Cambridge University Press (CUP), in association with le Conférence Intercantonale de l’Instruction Publique de la Suisse romande et du Tessin (CIIP), contacted BC in early 2011 about developing a website to attract and engage young, first-time learners of English in Switzerland. The site needed to provide access to a wide range of digital and print-based student and teacher resources based on the content of the highly successful More! course. Access to More’s teacher resources needed to be carefully controlled via a bespoke access control system. At the time CUP contacted us there was just over two months to take the site from concept to completion.

The BC design team began by developing a colourful ‘cutout’ graphic style that would appeal to the pre-teen target audience and also make a virtue of the disparate graphical styles of the games, activities and learning resources featured on the site. We proposed that the More! site be developed using the immensely popular and user-friendly  Joomla open source CMS to allow CUP’s staff to administer the large sets of learning materials and teacher resources. We extended the CMS with a custom version of the access control system we developed for CUP’s Interactive site, to allow registration to be limited to people who had bought More! courseware. As the project developed, additional types of activities were commissioned, including text and audio ‘sound grids’, karaoke clips for specially commissioned songs as well as a range of teaching resources.

The kind words above were written by Ben Graham, Publishing Manager at Cambridge Learning Adaptation Unit following the official launch of the More! site. The recently commissioned More! 8e full edition is scheduled to go live in early Summer 2014, with a raft of new HTML5 activities, games and teacher resources.