Online teacher learning environment

Good sign-language education stands or falls with good teachers — and good teachers get better by being able to see, evaluate, and question each other. This project was about exactly that: an online learning environment for math teachers where they could evaluate each other on signs they performed in exercises.

The idea sounds simple: teachers receive assignments, perform them on camera, post the result in the environment, and colleagues give feedback against a structured rubric. In practice many challenges follow: image and audio quality, reviewer bias, privacy, support across different devices, and the requirement that the experience stays low-threshold for people who aren't techies.

As the front-end developer I was responsible for the design and implementation of the Angular SPA. My biggest challenge sat in building the initial prototype, in which WebRTC and Cordova played a key role. WebRTC for direct video and audio communication between teachers; Cordova to ship the same codebase across multiple platforms — web and mobile.

WebRTC has plenty of power but also plenty of sharp edges: NAT traversal, codecs, fallback paths, browser differences. We deliberately worked on a solid base first: a connection that consistently comes up across most networks, and clear feedback when it doesn't — so a teacher isn't blocked by cryptic technical errors.

Adding Cordova means constantly thinking about what you solve in the webview and what in native plugins. We held this on principle: the UI fully in Angular, and only those things that genuinely need platform-specific access (e.g. camera and microphone permissions) through a thin native layer.

The project was a great opportunity to grow my front-end skills, but just as valuable was being exposed to an education domain that gets too little digital support. Good tools for teachers translate directly into better learning for students — and in this specific case for students who particularly benefit from strong sign-language education.