An immersive online educational platform for adult English learners
May 2016
The MVP Minimum Viable Product) was a simple community website built with WordPress and BBPress.
It was called “Abby’s Study” and my main purpose was to provide support to learners I work with. The idea was that they could join me in the learning process and enter my study, much like going to office hours in college.
In the early days, we conducted live sessions through a webinar platform called Crowdcast, but later utilized Zoom.
Oct 2016
I quickly iterated because the demands of our community outgrew the original setup. I also seized this opportunity to rebrand the learning community 2.0 as “English Ever After”. The idea was that English could be in part of everyone’s daily life, and we all live happily ever after (just like the sweet ending of a fairy tale—except it’s not just a fairy tale).
This membership site was built with WordPress and a customized learning management system, connected to an external forum software provided by Invision (written in PHP and uses MySQL). I also made use of WPFusion and automation services (Zapier, Integrately and Pabbly) to run this community.
Below is a video tour of the community.
(Published Oct 21st, 2016)
In 2018, I switched to the webinar platform Bigmarker, and we have been using that for live sessions ever since.
June 2019
Now, in its 3.0 version, English Ever After is not just a learning community but a diverse and unified course platform that includes the aforementioned community.