NV Pathways ⎯⟡ Study-Abroad Platform with Course Finder & AI Tools

Approach & Key Work

To address these challenges, we implemented a comprehensive strategy:

1. Course Finder That Works With and Without JavaScript: Built a search over 1,608 UK courses with filters for subject, level, intake, university, tuition range, scholarships and eligibility for applicants from Bangladesh. A compact JSON index is filtered in the browser for instant results, the same results are rendered in PHP so search engines can read every page, and a REST endpoint serves the data to other tools.
2. Course Import Tool for Messy Agent Spreadsheets: Created an admin importer for CSV and Excel files in any layout: it finds the header row, matches columns, cleans fees, intakes and levels, runs a dry run first, imports in batches and can undo the last import. Courses that disappear from a new list are closed with a 301 redirect instead of being deleted, so no indexed page is lost.
3. AI Assistants Grounded in the Site’s Own Data: Added an AI course assistant that uses tool calling, so it can only answer from the site’s course data, with OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini or any OpenAI-compatible provider and a fallback. API keys are encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM), and a monthly budget cap, rate limits and prompt-injection guards keep costs and abuse under control. The chat collects name, WhatsApp number and email first and sends each lead to the team at once.
4. AI Interview Practice for UK Pre-CAS and Visa Interviews: Built a mock interview where the AI adapts each question to the student’s last answer, gives feedback on every answer, scores five skills and emails the result to a counsellor, so students practise before the real university or UKVI credibility interview.
5. Practical Student Tools: Delivered a cost calculator with tuition and living costs per city in seven destinations, converted to taka and shareable by URL; a per-country document checklist that remembers the student’s ticks and has a secure upload form (file type and size checks, rate limiting, honeypot); and an accessible mobile bottom navigation bar.
6. Safe Staging-to-Live Deployment, SEO and Security: Wrote a Site Sync plugin that previews every file and database change before pushing staging to live and never overwrites live leads, per-site settings, security keys or licences. Added Course, CollegeOrUniversity, FAQ and Organization structured data, llms.txt and an agent-readable API catalogue, Meta Pixel with the Conversions API, two-factor login, a hidden login URL and security headers.