Xlearn

The Course Project of INFSCI 2560 WEB TECHNOLOGIES & STANDARDS

1. Introduction

Nowadays, with the development of information technologies, new learning methods like online learning take the place of classes based learning by degrees. Today, if we were facing some unknown concepts, the first thought flashes upon our minds is Google or Internet rather than teacher. Google always can provide short and clear courses for us in the form of text, video or other media. However, even though face to face communication is not necessary for teaching today, it is still one of the most efficient ways to learn knowledge, especially for learning languages and music instruments. Taking English learning as an example, learner can practice oral English through face to face communication with native speaker. At the meanwhile, the native speaker can also learn the other language from the learner. Based on these facts, our group came up with an idea of building a website to help people find a learning partner.

2. Flow chart

3. Function Design

Login System Offline and face to face meeting is the most effective method to help people learn from each other, which means we have to consider the location of users. Furthermore, it is not the only influence factor. We hope to find some high quality users, which means the users can provide more skills to fulfill other’s need or prefer to share their knowledge with other users.So, we decide to choose students of CMU and UPitt as our seed users by using .edu email to register. We believe that college students are more likely to share and to teach others what they know. It’s a good way to improve themselves during the teaching process. Also, we do not need to worry about the location problem.
Interest Category To help users find what they want to learn quickly and to imply them how to use this site, we choose interest category page as our home page. It helps people to focus on the knowledge itself rather than other’s images or profiles. Also, it is a kind of way to shorten the process.
Choose to learn Base on the previous step, users do not need to face too many options here. It provides a list of skills in this interest field students can choose. To provide a better user experience, the algorithm will help to make a filter - remove some skills nobody can teach.
Match group The most important function of our project is to match students who can learn from each other. In order to achieve the best learning effect, we only provide one on one service, which means the learning group is made up of only two students.
Share your skills To encourage more users join us not only as acceptors but also as providers, we hope to guide them share their own skills and abilities and teach others. In the meantime, they can get a sense of achievement and have an opportunity to know more friends