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Project Overview
Akademia Pro is the UK’s first fully-functional collaborative Student and Teacher App. Teachers and students login to view their personal timetable and manage all aspects of their school life – teachers can create lesson plans and homework assignments, mark assignments, award merits and send messages to a class. Students can add their own notes and tasks, submit assignments, and rate their lessons. The app features a rich, intuitive UI and synchronizes with a secure back-end system which integrates with schools’ MIS.
Tablets have the potential to revolutionize education. Akademia Pro enables schools, teachers and students to realise that potential.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
HDC is the UK’s market leader in providing customised printed publications to the education sector. HDC supplies over 1 million Student Planners each year to educational establishments across the UK. In 2012 HDC launched a new company, Appening, in order to develop digital equivalents of its paper-based products.
Compsoft have been specialising in mobile since 2009, having designed and developed web-based applications for many years prior. Compsoft combine stunning interface design with cutting edge development to deliver the best possible app for each customer. Our thirty-strong team lives and breathes mobile - we love nothing more than to apply our passion, creativity, skill and experience to each client’s individual requirement.
Project Brief
In 2013 Appening partnered with Compsoft to develop the Akademia Pro iPad app and supporting Content Management System (CMS), to facilitate central timetables and Student/Teacher collaboration. The brief for the app was to enable:
• Users to choose their specific lessons from the CMS master timetable
• Teachers to create lesson notes and homework assignments to be pushed to all the students in the class
• Students to add their own personal lesson notes, assignments and tasks, and provide lesson feedback
• All users to monitor the status of homework assignments and tasks
In 2014, based on market feedback, Appening commissioned Compsoft to enhance the solution to provide Teachers and Students with an improved, automated and customizable educational timetable, enabling a far greater degree of collaboration. Akademia Pro now also enables:
• Automatic import of full timetables to the CMS from schools’ Management Information Systems (MIS)
• Automated timetable set-up for each user based on user specific access keys
• The ability for students to submit assignments
• The ability for teachers to:
o Create lesson plans
o Create tasks for themselves
o Receive identifiable lesson feedback from students
o Award merits to individual students.
o View, mark and return assignments to the student
• Class/school Notifications via Automatic Push Notifications
• The ability for parents/guardians to sign-off of Students’ work
The CMS was further developed to include auto-upload of timetables, Push Notification administration and assignment transmission between users.
Project Need
Tablets are transforming the way we teach and learn. Powerful creative tools, interactive textbooks and a universe of apps and content make for endless learning possibilities, all on a device everyone loves to use.
Akademia Pro is the UK’s first fully functional Student and Teacher Planning and Collaboration App. Akademia Pro integrates with schools’ Management Information Systems to enable all users to download and manage their timetables in the simplest of ways. Intelligent collaboration provides users with a two way communication channel and can be used to instantaneously distribute essential lesson information, such as lesson key notes and assignments. And users can customise the app to suit their needs; creating ad-hoc tasks and assignments, including built-in reminders.
Additionally, students can submit homework via the app, which the teacher can then mark using Akademia Pro’s intuitive markup tool, before returning the assignment to the Student. The app also provides the ability for parents or guardians to sign-off students’ work, and for schools to distribute messages via Push Notifications.
Akademia Pro uses the latest tablet technology to enable teachers and students to manage their school lives, and to collaborate, more effectively than ever before.
User Experience
In designing the UX it was essential to keep easily-bored students engaged, and to minimise the time required by busy teachers. Akademia Pro enables quick and easy access to functions, combined with bright and interesting presentation. The UI makes the most of the iPad screen size and immediately provides the user with the most important information within a familiar ‘virtual diary’. The Akademia Pro app downloads the full timetable for the user and presents this along with their to-do list and calendar. Lessons can be tapped to access details and to add notes, assignments and ratings.
In 2014 the UI was updated, with new features designed in; facilitating discovery while retaining familiarity. A tap on the to-do list enables Students to submit assignment responses (including attached documents), or view returned assignments. Teachers can see the status of all pupils’ submissions, then individually review assignments, overlay annotation, add comments, and return to the student. The to-do list now includes enhanced filtering to enable greater functionality to be easily accessed.
In order to identify the functional, UX and design requirements for each phase of Akademia Pro, Compsoft undertook a Workshop, Specification and Design phase with Appening. During this phase the Appening and Compsoft teams met to discuss requirements and brainstorm implementation ideas. Further to each Workshop Compsoft created a “wireframe” user journey showing the screens of the app and key navigation concepts. Once the wireframes were agreed, Compsoft created alternative graphic designs, before amending Appening’s preferred designs based on feedback.
Project Marketing
Many schools struggle to develop an effective implementation plan for their tablets and often don’t gain the maximum benefit from the technology. Akademia Pro is one of very few apps that can be applied to every single lesson of every day and therefore can hugely contribute to the effective implementation of tablet technology within a school.
Appening’s existing customers include approximately 1,200 UK schools who are contacted regularly (typically monthly) regarding their printed publications and to discuss their future plans, including the implementation of tablets. When schools advise that they are implementing tablets the account manager will discuss Akademia Pro and offer a 60 day, no obligation free trial.
Appening also uses tailored campaigns to directly target private schools and schools with 'Academy' status, as these are the schools most likely to implement tablet technology. Furthermore Akademia Pro is featured in the Homework Diary product catalogue, which is sent to 3,500 UK secondary schools.
Appening has developed partnerships with many schools who are currently using Akademia Pro on a free trial basis with a view to purchasing the App at the start of the next academic year. Schools from Doha in Qatar to Tunbridge Wells in Kent are currently using Akademia Pro and are speaking very highly of the benefits they experience from using it.
Project Privacy
Appening sets up each subscribing school with its own password protected login to the web-based portal (passwords are hashed and salted for secure authentication), and defines the number of user keys that the school may allocate to teachers and students. The system generates non-sequential alpha-numeric access keys for each individual student and teacher, and also an associated Parental sign-off PIN code for each student.
The school logs in to obtain the keys, and then provides the keys to its students and teachers. The app is downloaded free of charge from the App Store but the key must be entered before the app can be used. On entering the key the app communicates with the backend system and links that instance of the app with the relevant user, as well as identifying the user as a teacher or student (which defines certain functionality within the app).
The CMS integrates via secure APIs with a school’s Management Information System enabling the auto-upload of that school’s master timetable. The CMS automatically links teachers, students and classes and selectively synchronises data with each app based on the access key, so only the user’s personal data is received in the app. All data transmitted between students and teachers via the CMS is only accessible via the app; there is no web interface to view user-sent data.
In the event of device change, loss or theft, a key may be decoupled, preventing access from the original device.
EdTech
EdTech focuses on how education is changing through technology, changing the way we learn and process knowledge. What will stand out here is those that enhance the learning experience and make a lasting impression.
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