India is home to the largest youth population in the world. There is an increasing demand for good quality education from parents and students themselves. However, the geographical and socio-economic factors hinder inclusive access to good quality education for the masses. However, internet penetration has improved and this can be leveraged to distribute content effectively. The Ekstep foundation was formed in 2014 with the goal of providing access to learning opportunities for every child.
They did this by creating an open, online learning platform where content creators, expert teachers, and organisations working for childrens' education could come together and collaborate to create high-quality content. A complete pedagogy of learning concepts across numeracy and literacy is available in the platform so content can be tagged according to the learning outcomes it should produce
The content created on the platform was consumed via a mobile app. A big highlight of the platform is the ability to view the content offline. When a child is viewing the content on a phone, a telemetry layer allows understanding the usage patterns and the learning outcomes of the child. This information is used to suggest newer content to learn and also shared with content creators to improve the quality of content.
The platform is built using a microservices architecture, and by itself does not have a UI. Ekstep foundation approached us in 2016. They were looking for a partner who can take the APIs and build a face for the platform so that all the planned use cases for the platform could start coming alive. Tekdi was called in to build the UI, and add a community and collaboration layer to the platform. In addition, a developer section complete with API documentation, API key management and API sandbox was also created to facilitate external developers to build on top of the platform.
Tekdi's experience in building community platforms and effortless user experiences helped us get the first version of the "Community Portal" up and running in just a couple of months. We leveraged several home-grown as well as 3rd party open-source plugins and libraries to optimise the build effort.
Solution
The microservice platform had several components - the learning service, language service, search service, analytics service to name a few. The Community Portal was the face of the platform, enabling content creation, communities and a partner ecosystem to use the portal for achieving Ekstep's goal of improving access to education for 200 million children. A summary of each of these sections follows:
UI & UX Design
Working with the product managers at Ekstep, the team conducted user research to understand the users of the platform. The product managers' thoughts about the user experience, combined with interviews with potential users of the platform allowed us to create an effortless user experience for the various types of users of the portal.
Content creation, collaboration and review
One of the key features of the Portal, this enables creators to create content and send for review. Creators can also add additional collaborators to help with building the content. To facilitate interaction between the collaborators a comment system was built similar to commenting in Google Slides. For this the team leveraged "JLike" and "REST API Toolkit" which are open source products built and maintained by Tekdi. Using this, we were also able to build a review workflow where the reviewer is able to provide feedback on various aspects of the content before it could be published.
Wordnet
The wordnet is a rich, multilingual, thesaurus.com like experience. However, the UI for the Wordnet includes pictures, translations, example uses and rhyming words which makes it easy for the child to understand. The wordnet is also used during content creation to add flashcards to content. This was a custom module created as a frontend for the language service.
A crowd-sourced word enrichment tool was also built, that allowed approved contributors to add information to words. Grade suitability, example usages, translations, pictures, parts of speech are some of the attributes that could be updated.
Developer Onboarding
Question Bank
Questions are a way to reinforce learning and also track learning outcomes. In the platform, questions can be added to content by searching in the question bank. We built a question creation interface that allows creating several question types - Multiple choice, fill in the blanks, match the following and several others that the plugin driven platform supports.
Communities
Communities on an open platform help foster collaboration and discussion which can increase the quality of content by cross exchange of ideas. The team used their experience of building communities to build infrastructure similar to facebook groups that allowed discussions, polls and media to be shared by group members.
The open platform allowed external developers to use the APIs and build for other learning use cases that the platform did not support. Flows were built to create and manage API keys for the Ekstep platform complete with scope selection and a choice of creating sandbox or live credentials. The portal that Tekdi built had an underlying service component that was responsible for the API communication. This allowed the UI to evolve independently without needing to bother about changes in APIs Due to the nature and size of the platform, Ekstep had onboarded multiple partners to build the platform. Initially, each partner handled a separate part of the platform, but eventually, the teams became cross-pollinated as cross-functional skills were needed. Since all partners were aligned to Ekstep's mission and the platform's success, collaboration was effortless. The platform is built as an open one, where any external developer can leverage the APIs to build functionality. In fact, the platform uses extensible architecture in several components which allows creating features without modifying the platform core. Moreover, the platform itself is built entirely on an open-source stack, and this open philosophy resonates very well with Tekdi, which made the project a joy to work on.
Working in a complex multi-partner environment
Open platform and Open Source
Tools & Technologies Used
