EPAM partnered with the client for the first time in 1998 to develop and deploy a greenfield digital LMS. We developed a modular platform that contained all the necessary LMS features (student authentication, roster, course enrollment and management, assignments, content authoring, analytics, etc.), and it rapidly gained popularity. However, with growing demand, the system constantly required greater scale and modernization. In 2003, we put together a dedicated development team to help our client with monitoring, maintenance, support, scalability and annual updates to the product. Since then, the platform has been upgraded and modernized multiple times, integrating content from four acquired platforms and handling more than four million sessions per month and up to 1.5 million annual users.

With the evolving digital education market, our client was constantly acquiring and developing new capabilities. Because of our proven EdTech expertise, our partnership expanded to cover more projects. In 2005, EPAM was asked to help with the client’s computer adaptive testing (CAT) solution aimed at helping students get ready for the SAT and GMAT. Our team developed algorithms for a complex adaptive testing engine and then performed full-fledged class testing for both content and software to normalize the algorithms. In another project, EPAM had to completely re-develop a homework assignment system that already existed but could no longer withstand the user load. That project was a huge success from both the technological and market standpoint. Over five years, we didn’t receive a single ticket in system support, which is the best indicator of system reliability.

Further, EPAM worked on the next generation of our client’s platforms, helping to develop web services for assessment content rendering, new problem types and authoring tools and complex grading algorithms for graphic math problems. Additionally, our team provided integration with Wolfram Mathematica, Maple and Microsoft APIs, and automated content conversion and migration from legacy platforms. The product received multiple CODiE awards and is now the client’s flagship platform. 

To bring our client’s content engineering to the next level, EPAM developed a new learning content management system (LCMS). The goal was to create a single-source content authoring platform for all content needs. We built the system based on an enterprise-grade XML database, which hosted over five million content items and assets (images, videos). The new LCMS integrated visual editors for complex assessment types developed by EPAM. The visual editors allowed both professional content authors and instructors to create new and edit existing content items in the “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) mode.

Over the course of our partnership, EPAM helped develop and maintain five assessment engines, including developing algorithms for automated grading with partial credit logic, automating feedback generation based on student response and adding import/export functionality with third-party systems and LMSs. Using our blueprints, we also helped the client automatically convert and migrate hundreds of thousands of complex interactive items between the acquired and home-grown platforms, dramatically improving the efficiency of the migration process. 

To ensure content quality, we developed multiple content performance and analytics tools, including automated cross-browser content testing from the end-user perspective, a tool for analyzing content features usage, a scanner for automated bug search and fixing, content-driven load testing and more.

Since 2003, EPAM had led content authoring for the client’s quantitative discipline products. We created over 750,000 content items for test banks, end-of-chapter exercises and homework assignments, as well as thousands of alt texts. To make learning and assessment more engaging for students, we developed more than 50 new interactive problem types with visual authoring tools and smart grading algorithms. We also leveraged our accessible and mobile-optimized 3D-graphing library, which is currently used for the production of complex 3D simulations and tutorials. Since 2017, EPAM’s accessibility features implementation had become a part of the standard full-cycle development process for interactive assets and tools, including conversion projects.