Case Study - Acadaware

The Story

The Acadaware portal needed to be able to manage all aspects related to Universities, Students and Clinical Sites. The Curriculum Management was thought of as a tool that correlates course goals and objective with the 7ABC accreditation standards and mandated CAPTE with effortless preparation and real time reporting.

Another module we had to build for Acadaware was the Assessment System which included evaluations made by students for clinical sites, for experiences and other performance assesment evaluations created by both students and clinical instructors.

The Acadaware portal is huge, but it can be described in a few words as the ultimate tool that simplifies the entire student education process.

Key Development Features

In the past 5 years working closely with specialists in the education industry we've developed Acadaware using the following stack.

1. The entire back-end is written using the Kohana PHP Framework
2. The complex MySQL database structure is managed using the built in ORM in Kohana. The system is so complex it features more than 100 individual models that help us interact seamlesly with the data
3. The front-end part of Acadaware is entirely custom - it uses various custom made jQuery plugins that integrate into a framework designed for speed and simplicity
4. The portal design is also custom made and we've taken into consideration every aspect of the university realities - with people that are not necesarily computer savy and want to get things done fast and efficiently
5. The development process is streamlined with Vagrant, Chef and Git so that deploying and creating environments for both devs and production literally takes 10 minutes
6. The development process is streamlined with Vagrant, Chef and Git so that deploying and creating environments for both devs and production literally takes 10 minutes
7. Syncronizations between the desktop application that Acadaware has and the online portal are done through a custom built API and everything is secured with an SSH tunnel that can only be accessed by public/private key pairs.

Results

After thousands of hours of work, thousands of individual GitHub commits and more than a million lines of code - Acadaware is now one of the leaders in the industry.

Acadaware now works with 65 universities across the states that all benefit from the management and reporting advantages the portal we've developed provides.

What we did