Global Dimension
Redeveloping a world-leading teaching resource database with a focus on sustainability and global citizenship
Launched:
- Winter 2020
Link:
Global Dimension is one of the world’s largest databases of teaching resources, and the team behind it reached out to me for help escaping their legacy CMS and building a brand-new site to deliver their content to classrooms everywhere.
The folks at Reboot the Future, the foundation behind Global Dimension, had reached the limits of what could be achieved with their legacy WordPress-based site and wanted to create a bespoke successor that would allow them to more effectively manage their extensive database, introduce new forms of content and connect better with their audience through new personalisation features.
I worked with their UX and design freelancers to develop a Django-based site with powerful content-management features to represent their teaching resources, events calendar, global campaigns and static pages. Visitors are able to create a highly detailed profile of interests when they sign up, which is used to tailor content across the site and recommend resources most relevant to them.
The hundreds of curated resources on the site can be filtered and sorted using a powerful search interface, with a detailed taxonomy given for each resource as well as the ability to bookmark and recommend content, further driving the site’s personalisation.
As well as developing tooling to import and clean up legacy data, the project involved considerable behind-the-scenes engineering in areas such as performance optimisation and data caching, recurring event generation and management, and sync with external platforms such as Mailchimp.
The project continues to involve and grow and I’m really pleased to continue to be part of it and help spread the message of sustainability and global citizenship, working with the Reboot team on several additional phases of development and further expansion of the site and its features.