E-gineering partnered with a state advocacy group to build an online suite of tools for educators. The goal was to provide Indiana teachers with “smart” tools to assist in the broad areas of planning, instruction, curriculum, assessment, and collaboration. These goals were achieved through the implementation of a web-based portal with custom portlets that included such things as a Class Manager, Lesson Planner, Resource Repository, Standards Manager, Assignment Grader, Rubric Builder, and multiple teacher collaboration tools.
E-gineering was involved from project inception, providing management direction and architectural oversight. We assembled a cross-functional project team that included individuals with expertise in project management, systems architecture, requirements analysis, user interface design, and software development. The team employed an Agile methodology called Scrum to optimize development productivity while remaining responsive to evolving product design. The platform quickly became very popular with teachers throughout the state.
Architecturally, E-gineering built the platform as a set of Java portlets running in the uPortal portlet container. We utilized the Spring Portlet MVC framework to manage the portlet lifecycle, and the Hibernate ORM framework to manage data persistence. We also integrated our code with a number of third-party and open source software packages where it was cost effective. These included Jive Software (forums and knowledge base), iCal4j (calendaring), DSpace and Seamark (resource repository and search), Slide and WebDAV (file repository), and BIRT (reporting).
Roles: Project management, architecture, development, UI design, testing, support