Key Takeaways
More people than ever are turning to online education to advance their careers, improve their grades, or enrich their hobbies. Many businesses, entrepreneurs, and educational institutions have built or planned an e-learning platform to meet this demand. To effectively create an e-learning platform, it is crucial to outline the specifics and functionalities required, choose the right development strategy, and assemble a competent team.
A MarketsAndMarkets estimate suggests that the digital education market is growing at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28%.
What’s impressive is the growth rate and the diverse target group. In the US alone, nearly half of military personnel (49%), three out of every five transfer students (61%), and about four-fifths of adults returning to education (79%) are among those opting for online education (Statista).
What is an online learning platform?
An e-learning platform is a portal designed to deliver education through digital devices. It encompasses essential features and various types of e-learning platforms. This learning may support regular education or act as the core education itself.
An e-learning platform, also known as an online learning platform, doesn’t require a student and teacher to be in the same place simultaneously in a traditional classroom. Online courses have eliminated such restrictions and redefined the conventional learning model.
Why build an elearning website
Business organizations are building online learning platforms to train and upskill employees. Colleges and educational institutions are investing in building online learning websites to serve more students and enrich the learning of existing students. Entrepreneurs are choosing to create e-learning platforms because they make great business sense.
Here are the five principal reasons to create a platform for online learning:
- Wide acceptance: Students and professionals all over are embracing digital learning.
- Proven model: The online learning model is now proven.
- Earned authenticity: Nearly all leading organizations and educational institutions have their own e-learning platform.
- Cost-effective: It's a build-once-use-often model, making it highly cost-effective.
- Global reach: An e-learning website opens your doors to international clients.
Steps to build an e-learning platform: Development process
The entire process can be divided into planning well ahead, understanding the core features of an online educational platform, and choosing the most suitable business model. Educational website development involves considering the cost, features, and steps required to create e-learning websites with advanced functionality and content.
Here are the detailed steps to build an online course platform:
1. Idea validation: Is it worth it?
Before you start website development or create courses, you want to ensure your idea is viable and worth the effort.
How to validate an idea:
You need to research and speak to at least two groups:
1. Course developers:
Whenever possible, speak to educational institutes. Understand how they are marrying traditional education with digital learning tools.
Simultaneously, analyze the publicly available information on their social media handles. See what kind of questions their audience is asking. Figure out their aspirations and focus on the unserved areas or unmet demands.
2. Business analysts
Interactions with business analysts will provide you a better understanding of the current trends in online education.
Another important idea you can discuss is monetization models, and learn more about which way the wind blows.
2. Know and analyze your audience: Whom will you serve?
Create opportunities to connect with your target audience. There are numerous channels to reach them, including questionnaires, interviews, informal chats, and free webinars.
Seek to understand them. Specifically, you need to find out:
- How do they define their learning goals?
- What are their expectations from an e-learning platform?
- What all things influence them the most to access courses online?
Along with these insights, you want to better define their demographics. Knowing the profile of the audience you're trying to attract can improve the results of your marketing tools.
Important demographics of your target audience:
- What is their age group?
- Are they working professionals? College students? Test prep students? K-12?
- Where are they based? This partially reflects their spending capacity, owing to currency differences across the world.
- What kind of learning materials would best support your education delivery?
3. The right business model: How will it work?
As your market research will reveal, the global elearning market doesn’t work on any one single business model.
Your monetization model depends upon factors like course content, fees, audience demographics, and competition. Below are the six models you can consider:
(a) College model:
Just like your college tuition covers everything - or nearly everything - they teach, you will charge a single number. Against that amount, all your courses will be made available to the student.
This model is best suited when the courses you teach are limited in number and variety. If, for instance, you are a micro business that helps students with their GRE preparations, this is a model worth considering.
(b) Pay-per-course model:
In contrast with the college model, this model charges separately for each of the various courses you teach. That means the student has complete freedom in terms of which courses to buy and pays only for those courses.
This could be the right business model when you run courses with considerable variety. Let’s say you offer language courses across six different languages and four levels. A student could pay only to learn Italian 101, Japanese 201, Spanish 101, German 101, and 201.
(c) Subscription model:
Under this monetization model, the focus could be the time duration instead of the course content. For a fixed monthly fee, your students will be able to access all the courses on your eLearning site.
Although it sounds identical to the College Model above, some differences exist. You may use the subscription model when:
- You have a large number of courses
- You keep adding courses regularly, or
- Your learning management system shows compelling reasons for learners to keep going.
