The client

Academic Gateway is a Swiss private school that trains students at the highest level, preparing them for university admission. Students who excel in examinations at this school have a strong competitive advantage for admission to almost any university in the world.

Background

Initially, AG had hired another company to develop Asismo, but the company did not fulfill its obligations. Mitrix had previously designed an application that successfully enabled AG to monitor student attendance, so the school decided to partner with Mitrix on the Asismo project as well.

 Objective

Currently, Academic Gateway uses several products to organize its online learning process. These programs often lack technical support, and they are also not a perfect fit for AG’s individual needs.

Thus, Academic Gateway aimed to develop Asismo as a single, user-friendly product that would meet their automation needs. The customer wanted to reduce the costs of using two free products, simplify system maintenance, and ensure data consistency, all of which require a significant level of engineer support.

The new system needed to be intuitive for both teachers and students.

Additionally, Academic Gateway wanted to be able to eventually sell Asismo to other online schools wishing to automate their business processes.

Solution

The Asismo project is an attempt to create an online platform to automate learning processes for an online school to the greatest extent possible.  Because Academic Gateway strives to optimize its programming through modern technology, they have installed video cameras in the classrooms. Students can watch a lecture online if they missed it or just want to refresh their memory on its content. The students will be able to study in person and/or online. Thus, the first part of the Asismo project is video hosting for lectures. Mitrix Technology integrated Asismo with YouTube.

The second component of the project is the functionality to manage various supplementary materials for courses. The system is capable of storing various electronic documents that accompany the courses. Each course is divided into subgroups, which are called topics.

Asismo also includes a scheduling function to help teachers and students synchronize their schedules and conduct classes without any overlap. In the school itself, there are large monitors (TVs) on which this schedule is displayed.

Mitrix will also help develop a boxed version of the Asismo project. Academic Gateway wants to not only use the product themselves but also to franchise it to other schools.

Challenges

We have recently begun active work on the video hosting portion of the project. Initially, the customer was unsure which third-party video hosting to choose. They even discussed options for creating their own video hosting platform, but this solution was found to be very expensive and impractical.

Many sites were considered: YouTube, Vimeo, and White Label. Vimeo and White Label can brand the entire site. YouTube branding can be done with JavaScript. We use special filters and Google settings that allow us to disable all the functionality we do not need in YouTube for regular users.

All video files on the host site will be private, restricted from public access. Asismo will collect data from YouTube and display it within the system to specific students.

Asismo uses a system of questionnaires to test students’ knowledge. The teacher can create a questionnaire and specify the correct answers for it. Such a questionnaire is offered to students as an online exam. Many questions in such questionnaires require the student to write a short answer. Initially, if a student had the correct answer but made a typo in their response, then their answer was returned as incorrect.

We solved this problem, which ultimately resulted in saving time and money and making the system more concise. This solution is still in the testing process. It has to do with the application of Levenshtein distance, an algorithm developed in the sixties. The implemented algorithm makes it possible to determine when answers contain a typo or omission but are still correct.

The Team

Five specialists are working on the project: a .net developer, a front-end developer, a business analyst, a QA engineer, and a delivery manager. At the start, there were two .net developers and two front-end developers.

Process

Development started in January 2022, and a working version will be ready in September 2022. Also, cooperation with Mitrix will be extended to 2023, as AG has many additional ideas for supplementing and improving products.

Technologies

Front-end: Angular

Back-end: Asp.Net Core WEB API, PostgreSQL