Annotations in the classroom
The Department of English at UCLA is renowned for supporting groundbreaking research and innovative teaching excellence.
The challenge
Students and educators were having trouble collaborating on assignments with no effective method for reviewing, commenting and sharing a document.
Our approach
Through interviews, focus groups and feedback, we learned that teachers needed a way to easily upload or scan content, edit it, set permissions and restraints, and respond to student's comments.
Breathable design, logical organization
Since potentially hundreds of students would be annotating the same document, we made design decisions that would keep information orderly and uncluttered.
Editable areas of the app expand naturally to fill the available viewport and provide the best possible writing experience.
Powerful technology
The platform was built using Python, Angular, HTML5, CSS, Terraform, Tesseract OCR and a few more magic things.
We built a custom platform to integrate advanced document management with OCR processing and multi-threaded annotations.
Python
Angular
HTML5
CSS3
Terraform
VagrantOutcome
The finished Digital Gateway allows students and educators to effectively collaborate on annotation-based assignments.
Widely accepted and appreciated by faculty, staff and over 600 students, we are continuing to work with the University to customize similar solutions to fit other departments' needs.
We loved working on this project and are excited to be a part of its future moving forward.
"Working with Magnet has been eye-opening. They helped refine our vision for the site, while also developing a remarkably creative and effective design that actually broadened the scope of what we hoped would be possible."
Matthew Fisher, UCLA English Professor