Creation of a new eLearning Saas

Opentrends has created a new cutting-edge eLearning system for Thinkö, focused on the learning experience of school teachers.

Opentrends has been in charge of every stage of the process, from the product design to its implementation and maintenance.

The main goals achieved are:

• Design and development of products through LEAN and SCRUM.
• Successful adaptation of the scope due to the uncertainty caused by the impact of COVID-19 on teachers’ work.
• Multiprofile team (PO, Scrum Master, UX, UI, Business analysis, Architecture, Dev, QA, DevOps).
• Outsourcing of the client’s IT Department

Project description

Development of an educational platform for the creation and delivery of educational experiences based on Project-based learning (PBL). The platform consists of three large blocks:

• Registration and setup (new registration or registration with Google)
• Creation of experiences and activities
• Virtual classroom

To help teachers with these three difficulties, which are found when they want to bring new PBL experiences to the classroom, an application has been generated. This application allows them to easily manage:

• The creation of new experiences, specifying how they are connected to the official educational curricula of the different Spanish autonomous communities, without having to consult official documents.
• The management of schedules, collaborating teachers and students of the experiences.
• The management of deliveries, communication with the students (both individually and globally, with all the participants) and the students’ assessments and grades.

The graphic below is a visual representation of the main functional entities managed in Thinkö, in terms of creation and administration of experiences:

As shown in the graphic, an "Experience" entity has been created. This entity includes all the information necessary for class management (everything related to teachers, students and the activities to be carried out in the classroom), thus creating a compact and easy-to-maintain functional core that covers the entire life cycle of an experience.

When implementing the solution in workflows for users, access has been divided into two levels: one for the teaching team and one for the student body.

Thinkö integrates (Google API) with Google platform Google Suite for Education and with some of its tools such as Google Classroom, Docs, Drive, Sites or Slides.

Methodology

• Agile methodology

The project has been carried out with SCRUM methodology. This allowed both our client and ourselves to be able to adjust the timing much better and, above all, to obtain the result expected. In short, thanks to an Agile approach, it has been possible for us to be aligned at all times with the client's expectations.

Originally, JIRA was used for project management. The different user stories (US) were defined in this tool. However, in an advanced stage of the project, the client decided to change from JIRA to Monday as a management tool.

• Growth methodology

During the design and development of the application, it is necessary to understand how value is added to the business through technology and design. For this, it has been managed through growth methodologies dedicated to the analysis of the needs and to the knowledge of the best growth options of the solution provided.

Finally, with the application publicly open to general users, it was necessary to control the use made. To do this, a Mixpanel control was integrated into the application.

This way, from the product and according to the defined KPIs, events (users’ actions on the platform) are defined, thus maintaining knowledge of these users’ behavior. Stored data can be analyzed to find out points of friction and points for improvement, as well as interests and sections that may be interesting, to be reinforced.

Technology

The main technologies used were:

• JAVA
• MICROSERVICES, HEXAGONAL ARCH PATTERN, SPRINGBOOT, RESTFUL API
• CSS3
• ANGULAR, NgRx (Redux), RxJS
• JS, TYPESCRIPT
• HTML
• AWS (ROUTE53, CLOUDFRONT, S3, CLOUDFORMATION, LAMBDA, FARGATE, ECR, CODECOMMIT, PIPELINE, CODEBUILD, API GATEWAY, AURORA SERVERLESS)
• DEVOPS
• DOCKER, DOCKER-COMPOSE
• LINUX Shell Scripting
• WORDPRESS

          - AWS Infrastructure Architecture:

          - Software architecture:

Decoupled frontend and backend architecture

• Frontend: Modular, component-oriented architecture. Developed with TypeScript and JavaScript, using the Ecma (tslint) 6 standard. Angular, NgRx (Redux), RxJS were used as main frameworks.

• Backend: Architecture based on microservices. Implemented with Hexagonal architecture that allows the use of a domain-driven design (DDD) approach. Developed in Java using Spring, SpringBoot, SpringCloud and Netflix OSS as main frameworks.

Containerized microservices with Docker.