AWE Learning

E-learning solutions have long become the norm for adult learners, complementing their busy lives with the convenience of accessing educational resources whenever they can and wherever they are. However, young learners do not have such a luxury as early education platforms are not that abundant.

While face-to-face education and peer interaction cannot be fully replaced by a digital solution, the latter is crucial for ensuring uninterrupted learning and mastering basic digital skills. The 2020 pandemic has accelerated the need to digitize learning experiences for the youngest learners who could no longer visit libraries or early education centers due to quarantine restrictions.

AWE Learning turned to Redwerk to help them build a SaaS platform for young learners, ages 2-12, from the ground up. They wanted to make their educational resources that were previously hosted through proprietary workstations installed in public libraries accessible to a broader community.

Our major task was to take the AWE Learning Early Literacy Station to the cloud and extend it with must-have SaaS features like reporting, role-based access, subscription and content management.

Redwerk was also fully responsible for the UI/UX design of the SaaS platform and a tablet app, which put to the test our ability to create enticing, intuitive, and inclusive digital experiences for kids and pre-teens.

While SaaS products are smart in that they work on any Internet-enabled device, they require implementing special security mechanisms to protect young users from age-inappropriate content online. We were expected to address this issue and deliver a solution that prioritizes child safety and user data integrity.

Lastly, AWE Learning Platinum Online had to be customizable and scalable. The e-learning industry presupposes a continuous supply of new educational materials; therefore, we had to put in place an easy-to-use content management system so that new resources could be easily integrated into the existing offering.

The ubiquitous digital transformation is testimony to the growing popularity of e-learning solutions. By 2024, global spending on digitalization will surpass 2 trillion dollars. Therefore, when devising the platform’s architecture, we had to consider the likely increase in the number of users and ensure the performance can be scaled in a fuss-free way.

Complementing AWE Learning’s decades-long experience in the early education industry with our technical prowess, the Redwerk delivery team built a powerful e-learning SaaS reflecting young learners’ education & entertainment needs, interests, and peculiarities of online behavior.

A cloud solution of this scope could only be handled by a leading cloud computing provider. As a Microsoft Partner, we saw immediate benefits of utilizing the Microsoft Azure ecosystem, such as built-in enterprise-grade security and governance mechanisms.

We implemented the Azure Kubernetes Service to achieve elastic capacity provisioning and thus make the scaling process a matter of a couple clicks.

AWE Learning Platinum Online has the microservices architecture, which makes it easy to update and extend. Each microservice is an independent unit, so it’s possible to work on one area of the platform at a time without affecting the entire codebase. Needless to say, maintaining the code hygiene and decreasing time to market are way more achievable with microservices.

We developed the whole platform from the ground up, including the designs for each of the STREAM areas, new icons and avatars. While the SaaS has a neutral cartoonish design, the app for touchscreen devices has a distinct emphasis on inclusivity, depicting children of different ethnicities, skin colors, and children with disabilities.

Here is a glimpse into some of the most prominent features we developed:

• Playground. This is the core part of the platform that contains more than 175 STREAM titles. The biggest challenge for us was to integrate all this content into a single platform. The intricacy lies in that the content comes in different formats (videos, websites, games, books) and from different vendors. Therefore, we often reached out to those vendors to clarify technical issues and worked out a custom solution for each content type.
• Admin Panel. This module gives access to the platform’s management system. Here, one can change access rights, manage subscriptions, check reports, edit bundle contents, add new child-friendly websites, limit the user’s access to different types of content, among several other things. There is a slight difference in the settings depending on the user role – a parent or organization – to match their specific needs.
• Bundles. This functionality is designed to simplify content management and provide personalized education plans. Bundles are customizable and can be tailored to the learner’s age, literacy skills, and personal preferences. They also make it possible to conveniently categorize resources for native English and bilingual speakers. Bundles can be assigned both to individual learners and a group of learners.
• Reports. Accessible from the admin panel, reports bring more visibility into what resources are the most engaging and how much time on average children spend on each of the apps. The Reports section has basic filtering and allows monitoring the app’s utilization time and number of sessions on a daily basis.
• Child Safety Web Extension. This browser extension allows accessing child-approved websites and downloading content from them safely. It also protects young learners from marketing trackers, cookie recorders, and ads that are sometimes included into the educational content by third-party vendors. With this extension, user data is only revealed to AWE Learning and is not shared with its content partners.