Virtual Learning Environment

Our customer is one of the world's leading learning platform providers with more than 4 million active users worldwide. The platform is used in all levels of education, from primary schools to universities, helping teachers make education more inspiring and valuable for today’s students. As user feedback drives the development, the customer achieved high levels of user adaptation and satisfaction.

The platform had existed since 1999 and, to keep the leading position on the market, it needed significant upgrade and improvement. In particular, that meant:

• improving performance to cope with a growing user base
• modern user interface with rich Web 2.0 functionality
• responsive web design to support mobile devices
• improving accessibility for visually impaired people
• expanding possibilities for integration with other applications to meet the needs of the growing number of users worldwide 
• advanced communication and collaboration features according to market demand.

The first phase of reaching these goals was a deep re-engineering of the application platform using .NET technologies and Web 2.0 approaches. In particular, we added new advanced but simple tools for communication and collaboration, such as:

• email, cloud email, text messages and internal messages
• video chats
• video conferencing
• discussion boards
• tests creation tool
• process-oriented writing tool
• project area putting students in control
• user interface for early learners
• new design of Grade book
• learning objectives repository
• content recommendation engine.

Besides, we greatly modified the user interface to provide the best UX, including responsive design and easy customisation features for a client.

During the migration, we met the requirements for compatibility on data level with the previous versions and smooth transition for the end users.

The project was performed in distributed teams, where Software Country's and the client's developers and testers worked together using SCRUM — an Agile management framework.

Outsourcing a significant part of software development to an offshore partner helped the customer to concentrate on its business goals, ensured fast company growth and high ROI ratio. As a bonus, working in a distributed team with Software Country led to significant improvements in software development processes inside the customer’s organization.