percipio.london: Evidence For Learning

As the EEF’s development partner, and developer of the API that feeds the Teaching and Learning Toolkit, we are regularly called upon to offer development support to their international partners.

Evidence for Learning (E4L) had outgrown their existing platform and wanted a more robust, scalable solution for their projected growth and mission to help busy educators increase learning for children and young people.

During discovery to fully understand the pitfalls E4L were experiencing with their current platform and what they were trying to achieve, it soon became clear that we could build upon a proven success formula and develop the E4L web application in an extremely efficient manner. Because of the unique way EEF and their partners operate we are able to reuse the Toolkit codebase free of any intellectual property issues. This allowed us to reuse the core framework that was already underpinning EEF’s Toolkit. Therefore, E4L could begin their next web chapter on a platform that had already been through thousands of iterations and tested on millions of users. 

Percipio set to work changing our Toolkit framework configuration to accommodate the E4L’s brand guidelines and very quickly we had a distinct Toolkit that had all the benefits of being previously road tested. 

Using the same framework over multiple platforms has numerous additional benefits. One being that we can maintain our custom plugins and modules in a single store and deploy changes, security updates and any required bug fixes and iterations to multiple sites at once. 

With more users interacting with the EEF than ever before, efficiencies like this become paramount in ongoing maintenance and support. 

As with the EEF’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit, the information behind the Toolkit is delivered through our Metaseed platform, turning the static data into a queryable API. Doing so allows the EEF to build a single source of truth – if the EEF change a data point, all their international partners receive this update via the API. 

As with any API, by offloading all of the technical computations of the Toolkit and the technical appendix data to Metaseed, this enables the core functionality of the E4L web application to remain as a content serving platform.

Shortlink service

With so many urls posted to social media, it’s important that any links directing users back to the site are quickly recognisable. Unfortunately, some page urls become rather unwieldy and cumbersome when transposed onto social media platforms. At Percipio, we recognise the importance of brand trust and where possible we will always ensure that social media shares add value to the client’s brand, not subtract from it. 

E4L have full control when it comes to what is shared. If they, or their users, share content from the site, E4L control not only which image is shared, but the link that is shared too. For example, one of the more popular resources on the site is the Metacognition guidance report:

Long urls such as this are always truncated on social platforms, masking the destination to the user.

By utilising a shorter domain (e4l.org.au) and binding it to the web server, we were able to build a dedicated plugin that allows E4L to operate their own custom shortlink service. 

This means, when creating pages E4L can assign a custom url for social sharing. A url such as this has perfect readability for users and results in increased click through rates when compared to default urls.

This is just one of the small things we do to ensure our web applications go over and above the briefs we receive. 

Ongoing Support

As with all of our web projects, we remain contracted for regular support and maintenance – 6 months on from launch we continue to push iterative changes and respond to support requests from the E4L team.

Sharing the same base framework as the EEF platform, any issues reported from either platform can be fixed simultaneously and deployed in tandem – with ~150k users on the platforms each month, being able to share development updates is a welcome efficiency.