ePlato
SaaS Platform
Poltava State Medical University is one of the oldest leading institutions of higher education in Ukraine, the history of which begins with the Faculty of Odontology, organized at the Kharkiv Medical Academy in 1921. The faculty became the first academic specialized educational institution for training dentists. Poltava State Medical University conducts undergraduate training of specialists at 4 faculties and 57 departments. Currently, 5000+ domestic students and 1300+ foreign students study at the PSMU, and the academic potential of the university involves 632 staff members.
COLLABORATION PERIOD: 2015 – ONGOING
INDUSTRY: EDUCATION
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Business context
Prior to the implementation of the ePlato system in the University our client struggled with handling all business processes in paper mode. There were separate digital services like e-mail or other similar services, but it was not a centralized digital system.
Keeping students' academic success, their academic debt in paper form; paper records of academic staff and their activity, led to late management decisions that significantly lost their effectiveness.
The use of paper circulation of documents related to students and academic staff significantly reduced the efficiency of the work of departments, faculty secretaries and university administration and led to a significant increase in time spent on routine work.
Product description
The product should unite the entire administrative vertical of the university, as well as academic staff and students, into a common single digital system. In addition, the product must accommodate users who use different devices, operating systems and screen sizes. The digital university management system should consist of the following software modules:
Student module
To view the results of academic performance, academic debts, manage finances and view needed academic schedules.
Department moderator module and department chief modulee
for managing the academic structure of disciplines, assigning the academic staff roles and creating schedules.
Professor module
For keeping track of students' performance, their attendance, keeping track of lecture classes; keeping records of own working time.
Dean module
To analyze the academic performance of students, issue permits to work off academic debts, create reports, make management decisions at the level of every faculty
Administrative module
Includes all the existing functionality of the dean's module at the university level, analytical capabilities of the necessary academic indicators, management of students, personnel and other entities.
Academic staff rating module
includes a functionality for evaluating and analyzing the success of the work of the academic staff using defined criteria, which allows to make the necessary management decisions regarding the academic staff.
PROBLEM
The Solution
In order to unify user identification, we decided to create a single sign-on system using OpenId Connect, which allows users to sign-in either by the means of a separate login-password or by the means of a corporate email account.
To meet the needs of all users who use various operating systems and screen sizes, we created a web application with mobile adaptation of the necessary software modules. The software product works on the basis of the REST API, which will allow other software products to use the existing data from the university digital system, as well as create a mobile application for certain groups of users.
One of the product deployment requirements was the use of the client's own servers (on premise). For natively managing the cluster of Docker containers we used Docker Swarm with multiple nodes. It allowed us to have zero-downtime deployments and reliability of running instances. For monitoring and alerting we used Prometheus & Grafana and Swarmprom which allowed us to deploy industry standard application and infrastructure monitoring system without additional costs.
DELIVERED VALUE
The Technologies
The Result
The product developed by us allowed the client to significantly digitize business processes, which made it possible to increase the speed of management decision-making up to 10 times. It should be noted especially the increased loyalty of employees and students, for whom the university digital system has become an integral part of the work process. Thanks to the creation and operation of this digital system, the university became a laureate of the international exhibition "Innovation in Modern Education".
Increasing the level of recognition of the university's brand (including with the help of digital solutions created by us) allowed the university to increase the number of students by 20% over the past 5 years.