Otava chose Eficode to help redesign Teacher’s World — a digital learning portal for teachers. Eficode helped brainstorm, validate, and implement the redesigned Teacher’s World. Otava was highly satisfied with the cooperation and its results.
Otava Learning, part of Otava Group, publishes educational materials on a wide range of subjects, and for all levels of education. It reaches up to 30,000 teachers and around 600,000 students annually. Teacher’s World is their digital portal in which teachers can create modules based on Otava’s digital learning materials.
Due to the new General Upper Secondary Education Act, the Finnish National Agency for Education formulated a new national core curricula. As a result of these major reforms, Otava initiated the work on the redesign of Teacher’s World.
In the redesigned service, a new feature was needed: Teachers needed to be able to combine parts of the learning materials into larger modules. That sort of modularity was requested in the new core curricula. It was also important for the service to be clear and easy to use, in order to ensure a continued excellent user experience in the portal.
Design sprint workshops and user studies ensured a perfect fit
Eficode organized several design sprint workshops with Otava. These brought together Eficode’s facilitators and a working group of Otava experts. The workshop participants brainstormed and developed the new version together. Based on the ideas this generated, Eficode built a clickable prototype, to demonstrate the new features to the users.
Teachers using the service, examined and tested this prototype in user studies. The studies provided feedback and further ideas for development from the teachers, to ensure that the redesigned service actually meets its users’ needs.
The design sprint workshops and the user tests resulted in creating a minimum viable product — an MVP — which teachers also tested in a test bed to guarantee the best possible user experience.
Eficode built a user-friendly and quickly scalable service
The idea went into production, and Eficode formulated an architectural and implementation plan for the Teacher’s World.
The architecture was redesigned so the service could be easily scalable as the number of students increased. Also, if a teacher makes changes to a course, these are updated in real time. The architecture also ensures that the software has a long lifecycleand is easy to develop further in the future.
DevOps methodology was used in the development work, to enable a high-quality and scalable service, whose software development phases remain transparent to the client. When designing and developing the user interface, special attention was paid to making it clear, easy to use, and accessible.
“With Eficode’s help, we were able to provide our users with an excellent service that is very clear and easy to implement and learn. I am very proud of the end result,”
Anna Hallikainen, Product Owner, Otava Learning
The successful cooperation also inspired the redesign of Student’s World
As Otava was highly satisfied with the partnership with Eficode, cooperation also began on redesigning Student’s World: Otava’s service for students. Eficode helped with the development work for Student’s World, including the architectural redesign and implementation of the user interface.
Eficode maintains the Otava systems
When Teacher’s World and Student’s World were completed, Eficode’s software management team became their administrator. As the administrator, Eficode ensures that the systems are always up-to-date and that any automatically monitored failures are corrected fast.
“We reached the desired outcome within an excellent time frame, even ahead of time. We didn’t have to compromise on anything, and Eficode still finished on time,” comments Anna Hallikainen.
