Confident German goes live

Spherical has created a platform for distance one-on-one video learning and launched Confident German, a German-language learning school.

Our task

Our task was to elicit business requirements, design architecture and build an online school of German. The school was founded by a sole entrepreneur with a teaching background; she managed to combine various online services to take care of student acquisition, retention, scheduling and payments. Her school was a clear business success, with students from all over the world flocking in to get inexpensive, efficient, customized and fun learning experience. Our main tasks were to help scale technical and logistical arrangements; automate scheduling, billing and employee relationships; and make the school user-friendly and professional-looking.

Challenges

An online school is a business with many obscure particularities. Elicitation of requirements and finding the right technical approach to hit as many customers as possible under a tight budget was the main challenge of this engagement.

Students want to study; instructors want to teach. This is the way it should be, and the rest of the school business should be as invisible for the users as possible. The school is completely online – students and instructors live all around the world, in all possible time zones: synchronization in time could be a challenge. Beginners may not have sufficient command of German, so the system should be multilingual. Accounting between the school, a few retained instructors and hundreds of students may become tricky. A large custom system was not affordable for a small business, so maximum use of available free services had to be made.

Our technical approach

It was clear from the very beginning that we were not building one school; we were building a platform to build schools and Confident German would be the first school built on that platform. The "productizing" of the platform allowed us to create a franchise and offer quickly.

We used Flask as the web framework and integrated Google Calendar to do the heavy lifting of scheduling classes. We implemented a simple internal closed-circuit accounting system based on an "internal currency" equivalent to a 30-minute instruction slot. When the students purchase the slots, these are transferred from the headmaster's account to the account of the student. When the student is booking a class, the slots are transferred from the account of the student to the account of the instructor. Finally, balances in instructors' accounts are transferred back to the headmaster's account when instructors' salaries are paid, closing the loop. We integrated Stripe and PayPal for payments and Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and GitHub for social authentication.

Confident German features web design from JetStyle.

Project management

The project was managed according to PRINCE2 methodology with a custom, formally approved tailoring statement. Task management and project tracking was done in JIRA, code collaboration in GitHub. Collaboration on design between the client, developers and designers was organized using Figma.

Client testimonial

Spherical hat herausragende Arbeit geleistet! Ich bin sowohl mit Planung, Design und Umsetzung, als auch mit Kommunikation, Service und Hosting absolut zufrieden!

"Spherical hat herausragende Arbeit bei der Umsetzung meines neuen Internetauftritts und der Programmierung des Buchungs- und Abrechnungssystems geleistet! Die Planung vorab war präzise und die Kommunikation unkompliziert und zuverlässig. Meine individuellen Wünsche und Bedürfnisse wurden sowohl was das Design, als auch die Programmierung betrifft, perfekt und professionell umgesetzt. Ich hatte zu jeder Zeit einen Ansprechpartner und ich fühlte mich hervorragend beraten.

Auch nach Fertigstellung des Projekts habe ich rund um die Uhr einen professionellen Ansprechpartner und bin absolut zufrieden mit Hosting und Support!"

Vera Frühauf

Founder, CEO and Headmaster, Confident German

Informal translation: 

Spherical has done an outstanding job! I am absolutely content with planning, design and implementation, as well as communication, service and hosting!

Spherical has done an outstanding job implementing my new website and the programming of the scheduling and billing systems! The advance planning was precise and the communication easy and reliable. My personal wishes and needs were perfectly and professionally implemented in both design and programming. I had access to an account manager at all times and I received excellent advice.

Even after the launch, I had constant access to a professional account manager and I am absolutely satisfied with hosting and support provided.