Product
SAM Learning is an award-winning online service tailored to improve the exam results of English students. Used by over 1 million people all over the UK, it covers a wide range of subjects across the curriculum including 50,000+ questions which are updated annually.
The service can be accessed from class or from home. All you need is a stable internet connection. Students can log in to do homework, complete interactive tests, and practice answering exam questions.
You can learn more about the application from the presentation video:
Key features:
- Ability to study anywhere, anytime.
- Web-based exam practice, providing teachers with the opportunity to revise results and enhance their programs respectively.
- Regular updates in line with latest curriculum.
- Personalised accounts helping students track their progress and exercise the most convenient way.
Research conducted by the Fischer Family Trust has proven that using SAM Learning helps improve exam results. Pupils achieve 2 GCSE grades better with just 10 or more hours spent on the platform.
Challenge
The company hired Intersog to help them build and release a completely new web platform designed to streamline the service delivery to hundreds of schools across the country.
With the help of our team, SAM Learning aimed to:
- Consolidate their code base;
- Minimize expenses for running their platform on multiple servers and decrease the number of these servers;
- Create an appealing and easy-to-use interface in order to make the learning process more engaging and enjoyable for students.
In other words, the client expected to receive a well-designed comprehensive web app empowered with up-to-date marketing features to better promote the SAM Learning platform to UK students and educational institutions.
Solution
Intersog's team completed massive denormalization in order to decrease the lock contention of the database. It enabled us to keep the data consistent along with separating the read and write loads which resulted in boosted system performance. We've created an error-tolerant message sequence and backed it up by the novel batch write tool. These modifications helped us increase the throughput to thousands of operations per second and merge database inputs coming from multiple sources into a single operation.
We integrated a brand-new caching technology to boost the overall system productivity and to decrease the number of servers needed to run the service. We achieved the feature parity with the previously used system in only one year.
After conducting the data migration, our team launched the new system. Over the following year we worked on optimization and extension. All these measures allowed us to substantially enhance performance and usability.
Thanks to code unification, the team could maintain several products aimed at various market segments with only one platform. The expert implementation of Flash along with effective data processing helped us to facilitate the training and make it more transparent.
The new marketing functionality helped the team to promote SAM Learning to millions of people all over the UK and US. The availability of a trial period increased the interest of potential users and boosted sales. The gamification elements helped to boost user engagement, training efficiency, and made the whole process more fun.
Due to the successful code unification done by Intersog, we are able to support multiple web products for different market segments using a single platform, while benefiting from improved data structure and visualization.
Project Manager at SAM Learning
