portfolio.