What is Audactive?

An online platform to create, publish and consume interactive learning resources. Tailored for learning on the go and uniquely suitable for language learning. Interactions include quizzes, text to speech and speech to text. A resource can contain text, images, videos and quizzes.

You can say it is like Udemy - but not video based. Or, like Wakelet / Medium with additional capabilities for learning and interactions.

System Overview

System Parts

1) The Audactive Player

Plays Audactive resources and enables interactions, voice interactions and quizzes.

The Audactive Player was developed and supports three systems:

2) The Audactive Authoring Tools

Enables the creation, editing, publishing and distributing resources.

3) The Audactive Backend

Server, database and users authorization. Powers the whole platform. Hosted on Google's App Engine to support scalability.

4) Teacher's Dashboard

Includes published resources and 'grade-book' that shows answers sent by students.

5) Audactive Library - Resources Repository

Enables exploring and consuming published documents. As well as enables sharing resources by teachers to their students.

6) Teacher public profile page

Where teachers can publish info about themselves, promote themselves and showcase their authored resources.

7) Website & Support Tools

Notable Features

- Both social sign in with Google and generic email password-less sign in.

- Create documents.

- Publishing & distribution platform. Every document gets a unique URL. Basically enables creation of structured webpages.

- Quizzes

- Supports different kinds of content, all within a single resource: - text, - images, - open questions, - multiple-choice questions, - youtube embeds, - links, - notes to self.

- Single tap to play. Reads out loud while automatically following and marking the part / text that is now being read / played. Like a video player for text & media combined content.

- Text to speech - reading out loud in multiple languages, powered by the operating system's native reading engine.

- Speech recognition - both for voice typing and for choosing answer in multiple choice questions. Powered by the operating system's native speech recognizer.

- Sending and receiving answers

- Export to SCORM - makes Audactive an easy to use tool for creating SCORM resources to then share with students via Moodle or other learning platform.

- Embeddable resources in any external webpage / learning platform.

- Adding notes to self when learning an Audactive resource.

- Every resource is read in its correct language automatically.

- Multiple languages supported within a single resource. Each block can have its own language. Each question can define its own answer-in language. This makes Audactive unique and very suitable for language learning.

- Import documents both in the player, and in the authoring tool

- Automatic immediate feedback (correct / wrong) on answers (in multiple choice questions with correct answer defined by the author) - so students can learn from their mistakes and correct.

- Deep links - so that a resource url can be shared both for the web and opened in the app directly

- Local persistence of users answers, notes and bookmarks (reading position) per document.

Technology Stack

- Backend server developed in Java. Runs on App Engine

- Firebase Authorozation

- Firestore database

- Mobile app: - UI developed in Flutter - System APIs - text to speech and speech to text, as well as deep links and etc - developed in native Java for Android and Swift for iOS - Persistence by native file system. Local database.

- Web player developed in Javascript, using webpack. Uses the Web Speech API for speech synthesis and for speech recognition. Persistence by browser's local storage.

- Authoring tools - developed in React. Editor based on Facebook's draft.js and further on the open source project MegaDraft.