Opiq e-platform for basic and upper secondary schools

Problem and goal

The customer wanted to give the students and teachers a convenient, exciting, interactive and modern facility for studying, which would fully replace paper-based textbooks and workbooks, while also serving as a study journal. As an extra bonus, Opiq would drastically reduce the weight of a schoolbag, and would also enable the student, parent and teacher to manage schoolwork at any location and on any digital platform. In addition, a lot of trees will be saved.

The platform is designed for conducting and assessing the study process between the students, teachers and parents in the most productive, convenient and modern way possible.

• Contains professional study material from publishers and also enables the teachers and students to share their content. The most extensive base of study materials possible, which can be shared with all users.
• All materials – workbooks, textbooks, images and other materials and study journal – can be found in one place. It is easier to manage, carry, study, assess and give feedback, irrespective of the location.
• Web-based responsive design, runs on various platforms, making it easy to carry along. Possibility to run on different devices and study, assess and give feedback, irrespective of the location.
• Design follows the needs of the study process, nothing is excessive. Design can be individually adapted based on the wishes of a teacher, student, parent. Any excessive and misleading noise is excluded, the focus is on content. More effective study process.
• Powerful search engine, which is unique as it works just as well and follows the same principles as Google search. Material search is always fast and material is always found. Saves the time of users.
• Smart assessment system – the teacher can assess certain content automatically. Saves the time of the teacher.
• Precise, fast and personal feedback from teacher to student, parent and vice versa. Possibility to get and give feedback irrespective of the location. Saves the time of users, ensures clear communication.
• Digital content. A lot of paper is not produced – thus, protecting nature!

Progress, technical solution of the project

We have set the priority business goals of ensuring that the end-user is satisfied with the product. As in any agile development, the initial plan was not 100% definite. We have done things according to the changing needs of business and wishes of the customer and in this way have ensured continuous flexible development. We started with the functionalities of highest priority and expanded the functionality over time. The development cycles were short (2 weeks); at the end of each cycle, operative functionality was completed which was then tested by us and the customer, and then handed over to it. The customer was able to monitor and give feedback throughout the development process.

The technologies we used were TDD and Domain Driven Development. This is a cloud application, hosted in Microsoft Azure cloud. It uses Azure storage and search on ElasticSearch server. We use continuous integration, the image server is TeamCity, and version control is GIT (in Bitbucket). Project management is carried out in Pivotal Tracker, which includes code reviews.

Current situation and what next

This solution has been in use at schools for several years now. During that period, we have gathered a lot of user feedback and used it for improvement of the product, as is common in agile development. As the development has been agile, it has enabled smooth changes.

For today, Opiq is used in most of the Estonian basic and upper secondary schools, and also in some schools in Kazakhstan. Nonetheless, we are still gathering feedback and use it to improve the system in an agile way.

Accessible at https://www.opiq.ee/

Read more: National curriculum – textbook – e-study material is a logical sequence