Creating a 1-million-user e-learning platform for the digital generation

Client

Entertainment Learning is an expert at leveraging the power of digital entertainment while transforming the way people learn. English Attack is a Web 2.0, entertainment-driven online learning platform for those who wish to study English.

Industry

e-Learning

Online Education

Services

3D Modeling & Animations

AWS Cloud

Back-end Development

Cloud & Backend Engineering

Cloud & DevOps

Country

France

Company size

Mid-Sized Business

A pioneering approach

Entertainment Learning disrupts language learning with gamified short-format experiences. Its flagship service, English Attack! creates true innovation in this $35 billion market with a 100% entertainment approach. These new type of digital courses are not only for students, but also at schools, corporations and governmental organisations promoting multilingualism.

English Attack! is the first English-language digital learning service specifically designed for the new generation. To immerse users in real everyday English via interactive lessons, the exercises are based on clips from movies, TV series, news reports, music videos, professionally produced casual games, visual dictionaries, and a global social network of English learners.

Top product features

The online learning platform has a comprehensive list of functionalities and modules that target a wide range of use cases and demographics.

What we worked on:

Advanced Accessibility Features (text to speech, audit)

Multilanguage interface (~30 languages including Chinese, Arabic etc.)

Multilanguage learning content (text to speech per language)

Bespoke CMS for translators and for Content editors

Advanced SEO Techniques for engaging new users

Security against attacks and hardware failures

Continuously optimised performance to adapt to the increasing number of users

B2B module, for organizations to manage users, progress and centralize access

Innovating learning and education through the best tech out there

We know how to develop robust and efficient multi-purpose platforms, ensuring top-tier performance and expert compatibility.

How to satisfy 1 million users?

A product with a very large user base and multiple content types and delivery mediums comes with its specific needs and requirements.

Performance

With most users being logged, scaling performance was uphill. We used Salt’s automatic deployment to configure servers in minutes. 4-Tier architecture scales horizontally with Load Balancers, Web apps, Storage and Databases.

We optimized website performance with CDN caching and maintained message flow to the database with Amazon SQS.

Newsletters

Personalized newsletters were needed, so an external service could not be used. The system sends many emails in a short time while avoiding the Spam folder.

To accomplish this, a Python backend was developed to send emails via Amazon SES. Currently, the service can send 250k emails/hr with flexible size limitation - made possible by the asynchronous API from Amazon.

Mobile optimization

Given the large audience and number of different mobile devices, optimization involved intensive testing and workarounds. HTML5 has been used extensively but on some older browsers we had to provide separate support.

Right now, the website and games work on a large majority of devices (phones, tablets with Android or iOS). The most popular devices were used in-house to provide reliable tests.

Great expansion and scalability

Expanding an already successful product to provide more languages and even more content, we got the opportunity to propel our partners to greatness. Together, we developed two games: Verb Dash and Swap Mania. These online games were built in Unity and we contributed to the game logic to help the user reach the level of repeat exposure for long-term memorization.

Verb Dash is the first game of the English Attack language learning service which has been developed as a multi-platform application both for the web browsers and the mobile market. For the entire development cycle we used Unity 5 game engine due to its improved efficiency in creating 2D/3D games and its great multi-platform support.

How we built a successful collaboration?

We used the SCRUM methodology, an Agile software development framework. This enabled flexible development while maintaining feature visibility and control for the client. All code is under revision for managers to follow and review changes.

The development team included many skills: from game design, frontend, backend to database and DevOps. Although challenging, thanks to the results, Entertainment Learning has been a client for over 10 years, seeking to bring new features and latest technologies to the platform.

What have we achieved?

As one of our longest standing partnerships, English Attack achieved many milestones and overcame unique challenges.

Over one million people across 30 countries have already learned with English Attack.

The platform is also at the heart of QIOZ, a free language learning service launched by Île-de-France (Paris Region) for 9m citizens.

Passed multiple security audits, including one from Orange Cybersecurity Team .

Testimonials and reviews

Paul Maglione, CO-founder at English Attack

FR

"This is to attest that for nearly a year now we have had a close relationship with ASSIST Software SRL, based in Suceava, Romania, for a range of product and service development issues related to our edutainment web service, English Attack!.

The relationship with ASSIST has evolved over time from sporadic product development to a full R&D and future functionality development and continuous improvement process, so much so that we think of ASSIST more as in-house development team than as an outside, occasional supplier.

The team at ASSIST, headed by Gheorghe David is a pleasure to work with: always looking for faster, smarter solutions and ready to provide extra effort and problem solving whenever required. They are proffesional, reliable, technically extremely competent and work well with a wide range of online collaborative tools and protocols.

I have no hesitation to recommend them to anyone needing high-end software development delivered on time and at the agreed-upon cost."