This model has proved effective for what has come to be known as Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). Udemy and Coursera are their most well-known examples. LinkedIn Learning (eponymously known as Lynda-dot-com before the takeover) is a recent addition.
(d) Commission model
This monetization model is a kind of a partnership model. You provide the technology and the bandwidth while a tutor brings the entire course content, from videos to training material.
The course is hosted on your platform, so you receive a commission from the fees the students have paid.
This model can work very well when you have a technology team that’s capable of building and maintaining the technology stack.
(e) Freemium model:
A freemium model may complement any of the other models. In this model, you allow access to a small part of the course content for free and put the rest behind a paywall.
Even the freemium model has two variations. In the first, you make a part of each online course available for free. In the second, some courses are entirely free, while others are available only for a fee.
(f) Ad-driven model:
Think YouTube. There are countless courses and educational videos available on YouTube.
The viewer doesn’t pay anything from their pocket to watch videos. Because YouTube is a video streaming service and not your typical e-learning portal, it generates revenues from ads.
Another feature YouTube offers is the ability to buy a Premium subscription, which allows viewers to enjoy video content without ads.
If you are just starting out, this model isn’t the best for you simply because you won’t have ads that can sustain you.
Note:
We aren’t saying the above list of business models of online education is exhaustive. We are saying that nearly all learning businesses follow one of the above models.
Entities like Khan Academy, of course, operate successfully outside of all the above models simply because their goals and missions are different. Some others offer free classes and charge you for tests and certifications. Still, others require a specific educational background before accessing the course.
Explore your market and understand your audience to determine what works best.
4. The right development team: Who will build it?
Here’s another important decision you’ll make: which team will build it for you?
On the whole, you have three alternatives:
(a) Build your team:
Building your team has its distinct advantages. But first, the plain truth: if you aren’t an IT company in the education niche, do not try to build a team solely for this. The development process will soon get complex.
That means you’ll begin investing more resources and time as the project unfolds. That’s why small and mid-sized businesses almost entirely avoid this route.
(b) Hire a company:
For many, this is a wise move. Get an IT company and have them develop a customized platform for you.
However, building an online learning platform is something specialized. If an IT company is into creating, say, a hotel billing software, it will not be the right choice for you. Remember, you’ll be publishing paid courses. In return, your student customers will demand a full-featured portal. Hence, choose only a company with a clear track record of building a successful e-learning platform.
(c) Go for a ready-made platform
If you don’t believe in reinventing the wheel, consider this option: choose a ready-for-you platform.
Edison started as a consulting firm dedicated to developing custom platforms for edupreneurs. Over time, we built something that online coaching companies can use immediately. We have the complete range of features that you’ll ever need.
And the best part? It’s fully customizable. Need anything in addition to what’s out there? We can do it for you. Want to tweak a feature? No problem, consider it done.
5. Must-have features: What your platform can’t do without
Think of the airlines you’ve travelled by in the past few years. Each airline brings some unique offers and works to provide a unique experience to you. And yet, they all share some common features that almost no airline can operate without.
An online platform can truly attract and retain students when it builds trust, comes across as valuable, and creates distinct value through its features.
We have grouped the must-have features that all educational platforms need to have under three heads:
Features for students
- Registration, login, and user profile
You can make registration and login easier by allowing logging through Gmail or Facebook. Encourage students to create and enrich their profiles since they help you better understand your students.
- Search
Students should be able to find teachers and courses with a simple button. Also, allow them filters like 'Courses between $49 and $99’.
- Payment gateway
Remove all the friction from payments. We strongly recommend having single-click payments because the more steps you add to payment, the fewer students will enroll.
- Support
You need a full-fledged customer care function, so your students know help is always available.
Features for Marketing
- Ratings and reviews
Allow your students to post their reviews and ratings. Then, you can use these genuine testimonials to attract more students.
- Course family listing
Keep a list of the courses that the student can take up next or courses that should be taken as a prerequisite to their current course. This will help improve learning outcomes and raise your ARPU (Average Revenue Per User).
- Bundle of offers
Mere course creation doesn’t guarantee business growth. Your target audience always needs one more reason to enroll. Don’t forget to periodically create offers to help your students save money on enrollments.
- Messaging
You need a feature to remind your students of every new course, offer and event. Emails and notifications keep your audience in the loop and help them grab great deals.
