QuickMind.Net is a full-scale portal containing wide functionality. It provides access to educational materials for teachers, students, and administrators anytime and anywhere. The main goal of this product is to ensure the possibility for distant education; to provide access to educational materials; to allow generating a huge quantity of tasks on various school subjects. QuickMind is targeted at the American educational system and has won several prestigious awards.

QuickMind can be accessed via the URL: www.quickmind.net .

Requirements

• To create the first full- scale educational internet portal for USA schools.
• To provide constant access to the portal, with the number of simultaneous connections amounting to 10 000.
• To provide broad opportunities for educational content generation, distant assignment of tasks to students, automatic assessment.
• To create a rich choice of resources (information, web links, images, animation, movies, ...).
• To develop additional services on user management, content management, and license management.

Suggested solution

The QuickMind project was entirely developed by DigitalXpert, from the very first stages (requirements investigation) to implementation, maintenance, and post-release support.

For realization, it was suggested to employ client-server, API-oriented architecture. The server part was realized on Java, client part on Macromedia Flash. This allowed to apply the RIA paradigm (Rich Internet Applications). It means that applications similar in functionality to CD products work on Web without page reloading, interact with the database and with each other, and are completely reliable.

For the database server it was decided to use Sybase as it had been the optimum in terms of price and quality. The system was designed in such a way that it would be possible to port it to any other database server without excessive efforts.

Inside system services, the programmers realized support for an original session service, internal exchange protocol, in-process uploading, and caching. One of the product's options is monitoring in real-time mode. Teachers can supervise and comment 4 students' work simultaneously.

Result

QuickMind is a powerful system for distant education that possesses 120+ applications and services, millions of activity titles, modules for students' interactive research work, educational movies with lively and memorizable characters, rich video content, and much more.

QuickMind has become a standard for on-line educational systems in the USA and was considered a part of the Presidential program "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB).

Awards received by QuickMind:

• 2003 District Administration Magazine Top 100 Products, 2nd Place for Internet Programs.
• 2003 Teacher’s Choice Award for Website.
• 2004 ComputED Gazette Eddie Award for Course Ware Management Website.
• 2004 Media & Methods Award for Online Curriculum.
• 2004 Technology & Learning Award of Excellence.