Portals

About

The Portals project is a universal process solution for organizing a distance education process between a teacher and a student. This system:

• is designed for the USA users,
• operates by subscriptions and as native Android and iOS apps,
• is partially adapted for web technologies.

The current version of the project consists of two independent parts: Portal School – for teachers, and Portal Student – for students. Systems differ in interface and features.

Challenges

A challenge for the New Line Technologies team was to digitize new teaching materials, make the ready materials interactive, and fill them into new module generations – Portal School and Portal Student.

Solutions

During the work on the Portals project, 2 generations of one idea for an educational project were implemented, and the 3rd generation is in the process:

• Portals is the system the customer came to us with. It was not designed for distance learning, contained a set of educational games for primary school students, and training modules.
• Portal School and Portal Student are the next version of Portals, developed in liaison with the customer. It is designed for distance learning (when the teacher and the student may not be simultaneously in the classroom) using modern educational technologies.
• Modules for Portal School and Portal Student are rewritten for LTI (Learning Tool Interoperability) web for integration with the LMS (Learning Management System). Daily Math Practice and Daily Paragraph Editing are ready, and a DPA – Daily Practice Academy – project (targeting Home School using rewritten web modules) is underway.

To make the materials of each generation of the project find their application in current training programs, our experts:

• rewrote the first-generation games into native Android and iOS apps;
• adapted Portal School and Portal Student to the format of subscriptions;
• released 11 new educational series, designed for students of different school age (up to 6th grade).

The biggest challenges were:

• Interaction: correctly understand the key idea of ​​the project, announced by the customer.
• Time optimization: the ability to quickly switch between scheduled and urgent real-time tasks.

The business tasks we assisted the customer in:

• Updated educational content, making it more interactive and competitive (within the implementation of two generations of the project – Portal School and Portal Student).
• Helped the customer expand the markets: due to the integration of LTI specifications, the new content format is suitable for modern LMS (Buzz, Blackboard, Canvas, etc.).

Results

At the present stage, our team supports the project.

We simultaneously rewrite the existing series for Web technologies and update the customer’s site.

We are working on the third generation of the project – DPA + adaptation for Web and LTI.