Newcastle University
A knowledge-sharing platform, built in cooperation with Newcastle University, allowing students to learn from one another.
- Adopted by 1000's of students
- Support of Sugata Mitra's "School in the cloud" methodology
- Educational innovation
What did the client aim for?
Design interactive environment
The platform had to be attractive enough to engage users and assure conversation.
Reduce involvement of the teacher
The app had to be based around students, not the teacher.
Live conferencing
Remote video chat was requested to facilitate face to face contact.
How did we work on the project?
We were asked to create a platform that organizes students in groups based on their location and preferences. Students then interact and learn from one another, based on a predefined interactive program, with minimal involvement of a teacher. The project was built for Learning Circle, under the support of Newcastle University.
We helped define functionalities and interface for the platform. We chose Meteor to realize this project, due to a number of features we could reuse from our codebase. We based the Learning Circle on our Universe platform. It increases the sustainability of Meteor projects by implementing better encapsulation of code, better separation of front-end modules from the back-end, and provides the option of extending functionalities through a set of predefined rules.
The central feature for student cooperation is live conferencing, which we implemented based on Google Hangouts. The students can also interact through twitter-like communication. All education-focused activity is presented to them through an activity feed, working similarly to Facebook's activity wall.
Mentors and teachers can manage student progress and guide them through the teacher's panel. Administrators have insight into admission reports through a separate tool prepared for them.
What did we achieve?
The augmented team in the distributed model proved successful. The web and mobile versions of the application were delivered and rolled out to the live environment.
Adopted by 1000 students
Promotion of online citizenship model
Increased cooperation
Less individualistic model
Educational innovation
A new approach to knowledge sharing
Key deliverables
Conferencing through Google Hangouts
Automatic matching of students to groups on the basis of a completed questionnaire
Projects - based on student cooperation
Custom-defined course logic
Blogs - Students' creation of articles
Timeline with recents posts and activity