Online e-learning platforms and applications have taken a significant place in daily life during the pandemic. The educational sector overcame this challenging period by implementing new technologies. Nowadays, education software development services result in the learning revolution providing users with study resources at any time and from any location.
It opens new opportunities for the e-learning industry. Geniusee has extensive experience and broad expertise in developing successful e-learning projects of different complexity and helping transform today’s educational system. The Edtech sector is one of our main areas of focus.
What To Consider To Develop Edtech Product
Multiplatform Access
User convenience is a crucial characteristic of educational products. They should be easily accessible from devices such as Android or iOS-based smartphones, laptops, or Chromebooks. As a developer, you have to consider a user-friendly design for your platform. Content must be available and compatible with various devices with different operating systems and screen sizes.
A collision between developer libraries, the web browser, or device-specific settings such as the shell or screen resolution can cause some incompatibilities. Imply the user experiences analysis tools to prevent such a situation.
Video Implementation
For an online learning experience, the good quality and stability of the video connection should be the main focus. If the video connection is inconsistent, even with fascinating learning materials, the overall quality of the online training sessions won’t be able to meet its objectives. Moreover, online education platforms require face-to-face communication with video-based learning and real-time media content sharing. WebSocket is a nice technical solution as it helps maintain a stable and smooth connection.
Payment Gateway
A fully operational and integrated payment system in your e-learning platform can protect your users from possible hassle. The payment gateway ensures a convenient online learning process, as students can sign up for your classes without getting out from the site or app.
Despite the major benefits and accessibility, an integrated payment system raises the risk of the platform’s vulnerabilities and makes it more sensitive to cyberattacks. While implementing external payment gateways like Stripe into your platform, you should comply with all security rules to prevent possible risks. To avoid vulnerabilities, follow all the necessary security procedures during the process of external payment gateway integration, such as Stripe.
Calendar Integration
Your learning content would be much enhanced by a well-structured calendar system enabling people to schedule learning modules according to their skills, individual growth, and knowledge. Schedule incompatibilities cause problems that can be encountered by implementing a well-ordered calendar system. The cancellation process of some lessons is another topic of concern. It is so important to identify a mechanism to reschedule classes in these circumstances without interfering with other pre-scheduled time slots.
User Types Segmentation
Different types of users can interact in an e-learning platform, such as
- tutors
- classroom managers
- students
- lecturers
- and examiners.
They require different types of access to learning systems and relevant content. There are two problems you may encounter when implementing user types based on permissions and their roles:
- Implementing permissions;
- managing user accounts.
Tools such as Amazon Cognito from Amazon Web Services will assist you with handling user enrollment management tasks at different authorization levels. Cognito also lets you set various authentication rules for multiple levels of users. For a smooth login experience, you should integrate social identity providers like Facebook, Apple, Google, or Amazon.
Booking System
The next step is facilitating the lesson booking system and registration procedure, as participants have to handle the process themselves. Meanwhile, you should provide members with an opportunity to access the system and troubleshoot any complex issues manually.
Once you combine various booking methods, testing may become more complex. AWS Lambda enables you to test the efficiency of your booking system and simulate a real-world environment. With AWS Lambda’s scalable architecture, you can check features such as scheduled actions, recurring payments, or an automatic renewal of booked lessons under some circumstances.
Timezone System
Global audience participation can help you boost the e-learning product. However, as your students will join from various time zones, managing real-time interaction will become challenging. Therefore, your learning system must automatically incorporate daylight savings time from diverse time zones. There are numerous ways to help participants handle their time zone settings seamlessly. For instance, browser tools and extensions that emulate different time zones. In addition, lesson booking systems and calendars may need to be adapted to dynamic time zone settings.
Platform Security
It is essential to secure the platform from cyberattacks and protect your data, educational materials, and financial resources. Lots of users can access your platform through their social accounts. Consequently, any security breach in the platform can interfere with their social media accounts, and attackers can steal users’ sensitive information. Typical attacks on e-learning platforms may include XSS (cross-site scripting), direct SQL code injection, remote Trojan file injection, URL SQL injection, force attacks to crack passwords, etc.
You can imply different user access levels, multi-factor authentication for registration, and login flows to protect the system’s integrity. Here are some recommendations based on our experience:
- Re-authentication. Make the verification valid for a pre-defined time, requiring re-authentication when the time is reached.
- Strengthen the password policy by requiring a combination of small and capital letters, digits, and other characters.
Mailing Service implementation
Various email service providers come with their advantages and limitations for delivering your online training programs. It makes sense to try several email services for your eLearning company to choose the best one. For example, MailChimp enables you to segment users according to their roles (e.g., students, instructors, classroom teachers) and create scheduled emails. Slack, on the other hand, helps you send emails in real time, like instant messages.
We described the essential features for the successful development of eLearning products that will definitely help you. All the recommendations are based on Geniusee expertise and experience. Various EdTech projects may require different approaches and solutions. However, they have the same significant pillars for further development and improvements.
