Client
Profile
The Client — Intellipaat — is an e-learning company from Bangalore, India, which provides remote online training courses in various disciplines as part of the information technology domain. It has trained over 600,000 learners so far. The range of educational programs covers over 150 technologies and includes general programming courses (on Python, Java, Ruby, etc.), and industry-designed certification training programs for modern and highly demanded tech branches (Big Data, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, and more).
The main goal for Intellipaat as an educational service provider is to help professionals push their careers to new heights. For this purpose, the company engages only qualified trainers with at least a decade of hands-on industry experience, offers rigorous learner progress evaluation, and issues industry-recognized certifications.
Key Project
Challenges
Intellipaat operates its own e-learning platform. At some point, its functionality appeared to be insufficient to the company’s management in terms of communication options. This led the decision-makers to introduce a new messaging solution that would encourage structured communication between key user groups: course mentors, students, Intellipaat support staff and administration reps.
The company started exploring the market looking for an appropriate solution. Their vision was to incorporate a messaging app that could offer:
- A well-balanced communication interface, smoothly blending with the existing structure of courses and classes;
- Reliable privacy options regulating user access rights and availability of in-course discussions and messaging;
- Intelligent group chat functionality, promoting collective discussions and active knowledge exchange between students;
- Convenient support tools for swift assistance to e-learning platform users;
- Efficient notification options for timely updates to users regarding any new developments, events, or job opportunities.
Solutions Provided
Core Technology
GP Solutions decided to approach Intellipaat with an offering based on a ready-made system — Leverice messaging platform. This is a unique deep-threaded communication software that intelligently combines messaging and collaboration. The primary technology stack for the platform includes:
- Java programming language as the core back-end technology;
- Vue.js framework for front-end development;
- Apache Kafka — an open-source platform, was applied to ensure scalability and sufficient capacity to sustain high-loaded messaging streams.
The key advantage of Leverice which influenced Intellipaat’s decision was its innovative messaging interface built around the topical discussion. What is more, the platform provided extendable architecture, allowing to build custom applications for absolutely different use cases.
Get acquainted with Leverice
Case Study
Custom E-learning Messaging Application
Following the custom communication requirements set forth by Intellipaat, GP Solutions modernized Leverice by creating a tailor-made messaging application. It was built using Groovy — a powerful, optionally typed, and dynamic language compatible with the platform core built in Java. The new application deployed a customer-specific messaging structure presented in the screenshot below:
As part of this structure…
Each course (e.g., Java or Python) is set up as a separate messaging workspace.
The workspaces are created by the system administrator and contain a set of predefined sub-channels:
- ‘Memes’ — for informal message exchange;
- ‘Support’ — for ongoing communication with the course service team;
- ‘Job notifications’ — contains regular posts advertising available job openings related to the course discipline;
- ‘Announcements’ — general notifications from Intellipaat staff;
- ‘Direct’ — for cases of direct communication with Intellipaat employees.
Each workspace contains separate communication channels for classes.
These channels are created by the system administrator, who invites students to participate in course-related communications. Each class channel also contains a pre-defined ‘Announcements’ sub-channel for posting general news and updates. Besides, class channels allow creating of more sub-channels that automatically add all course students in.
The messaging application allows 3 distinct user roles:
WS Administrator — for employees with access to full Leverice functionality allowing to create/delete any user, workspace, channel and manage the communication;
Support Specialist — a limited user role for Intellipaat employees responsible for handling student requests and supervision of ongoing communication;
Student — the role of course learners who can post messages and create sub-channels (the latter only for direct messaging with WS Administrators or Support Specialists).
The messaging app has customized access rights and privacy settings.
The custom messaging app’s access rights work differently than the default Leverice settings.
Course channels are private, with access provided only to designated students. All users added to course channels get automatically added to the four sub-channels available by default: ‘Job Notifications,’ ‘Memes,’ ‘Support,’ and ‘Announcements.’
In ‘Announcements’ channels, students are unable to post messages. This right is allocated only to WS Administrators and Support Specialists.
‘Support’ channels are of split stream type. This means that Support Specialists and Administrators see one of them as many channels with messages from different users, while students — as a single channel with only their correspondence available.
The custom messaging application was made accessible to all students from the main Intellipaat platform. Any learner can access the app by clicking the ‘Peer Chat’ button available in the appropriate course section of the platform. It instantly redirects students to their course messaging channels to resume conversations.
Project Results
The custom messaging app was officially released for Intellipaat in 2021. As a result, the company enhanced their service with a fully-featured communication tool that was fully aligned with their existing course structure and functional requirements. In addition, the new solution proved to be very cost-effective as it was engineered on top of an existing messaging system, with no need to build a communication engine from scratch.
Consequently, Intellipaat improved service quality by making their e-learning platform a lot more interactive. Their students started to actively engage in peer chats and exchange opinions, knowledge and ideas on a regular basis.
As of October 2023 the Leverice-based messaging app is accessible across the entire Intellipaat platform which counts over 1.5 million subscribers.