Feature for your tutors
- Course publishing
Your tutors should be able to publish their courses on your online teaching platform easily.
- Accounting
As you grow, the accounting and payout system will face more load. A robust, forward-looking system will ensure timely revenue sharing with your partners and keep your accounts sorted.
- Teacher resources
Help your tutors learn how to create great online courses. Set standards, have demos, make basic tools available, and assist them in creating engaging video lessons.
6. UI/UX and design: What does your platform feel like?
Today, the challenge with online learning platforms is not course creation but user experience. A platform that offers great courses and a great learning experience will be successful.
Don’t forget the most important goal of UI/UX is to make the learner’s journey swift, smooth, and enjoyable. Let the below five lessons guide your UI/UX:
- Good design is intuitive: Students should easily find anything they are looking for.
- Good design is responsive: While this is a given nowadays, ensure your design works equally well across different devices.
- Good design is robust: A poor design might put people in one place when they are meant to click another button.
- Good design is pleasant. Your design may be plain or futuristic, but be sure it is great on the eyes.
- Good design is aligned with your brand identity: Your website design should carry your brand further.
7. Ongoing maintenance: How do you keep the platform running?
Even during the development process, you’ll realize that while a great launch will sell courses, regular maintenance and updates are key to staying ahead.
Your maintenance tasks serve one or more of the below five goals:
- Address known issues: This includes fixing bugs that impair proper functioning and improving minor UI/UX issues that cause delays or add friction to the process.
- Add new features: User preferences keep changing. To keep them happy and up with the trends, you’ll need to introduce new features that make life easier for your users.
- Keep up with new technologies: Every day, something new happens in the tech universe. Your platform should ensure you can handle new technology and phase out old technology.
- Improve compliance: Governments everywhere are raising the bar for compliance. You don’t want to wake up one morning and see you aren’t compliant. Hence, it’s important that you remain aware of the latest regulations and abide by them.
- Raise security standards: Your platform must be protected against all digital threats. To do that, you’ll need to provide security updates and patches regularly.
- Tips to attract learners to your online learning platform
- The e-learning business is highly competitive. This means that clear growth strategies are a must to generate new business constantly.
- Here are some of the most effective ways to attract learners to your elearning website:
- Cost-effective solutions: A few years back, InsideHigherEd reported that students are highly sensitive to fees. Things haven’t changed since. So one of your key priorities should be to keep your courses course-effective. You can explore how payment solutions like Stripe or PayPal can help you convert fees into subscriptions or instalments.
Enriched features: The brutal truth every online business must live with is that basic offerings are available on the internet for free. So, to stand out, your online learning platform must have additional features like: - Regular quizzes
- Content with gamification
- A clear feedback system
- Multi-language tutoring, wherever viable
- Strong data security
- Winner board
- Easy login and payment
- Progress monitoring mechanism
- Free content: As quoted by The Economist, a University of Minnesota study revealed how the word ‘free’ can entice more customers. Instead of a simple discount, customers find it more attractive when they get something for free.
- Your free content works pretty much the same way. Treat your free content like your ads—give away only the most engaging part of the content.
- Student testimonials: Everyone trusts proven results. Hence, display all your testimonials prominently and encourage more students to share their experiences. This brings in a touch of authenticity that nothing else can.
- Affiliate marketing: Affiliate marketing is a great, low-cost channel to promote your courses. There's no fixed cost against paid ads (below); you pay only for inquiries that convert.
- Paid ads: Once you have the budget, paid ads are a highly effective channel for generating new business. Search engines and advertisement networks offer multiple possibilities for targeting your ideal audience.
- SEO-strong content: Paid ads bring instant traffic, but that traffic dies when your ads stop running. Though slow initially, traffic earned from SEO-optimised content brings in visitors for a long time. So be sure to invest in SEO-optimized content.
Where do you start from?
If you're excited after reading the above, it's only natural to ask: what next?
The first step is always about validating the idea and understanding the audience.
The five important stages of starting an online platform are clearly understanding the idea's viability and researching your audience, selecting the right business model, deciding on a technology stack, zeroing in on must-have functionalities, and identifying the team to develop it for you.
We've empowered over 500 founders and edupreneurs in the past seven years. We worked as their silent technology partner, their single-window vendor, to help them set up their online education platform.
Let's speak if you'd like to benefit from our successful experience with all these edupreneurs.
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