Educational platform modernization

The customer runs an educational service that offers prospective college students guidance and assistance in preparing their applications. It is a peer-to-peer platform where successfully admitted students share their application essays and insights into the admission process, thus giving applicants a higher chance of passing. It is also a platform where prospective students search an ever-growing database of college students’ profiles and narrow their search to people who have already succeeded in being admitted to colleges and departments that they are interested in. Finally, the service enables students-to-be to liaise with experienced mentors and to obtain valuable recommendations on preparing their college applications.

Challenge

The customer contacted *instinctools while looking for a contractor to help them implement several new features to their platform based on ExpressionEngine. Due to the startup nature of the project, cost was a major factor. The cost/quality ratio offered by *instinctools turned out to be the best among all of the other competitors.

The customer hired a senior PHP developer to work on a number of challenging data visualization tasks.

The goal of the project was to modify the platform and to add a number of useful features to the existing functionality.

Solution

The problem was solved by the creation of complex charts for visualizing the relationship between admission success and various parameters:
  • Test results
  • Number of unique words in the application essay
  • Selected major

Charts were built using the D3 JavaScript library. However, the key challenge behind this task was to calculate the number of unique words. This required the use of the phpMorphy library for lemmatization.

Key Features

All of the necessary features were successfully implemented to the platform including:

Search for the nearest users using GPS as well as users from other close cities

Search for the nearest users using GPS as well as users from other close cities

As a result, the use of the platform has become much more comfortable for its users.

The customer was pleased with this cooperation and plans to outsource more development tasks to *instinctools upon receiving an additional round of funding.

quote-icon

I’ve worked with half a dozen overseas contractors as well as many local ones in the U.S. over the past 15 years at several different companies that I founded or was a part of. I am very impressed with *instinctools. They are the best contractors that I have ever worked with in terms of expertise, professionalism, and value for the money. The quality of their work, their ability to take on complex tasks without much assistance from us, and their excellent daily communication make them second to none in my mind. Highly recommended.

CA, Founding Engineer EdTech Startup

Technologies

Angular
MySQL
PHP

Do you have a similar project idea?

Anna Vasilevskaya
Anna Vasilevskaya Account Executive

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