PowerLearning21.com is a media hub for teachers, tutors and students across the world, providing educational content on a variety of topics. PowerLearning21, or “PL21” for short, provides a state of the art content-sharing platform that allows “teachers” or “tutors” to upload instructional videos to be purchased by other users, “students”. PL21 defines these terms lightly, as anyone can be a teacher or student in a given subject provided they have background or prior knowledge of the topic. The interactive community environment that PL21 is creating pulls from the life blood of passionate teachers and eager-to-learn students from across the world to create a really intriguing concept. PL21 thrives on the fact that teachers will always want to teach, students will always want to learn, and the continually cluttering market of free video content will in time be too difficult to search for quality material.

Web Development Challenge:

Promet was approached by a pair of seasoned entrepreneurs with an idea for a web start-up. The website idea was to create an educational intermediary—allowing teachers to upload videotaped lectures on any subject and students to download and view those videotaped lectures for a small fee. The fee is then split between the teacher and the intermediary. They needed an experienced web company to bring them to market quickly.

The challenge lay in creating a complex site which would have a video upload capability, a social networking component in creating teacher classrooms and students, and an e-commerce capability which would lead to a private playback of the purchased videos in an online learning environment supported by documentation and student notes. This was a challenge in that this project required complex web development but on a limited budget and a short timeline.

Solution:

To quickly create a an e-commerce system we utilized a rapid web development methodology using cakePHP, which allowed us to build a proprietary system for our client that provided them with the capability of licensing the technology in the future.

We utilized open source technologies such as FFMPEG to convert video into the preferred format. Working together with our system admin team from Promet Host, we tapped pantherexpress CDN to speed video content delivery. Finally, we created a best-in-class distance learning environment where each student may view class materials, take notes, rate the content and playback the video lessons.

The e-commerce capability was a custom web development build in a very secure and PCI compliant environment.

Despite the project complexity, we delivered the beta site on time and on budget. We worked closely with the client, meeting often during the web development cycle. This is emblematic of our complex web development capabilities: building an application from scratch, integrating several separate components into a single functional web site.