Educational Textbook App for Digitized Learning
Our team delivered a mobile textbook app for students with easy access to digital editions of textbooks and equipped it with various interactive follow-up features.
Context & Challenge
In this project, we’ve cooperated with an educational publishing agency providing digital learning services and materials. The client contacted us because they required a software development team with edTech expertise to redesign their software and equip it with several new features. On the one hand, the client had already developed a textbook app. On the other hand, the app’s code was outdated and glitched.
Our team’s main challenge was to develop a mobile app that displayed the textbook archives with the ability to download them to the file system and unpack on the fly. In other words, the client hired Mbicycle’s edTech app developers to implement a set of tools and features for digital education and make it convenient to use within a single app.
Solution
Mbicycle’s e-learning software development team chose Java as the primary programming language since the client was already using it when writing the source code for their solution.
Based on the client’s requirements, we’ve developed an application that would provide its users with the following options:
- Activate and deactivate digital editions and publications on their devices.
- Transfer digital textbooks from one device to another.
- Work with paid textbook editions offline.
- Accumulate, analyze, and structure textbook information by adding interactive notes and bookmarks.
All digital editions of textbooks fully corresponded to their paper versions. They also contained follow-up features, such as glossaries, multimedia resources, interactive tasks, as well as a branched reference system, and various options to track the task progress.
We set up integration with special cloud storage to make downloading textbooks smooth and easy. Our Android developer built a tool on top of this storage to help create lists of downloads with the ability to run up to 10 downloads simultaneously.
The client constantly uploaded up-to-date digitized versions of their textbooks to the cloud storage. The app users could purchase a textbook and get a unique token to download the current textbook version and run it on their devices easily. The Mbicycle team used encryption for tokens to ensure data security and stored all the passwords locally.
Process
For this project, we ramped up our qualified experts with relevant skills in educational app development services. The project team included an Android developer, two QA engineers, and a project manager.
In developing this textbook mobile application, our experts followed the Agile methodology with weekly reports and build testing. After successfully implementing each big update, we held demos for the entire project team. The client also took an active part in task assignments and management, which helped us achieve such close-knit cooperation between our companies.
Technologies & Tools
Programming language
Java
Third-party library APIs
Android Studio, Android SDK, Android NDK, Binding, Zip4j, ButterKnife, RadaeePDF SDK, Glide, Google ExoPlayer, Crashlytics
Results
As a result of our long-term & proactive cooperation between our e-learning mobile app development company and the client’s team, we delivered an advanced mobile solution that expanded the ways of mixed learning. Experts from Mbicycle also assured using digital textbooks from the client’s library along with printed materials, thus enriching traditional educational methods.
The client was delighted with the results, as bringing together digital and analog educational resources turned out to be very helpful for both students and teachers. Today, our development team continues supporting the project and making regular functional updates.
