How we Developed Curated Courseware for Schools: einsAcademy

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Imagine a platform on which one can access various educational texts and audio-visual aids; a platform which can organise and categorise educational content according to one’s needs.

Internet Results – Lacks security and accuracy

Internet is a boon for those who want to find free educational content, online. However, if people have searched the web before for the same, they will tell you that it is not easy to navigate through the interweb and find relevant texts or educational multimedia. Instead they’d probably share anecdotes about the various roadblocks they’ve faced. From unnecessary advertisements to inappropriate or false content, they face it all. This prompts the idea and the creation of einsAcademy. Since eins is an established educational brand, it provides products that cater to schools and universities.

einsAcademy – Free curated courseware for schools

It is a smart move to merge existing database with the software application instead of a involving a third-party site for content. After this was finalized, the intense research ensued. The gauntlet involved finding out about the process that various online teaching and content providing companies follow. The search revolved around how they function. The researchers took notes and worked on improving the foundation of einsAcademy. What they found out is this: these content companies usually charge customers on the basis of the login credentials or yearly subscriptions. But most often than not, the content that they provide are always available online for free. Despite the charges, they are unable to provide a proper structure or a working index to access exactly the content one is looking for. This was a struggle einsAcademy was now ready to address.

The developing phase

To begin with, the developers began working on the CBSE syllabus. Referring to CBSE textbooks and CBSE syllabus, available on the official website of CBSE. With the CBSE syllabus in sight, from classes 1 to 12, the team began by mapping the keywords in the existing eins database. After mapping, using MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS and NodeJS, also known as the MEAN stack, the developers set sail and began working on the einsAcademy platform. This web application, which can be accessed from different browsers of any device, began to take shape. In this era, where tracking you child’s online activity is crucial, the application strictly focused on providing curated educational content. While users entrust Eins with personal details, EinsAcademy ensures that it doesn’t disclose any information pertaining to users to anyone. Even teams at Eins cannot access the user’s accounts! So, one’s personalised content id and notebooks are strictly confidential. The security is such that once the password is lost, even Eins cannot get a user through. However, EinsAcademy provides save-password options and even an auto-logout facility which logs the user out of any device and browser other than the one the user is currently using.

einsAcademy – For teachers and students

The application now allows teachers and students, who are subscribers of einsAcademy, to login and access the content for the board of choice. The user needs to put in a filter to access the choice of board. The einsAcademy application can contain “n” number of boards. The eins Academy application can contain “n” number of boards. Once the filter is put, the user will have access to the classrooms and the subjects categorised under a certain board. Under the subjects, the user will have all the topic that is being covered. One can even fetch relevant images, videos or texts for a particular class. Choosing all of this, the user is now free to align and save this selection into one’s own notebook for future reference.

Creation of the central database by the developers here at Eins, was a huge breakthrough for this application. API from bingsearch is used to create such a database; by searching for images, videos and web searches for different search terms which is part of a certain syllabus. Curated text files of all the search terms helped the team at Eins to create the database. By conducting a safe search using the API, developers were successful in creating a safe content environment which students can use. Since einsAcademy has all the data in one place, it saves time from requesting other APIs to show desired results. einsAcademy has been enabled to also start using these results in MyCloud image search as well. So, if students and teachers register and subscribe to EinsAcademy, they get full access to verified educational content of all the popular boards. One can continuously customize the learning material to suit one’s needs. For teachers who save lesson plans in “My Notebook”, can create various combinations of audio-visual and text-based plans to help students learn better. One needn’t go anywhere else.

Accurate Search Results

One thing that the team learnt, while working on EinsAcademy was that showing 50 images and 50 videos is not immensely helpful to its users. It’s been difficult to teach or learn with too much data reflecting on one space. Searching for any specific term doesn’t work as the developers are currently using mongoDB as database and it is not efficient enough to search specific items in a large database. Going forward the team has plans to use elasticsearch instead of mongoDB for the search feature. They will also add other educational boards to the database in future. If that’s not enough, there’ll also be a hobbies section in the einsAcademy, which will help lots of other users. The usage or view count for each image and video will help the team to provide to users the most used results, which will streamline relevant content from the random results. Later there’ll also be an option to publish the notebooks that users have been creating. It will become accessible by other teachers and students.

Conclusion

einsAcademy is one of a kind application and currently there are no competitors in the market which even come close to the functions it provides. The potential of this web application in its service to the current educational market is what makes it stand out.