Newcastle University

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.