Atlas Language School – Building a go-to communication hub for students
About Atlas Language School
Atlas Language School is an international English school welcoming students from all over the world. With campuses in several countries and a steady flow of new enrolments, Atlas needed a better way to keep students in the loop, without drowning them in emails or paperwork.
The school had a lot to share: updates about classes, social events, visa reminders, orientation schedules. But distributing that information was clunky and inconsistent. For students, the experience felt disjointed. For staff, it was a mess of spreadsheets, disconnected tools, and far too much manual work.
Expertise
Scope
Vertical
Challenge
Atlas needed a better way to communicate with students. They wanted a mobile app that delivered personalised content to students and an admin panel that let staff manage everything in one place without manual work.
Solution
Altamira delivered a cross-platform mobile app where students could view school news, receive notifications, and manage their profile. We also built a web-based Admin Panel that allowed staff to create and schedule content, filter student groups, and sync user data directly from SAM twice daily.
Results
Students get timely, relevant updates in one place. Staff can manage thousands of users and target content with precision.
Manual work is gone, adoption is high, and the school can focus more on teaching, less on admin.
01 The Challenge
Atlas wanted to improve how they communicated with their students, especially outside the classroom. But this wasn’t just about building an app, it had to sync perfectly with their internal system, SAM, which handled everything from student records to course schedules.
From the very beginning, the project hinged on three core objectives:
- Give students a simple but reliable place to get school updates
- Give staff a central tool to manage users and publish content
- Keep everything in sync with SAM automatically—twice a day, no exceptions
That meant we were building around a legacy system, and had to ensure smooth, real-time synchronisation of sensitive student data across platforms. And because every feature had to serve real needs (not just look good on paper), we worked hand-in-hand with the Atlas team through every stage, from defining edge cases to testing live data flows.
One of the toughest parts? Designing content and user targeting logic that respected how student records were structured in SAM. Each student could belong to multiple courses, centres, and classes, often at the same time. And content needed to be filtered precisely, with no mistakes.
02 The Solution
The scope of the project included a mobile application for students (iOS and Android), as well as a web-based Admin Panel for content and user management.
Atlas team was actively involved in requirement gathering, content structure definition, and SAM data integration validation. The work progressed through:
- Discovery and design alignment sessions
- Backend and API synchronisation planning
- Iterative development and testing of the Admin Panel and mobile app
- Continuous feedback and validation with Atlas stakeholders at each milestone
Altamira brought strong technical leadership to the table, especially in:
- Building scalable cross-platform mobile applications
- Implementing real-time user data synchronisation via complex API structures
- Designing a custom content and user management system that interfaces with a legacy system (SAM)
For Students
- A personalised News Feed with updates categorised into Academic News, Social Programme, Atlas News, and more.
- The ability to filter content by tags, mark favourites, and follow topics that mattered to them.
- A secure profile section for updating personal details or resetting passwords.
- Smart onboarding via email invitations—each student received credentials and a direct link to download the app and log in.
For Administrators
- A full User Management interface synced with SAM, showing up-to-date student details: courses, classes, centres, and enrolment status.
- The ability to send invitations, reset passwords, and track who had registered or logged in.
- A Content Management System to create, edit, schedule, and publish articles—either to all students or specific groups based on course status, timeline, or profile filters.
- Features to pin important messages, mark priority content, and assign tags for better targeting.
- A WYSIWYG editor with support for rich text, images, and videos, making articles more engaging.
We also built in all the details that matter when real people use software every day:
- Filters to quickly find the right student or content.
- Sortable tables with pagination to handle large data sets.
- Built-in publishing rules so admins could decide exactly when and to whom each article appeared.
03 The Result
As a result, we delivered a deeply integrated system built to solve real operational problems at scale. Atlas trusted us with their data, their students, and their reputation and we delivered software that’s helping them focus less on admin work and more on what they do best: teaching.
For the students, the app became the go-to hub for everything school-related. No more digging through inboxes. No more missing out on events or deadlines. Everything they needed was right there, tailored to them.
For the staff, what used to take hours of cross-checking now takes minutes. Need to send a welcome article only to students whose classes start next week? Done. Want to highlight a policy update for current students, but not past or future ones? One filter. One publish button. Done.
What’s more, the system now runs quietly in the background, pulling updated student records from SAM twice a day, keeping everything aligned, no manual sync required.
The app launched smoothly across iOS and Android, and adoption among students was immediate. Even better: no daily handholding, no constant admin questions. The system just works.
