This is an online educational resource platform with 20,000+ monthly visitors that have been featured on mainstream media.
Highlights
▌Achievements
- Aggregated more than 1,500 external resources and created more than 150 chapters of original content.
- Aggregated content from 5 educational platforms into one unified search interface.
- The platform has stably around 20,000+ monthly visitors.
- The platform has been featured in 6 magazines, 2 of which are mainstream educational media.
▌Leadership & Communication
- Leading 15 people, one team focusing on content creation and the other team full-stack development.
- Holding and managing weekly progress meetings.
- Communicating with partnering organization regarding funding and leading seasonal meetings to discuss organizational goals.
▌Backend Technical Skills
- Configured an Apache server on a Linux VM that runs Django and PostgreSQL.
- Developed a Django API backend with automatic CI deployment through GitHub.
- Worked with BERT models for Chinese NLP tasks in developing a content search algorithm.
- Used YouTube’s APIs for educational video resource integration.
- Used OpenAI’s Chat Completion APIs to develop a content-aware tutoring chatbot.
▌Frontend Technical Skills
- Developed a Next.js web app with mixed rendering strategies.
- Optimized codebase structure to optimize app loading speed and other SEO metrics.
- Developed a content standard based on Markdown for educational multimedia content usage.
Story Behind the Platform
In middle school, I “wasted” much of my evenings on YouTube videos, but over time, my grades improved. This seemed odd to me at first, but then, I realized that this was not a miracle: most videos I consumed were about science and technology, and they served as reinforcements to what I learned at school. What’s better, most of them were filmed in English, which improved my language skills dramatically. Gradually, I understood that knowledge is not something constrained to textbooks.
Many Taiwanese students, haunted by endlessly memorizing the textbooks, turn to after-school cram classes, and many of those whose families cannot afford these expensive sessions become “incompetent.” People simply do not know the existence of the online educational resources (to me, it was the YouTube videos) around them.
But education should be universal. Students should have the right to get in touch with the available resources; they should have the right to be “competent” regardless of their family wealth. More importantly, people should stop perceiving knowledge as something that only exists within textbooks.
Starting from 9th grade, I have been building the online educational platform Zetria for people to share educational resources from across the Internet and contribute to the online textbook chapters. These chapters are integrated with interactive content and a database of educational links and videos. The platform covers all the high school academic subjects, and I hope to bring students closer to the resources that they might not know existed.
As I programmed the underlying infrastructure of the platform—the resource search algorithm, the content moderation mechanisms, etc.—I encountered innumerable problems that made me want to smash my computer screen with a bat, but whenever I looked at what I had already built, I felt a sense of pleasure (to be honest, it was closer to the I’ve-spent-so-much-time-so-there’s-no-turning-back feeling) and was empowered to keep working on the issues that hid in the ocean of code.
After countless hours of development, and thanks to crowdsource contributors, Zetria, as of December 2021, had become a platform of over 500 daily users. It had compiled a collection of more than 1300 educational resources and, with the help of 8 editors, produced over 135 online textbook chapters. It was eventually recognized by the CommonWealth Magazine, and when they interviewed me, I stressed on the importance of learning beyond textbooks.
In 2021, due to the covid-19 lockdown, we also implemented functionalities for interactive questions and assignments. The platform had outgrown what I initially thought it would be, and I am fully ready to embark on an adventure with it.