How to Create an e-Learning Platform: Tips & Tricks

Want to be the new Coursera or Duolingo, or digitize your offline business and create your own e-learning platform, but don’t know how? No worries, we've got your back.

👍 Benefits of Creating Your own e-Learning Platform

Before we dive into how to create an e-Learning platform, no matter if website or app, let’s quickly recall the key benefits you will get from it!

👨‍🎓 Reach a wider audience

If you create your own e-Learning website or app, the geolocation of your students won’t be an issue anymore. It works on a few different levels:

• You can have students from all over the world, including foreigners, expats, or compatriots living in different parts of your country. That can dramatically increase the number of people you can reach with your content.
• Additionally, you make your courses more accessible for people who just prefer online learning. For example, if they don’t like commuting, limit their offline activities due to COVID-19, or can study only late in the evenings after university and/or their jobs.
• Finally, it might be easier for you to offer your courses to corporate clients: SMEs, large enterprises, private schools, etc. That also contributes to your personal brand, which is never a bad thing.

🔄 Reuse your content

e-Learning website development allows you to get the most out of your content. Once recorded or created, it can be accessed by new students again and again. That means that you can expect a higher return on investment (ROI) compared to offline lessons.

Let’s assume that you are a language school owner. How many students can you have during one class? Even if we don’t consider the post-COVID regulations, not as many as online, right?

Thus, you’ll be able to provide extra services and additional value to your customers, as well as use your e-Learning platform for marketing purposes.

However, these are just a few examples. You can choose one of the mentioned models, go for both or pick your own one — that’s what custom e-Learning app development is for!

📱 e-Learning Platform Development: Website vs Mobile App

One of the first questions you can have is whether you should build an e-Learning website or develop an e-Learning app. The truth is that neither option is better or worse than the other one — different platforms are more suitable for different cases. Which ones? Let’s find out together!

Websites 🖥

This type of an e-Learning platform is well-suited for big loads of information.

If you need your students to deal with time-consuming tasks, a website is for suitable for it. Examples of such tasks can be reading an article and then writing a detailed answer to a certain question, performing math calculations, solving problems, etc.

Moreover, websites are great for watching video lessons since learners usually visit them from their PCs and/or laptops — because of bigger screens, such devices are better suited for watching videos.

If you’re interested in LMS development and want to know a bit more about features we aren’t covering in this article, drop us a line and we’ll see how we can help with that, too!

⚙️ Top Features of e-Learning Website and App

In this section, we will review the basic features of an e-learning platform. Keep in mind that this functionality can be implemented on both websites and apps.

# 1: Sign Up & Profiles 🔐

This feature is useful in several ways:

• It helps you get and, later, store the user data. Users also benefit from it since they can easily access it when signing in from different devices.
• If users come back after a break or even delete and reinstall your app, they will be able to just continue from the same place they left off last time.
• As an owner of a platform, you could increase your revenue by offering personalized offers and discounts on users’ profiles.

How to create an e-learning app or website with a great Sign Up feature? Do NOT require too much info right at the beginning as it can cause a high bounce rate. The best thing you can do is get rid of any repellent barriers, including requiring personal or credit card details even before clients they actually start using the app or website.

The minimum info you can ask at the beginning is login/email and password. Don’t worry, you’ll be able to ask for all the needed personal information later. For example, offer to fill in the profile for extra gamification points or before making a payment.

# 8 Push-notifications (mobile-only) 🔔

We’d recommend implementing Push Notifications to increase sales, retarget customers, and make personalized offers. Here are some thoughts on why you should implement this feature during e-Learning platform development:

• To remind customers to return to their courses or do their daily tasks.
• To inform users about new courses, price changes, special offers, etc.
• To improve the customer experience by sending personalized notifications.

Push notifications can help you stay connected with your users and retain the ones that would otherwise forget about your app.

🤖 Top Technologies You Can Use to Build an e-Learning Platform

If you are planning on building your e-learning platform, the competition might be tough. However, modern technology could help you stand out. Let’s have a closer look.

# 1: Augmented Reality (AR)

AR is helpful if you want to catch your students’ attention and keep them engaged during classes. Interactive tools are proven to be one of the most effective ways to deal with distractions while studying. Visualization makes it easier to understand complex concepts and topics.

A very good example of VR use is the following case. Harvard partnered with Zhejiang University in China to conduct an anthropological lesson with the help of rumii, a social VR software. Half of the students were from Harvard and half from Zhejiang University, and they were working together as avatars in a VR-equipped classroom to study ancient Egyptian characters and tombs. Both were using the Oculus Go headset and worked together to identify certain hieroglyphics.

Using avatars and mapped facial expressions, students on opposite sides of the world could come together to discuss, synthesize, and learn from one another at the same time.

💸 How Much Does It Cost to Develop an E-Learning Platform?

In this paragraph we’re going to give you an idea of the average costs for educational website development. However, keep in mind that the development of your app can cost more or less depending on the amount of features, special designs, additional services, and integrations.

It is also important to take the hourly rate of your development team into account. This estimation is based on a rate of $40/hour which is average for Eastern Europe. Here it is: