AOU Digital Bookstore

Knowledge is the absorption of data and processing it from raw data to insights. Understanding these insights is what helps generations move forward and innovate. This was the main motivating factor of this project, was to provide an educational institute with a medium in which it's students can be empowered by gaining knowledge. The AOU interactive digital bookstore was born.

1. To build a digital bookstore where AOU could publish their self-published books for students
2. To make the books accessible to both students and non-students at different rates
3. Students who purchased the physical book to be able to download the digital for free
4. An interactive set of books that help translate information into knowledge
5. Linking student IDs and accounts to the app
6. Allowing enrolled students to do workbooks and quizzes inside the book, and providing the results to their professors via an online dashboard
7. Allowing students to take timed exams from the app and track time in and out of the app (to avoid cheating)
8. Providing exam results to their professors
9. All this data using TINCAN API and pushing it to the professors through the LMS (moodle)

Problem Statement: Printed books were being done through several partners which resulted in delays of printed books reaching to students at certain times.

Solution: A mobile/tablet application with a newstand that resembles each respective platforms' app store was made to house the university owned IP textbooks. This allowed the books and their versions to be updated on demand and available to students OTA regardless of what device their were using.

Problem Statement: The logistics and warehousing for the printed books was costing the university (redacted number) per year. A fee they surely wanted to see reduced.

Solution: Instead of keeping a heavy reliance on printing these books, keeping editions in warehouses and delivering them every semester; it was decided to have every student's ID linked to the application in which their concerned books for that term would load. External parties (non university connected IDs) would purchase these books at higher prices. Creating a revenue stream that does not require more than some basic AWS hosting. The whole solution was a fraction of the cost of logistics, warehousing and printing.

Problem Statement: The professors who authored and taught these classes wanted a method to monitor and understand their students' progress with their content in order to understand how to improve the content for next editions.

Solution: These books each have their own unique set of analytics. Each professor can browse usage of each and every student. From the in book exercises/quizzes to the time spent on each page. Every interaction is logged in. This allows professors to see what content required the most time to understand and what tools served the students best in helping them gain knowledge out of the content. The next editions would be updated based on the analytical reports and insights gained from these usage statistics, and cross referenced with the students' grades and progress reports.

Problem Statement: The students wanted books that were not static, and provided tools to help them understand the content and not just be able to read at their convenience.

Solution: The students were able to take benefit of interactive elements which help take the raw content they are studying and help them understand it. Tooks like interactive charts. For example, imagine sliding your finger over a supply and demand curve and see what happens in real time to those variables? With this project, that was possible. We input features such as advanced search, highlighting, notetaking, notesharing, video, audio, LMS integrated end of chapter exercises (With real time advice on why certain answers were right or wrong) and the list goes on.

Conclusion:

All screens used here are from the book for course code AR112, an Arabic language and literature book. The brief was to convert it as closely as possible the the print design considering the branding, and to implement an easy to use and utilitarian user experience approach.
With a project like this, one has to be careful to understand not only their client's needs, but also those of the users who will be using the application. This is why we focused on navigation and search features to be compelling and accurate in the Arabic language (includings searches with ligatures/kashidas). We realized that the books that were going to be published in this application were approximately 600+ pages in print format.

So one of our main goals was to allow students to find what they were looking for in such large textbooks. We also created a web client version for easy reference in classrooms (airplay from tablets to projectors was also an option). ​​​​​​​

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