Scottish Online Lessons

Scottish Online Lessons

End-to-end platform development for a video based online lessons platform for the Scottish Education Curriculum.

Challenge:

Our client, Scottish Online Lessons required a video based online lessons platform tailored to the Scottish Curriculum. We were asked to create a remote learning platform that delivers online lessons to children and young adults aged between 5 - 18.

Each lesson was to be presented in a video format that had been written and presented by one of the teachers. The teachers would both visually and audibly go over each lesson covering all subjects as well as setting tasks to be completed throughout.  

Critical to the project was the ability for pupils to be able to either stream or download content to their mobile devices, but also for this content to be protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM) so that it couldn't be copied or used outside the platform.

Creating an end-to-end platform for a video-based online lessons platform tailored to the Scottish Curriculum is a complex endeavor that involves various components such as content creation, user management, video delivery, and mobile tools. 

We were engaged to design and develop the systems due to our experience in previous in developing Learning Management Systems (LMS) and their ability to be able to develop all aspects of the project in-house and to a relatively short timescale.

Solution:

After some research of the various options for this it was decided to use Azure Media Services .  This provided the project with the following benefits:

1. A range of encoding options for different operating systems and devices types for both streaming and downloading of content
2. Advanced and automated AES-128 encryption and licencing of content in real-time.
3. Almost unlimited storage and near 100% up time to allow for quick scalability
4. Excellent integration tools with the .NET ecosystem

Azure Media Services was then integrated into the wider web (Umbraco) and mobile solutions (Xamarin iOS and Android) also developed by Craig Champion Software Development. 

The system is subscription only using Stripe as the integrated payment provider for this monthly and annual subscriptions. 

Results:

Scottish Online Lessons launched in August 2021 and to date has helped thousands of children in Scotland and beyond with their learning. 

https://scottishonlinelessons.com/

Technologies Used:

• Xamarin Forms / Maui
• Umbraco
• SQL Server
• Azure Media Services
• Stripe Integration
• ASP.NET MVC / Web API