The need

SpeakUp is a language school specializing in teaching English. It operates in 12 countries from all over the world. The company contacted us at the beginning of 2019, looking for programming support in their projects. As the cooperation developed, the brand also decided to entrust us with the task of refreshing one of the key applications - Student Zone.

Project goals

The first task that was entrusted to us was to audit existing solutions within projects based on the PHP language. The process turned out to be quite complicated due to the enormous variety of applications: some solutions used old versions of the language, others had bugs necessary to eliminate them. Ubiquitous integration with external tools additionally complicated the process of documenting business logic. The SpeakUp team was aware of the problems and was aware of the fact that, apart from technical problems, it is also worth refreshing the key website responsible for student participation in classes.

Web development

Implementation of an application for managing learning progress
Reservation module
Teaching materials management module

Support and maintenance

Development of existing tools
Application performance monitoring
Integration with external websites

Product Design

UX Workshops
Preparation of user journey, mock-ups and website architecture
Design of a useful and clear user interface

Student Zone

The first weeks of work in 2019 focused on creating documentation and improving the quality of the code. Our programmers were also responsible for various integrations with tools for verifying learning progress, quizzes and tests. Rooms for online lessons were also created. Our designers also joined the project in May 2019. Their task was to refresh the image of SpeakUp by creating a completely new layout for the company's key website - Student Zone.

The process of implementing the new version lasted less than 4 months in the first instance (Poland). The remaining countries are updated successively. Currently, a new version of the project exists in Asian and European countries. The cooperation with SpeakUp continues to this day and the key functionalities for which we are responsible are presented below.

Key features and modules

As part of the implementation, we have prepared a number of dedicated modules using PHP (Yii / Yii2), JS languages, including:

Checking your progress and statistics

Each student can check their own progress since they started studying. Progress is broken down into levels, chapters, and lessons. All statistics are presented in graphs that clearly show what the progress looks like, e.g. in a specific reading chapter that has several chapters.

Convenient booking of classes

In Speak Up, there are two views from which you can book classes. The first one is the classic calendar view that allows you to display the types of activities that interest you. The second view is a list grouped by days of the week and the activities available in them. This view is much more extensive. It allows you to filter classes not only by type, but also by the teachers conducting the classes, time and place of the classes (stationary, online, phone call). It is also possible to view a list of classes with or without a reserve list. All these functionalities mean that we are able to search for one specific activity that interests us.

Convenient access to materials

The system supports such types of materials as pdf, excel, word, multimedia presentations. The student may download the materials made available for him at any time. Apart from teaching materials, the Speak Up platform also offers books for all levels of education. The student unlocks access to subsequent books and chapters by solving tests at each level of education.

Multimedia classes

Students also have unlimited access to multimedia lessons, during which they practice reading comprehension and writing by listening by supplementing specially prepared interactive quizzes and mini-games. Each level has 20 unique multimedia lessons, each of them ends with a short test that tests the acquired skills. Due to the possibility of repeated approach to these lessons, each student can maximize his score, which translates into improved statistics.

Checking your progress and statistics

Each student can check their own progress since they started studying. Progress is broken down into levels, chapters, and lessons. All statistics are presented in graphs that clearly show what the progress looks like, e.g. in a specific reading chapter that has several chapters.

Convenient booking of classes

In Speak Up, there are two views from which you can book classes. The first one is the classic calendar view that allows you to display the types of activities that interest you. The second view is a list grouped by days of the week and the activities available in them. This view is much more extensive. It allows you to filter classes not only by type, but also by the teachers conducting the classes, time and place of the classes (stationary, online, phone call). It is also possible to view a list of classes with or without a reserve list. All these functionalities mean that we are able to search for one specific activity that interests us.