An international multimedia organisation started an education division dedicated to offering free online courses, certificates and learning that focussed on entrepreneurial and soft skills to students via an innovative mobile app. Wanting to do their part to help humanity, their mission is to empower young people around the globe, specifically women, with teachings from global experts while giving them opportunities to kickstart their careers through a localised job board filtered on the student’s preferences and courses. Needing it to be a success globally, they reached out to BBD to assist in developing the app.
The strategy was to revolutionise the way students interact with online multimedia learning content. The brief: Create an immersive user experience achieved by the most successful social media apps.
Objectives
- Design captivating features, incorporating interactive elements, personalised recommendations, and gamification for a positive user experience
- Address diverse user needs, including abilities, cultural backgrounds and learning preferences
- Build an easy-to-use and intuitive mobile app and platform for online content and courses
- Strive to minimise the download size and cost to the client, ensuring accessibility for those on low bandwidth or limited data packages
- Allow for automatic video and content filtering based on profile preferences – content shown to each user had to be relevant
- Develop a back office to facilitate easy content management for internal users
- Develop a back-end content management system for uploading courses, multimedia content and creating assessments
- Develop captivating social functionalities that facilitate in-app interactions among users, harnessing the positive affirmations inherent in social media experiences
- Develop a job board which integrates into the student’s preferences and works as a localised search engine for available jobs based on courses completed by each student
Benefits
- Mobile app reinvented the way students consume educational information in a way fitting today’s digital age
- Increased engagement through utilising adaptive techniques, tailoring content delivery to individual user
preferences, pace and performance - Encourages collaborative learning and knowledge-sharing while fostering a community
- Enables users to track progress in real-time, offering insights into completed courses, achievements, and areas for improvement
- Incorporates user feedback mechanisms for iterative enhancements, aligning with evolving user needs
- Technology used is nimble and allows for immediate over-the-air updates for new features and bug fixes
- Tech stack provides superior mechanisms for securing personal information
- App is highly interactive – achieving the perfect mix of education and social learning
- Accessibility through no licencing fees
- Sustainability through the development of a stable, scalable solution, employing platform engineering best practices and a contemporary technology stack
- Quick turnaround time, allowing the client organisation to start making an impact as quickly as possible
Overview of the solution
With a requirement to revolutionise online learning while simultaneously allowing for easy accessibility from wherever the user is, it was a tricky but highly rewarding build for the BBD team. The app primarily focusses on the French, Brazilian, South African and Kenyan markets, but is available to anyone globally.
The learning platform aims to deliver a feature-rich experience, blending social media-style interaction with learning summaries, assessments and personalised graphs illustrating relevant career paths tailored to each user’s unique journey. A notice board showcases real-time available job posts, sourced from local third-party websites, curated for each user’s completed courses, interests and preferences. Additionally, the platform hosts course-specific competitions; presenting job opportunities and prizes from partner companies to top-performing students
Approach
Trusting BBD’s experience and expertise within the space, the client allowed BBD to guide the technical decision-making around the app development as well as the learner and content management systems to ensure rapid development and project delivery.
The dynamic and fast-paced nature of the education space resonates with BBD’s values. Consequently, the team implemented cutting-edge technology to offer the client agility, ensuring relevance through streamlined content management processes.
For the mobile app, React Native technology was used to build a cross-platform application native to Android and iOS. As React Native is open source, it meant no licencing fees for the client while offering an enriched user interface and delivering reusable code between the different mobile platforms. Additionally, it ensures enhanced flexibility and gives a near-native feel no matter the operating system used. Maybe the biggest benefit in using React Native is that it allows for over-the-air updates which means that development teams don’t have to wait for the app stores’ approval (often a long and tedious task)
when enhancing the app with the new features or pushing through reparative updates. For users, it offers a slick user experience that instead of having to download an updated version through their app store, the app updates the next time it’s used in real time.
Scalability and performance were pivotal considerations in delivering a future-fit solution, given the organisation’s ambition to make a positive impact on a substantial market. To address these requirements, BBD leveraged the cloud, choosing Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build the admin portal and backend-for-frontend systems. Alongside the implementation of microservices and the React Native web app, the team established continuous integration and deployment pipelines. These processes were automated by our platform engineers, who focussed on ensuring a stable, scalable and seamless back-end that supports the mobile application and its scale.
Within four months, BBD’s team was able to deliver a working pilot on the app to meet the client’s partner deadlines.
Impact of BBD’s partnership
In a partnership that valued each other’s strengths, BBD and the client were able to develop and deploy a working pilot in four months and achieved very high ratings. The innovative mobile app revolutionised how multimedia content can be consumed by students on online learning management systems. Since go-live, the app has matured exceptionally well with 4.6+ / 5 stars ratings across both Android and iOS app stores.
