Another popular practice feature for students outside of the classroom was streaming radio stations from around the world, allowing students to absorb the language they were learning through passive listening. Students selected a country, Argentina in the example above, then click to start streaming a radio station. They could switch between radio stations, change countries, etc.

The engineering wasn’t extremely difficult here, the UX was the important piece to the puzzle. On the front-end we saved user favorites, handled streaming failures and a few other tidbits. On the back-end we needed to periodically test each station as some would get removed by their station affiliate from time to time.