RUSSOFT » Success Stories » Competentum Group » iLrn

Project Title: iLrn

Company:Competentum Group View Company Profile

Client (Country):Thomson Higher Education (USA)

Duration, months:60

Total Effort, person/months:3000

Total Views:6746

The Challenge

To boost Thomson’s higher education textbooks sales by providing all students and teachers using these books with free access to the online e-Learning system to be developed. Additional value for all types of system potential users should be obvious and competitive through innovation if compared to other e-Learning systems on the market provided by other publishers.

The task for implementation of this business objective was to develop an e-Learning system of national scale supporting universities and colleges learning process based on Thomson’s textbooks sold on USA market, providing its users with rich innovative e-Learning experience along with huge amounts of constantly added new interactive learning objects. Thus the system should be easily accessible via Internet from any campus or home and function under any hardware & software platform common for USA market.

The Solution

To achieve accessibility goals the system was designed and implemented as thin client web application using Java and Flash plug-in for interactive objects, such as problems and simulations, while server side was a cluster of Sun SPARC stations running BEA WebLogic application server and Oracle database. For this project, PHYSICON also formed a special dedicated team of about 50 specialists combining both programming skills and profound scientific knowledge (actually, very rare combination in USA, while common among people with technical higher education in Russia) for the creation of interactive e-Learning content based on specific Thomson’s textbooks. One of the system’s highlights and competitive advantages are so-called "algorithmic problems". These are randomly generated problems based on some algorithm defined by its creator, which allows obtaining literally infinite number of problems within the system and assuring each student will receive his own individual task. PHYSICON’s content creation team developed more than 300 000 different algorithms for such algorithmic tasks of more than 50 interactive problem types, which made the system possess one of the hugest test banks on the market. The system provided its users with all kinds of services for both online and conventional offline learning process. For example, the teachers were supplied with the algorithmic problems-powered quiz generating and printing service, allowing them to prepare for in-class quiz within seconds having an individual printed task for each student, while college administration was provided with a set of intellectual parser tools for automated transformation of test questions stored in some older format (like MS Word) into the system’s internal test bank.

The new system fully met business requirements and client’s needs. Since the system went online the textbook sales increased by 20-100 %, especially in Math and Statistics, the disciplines having the hugest amount of content in the system, which is a very good result for mature and not significantly growing USA publishing market. Currently the system is used in nearly 1000 educational institutions all over USA, it has an average of about 20 000 users simultaneously working online. The system keeps constantly evolving, offering more and more high quality e-Learning content and services to its users.

Tools and Technologies

Java, EJB, Servlets, Web Services (JAX-RPC, SAAJ), Struts, XML/XSL, Oracle, Macromedia Flash

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