How to Build an eLearning Platform like Coursera

The origin of eLearning goes far back to 1999 during the CBT systems seminar where they mentioned the term first time. It was about describing online lessons.

Now technically uttered with a broader industry-specific term MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses), the eLearning space has significantly evolved to offer people from all parts of the world an opportunity to study direct courses of world’s leading universities.

The eLearning app like Coursera even offers a chance to gain bachelor’s and master’s degree in many popular disciplines.

Due to its curious adoption, the eLearning market is rich with many opportunities for educators and entrepreneurs to monetize online courses. Nearly 50 MOOC platforms are already active in more than 20 countries around the world.

Building an eLearning platform like Coursera is the best way to create an educational marketplace where students can interact with university professors and contributors without actually going there.

Read Also: How Much Does It Cost to Create an App Like Udemy

So how would you build your own eLearning platform similar to Coursera? Here is the insight.

Success Journey and working standard of Coursera

Coursera has achieved phenomenal success in MOOC market ever since it was initiated by Stanford Professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. Established in 2012, Coursera has significantly influenced e-Learning sphere, reaching over 33 million users by June 2018.

Unlike Udemy where individual teachers share the course content online, Coursera works in a different way and publish strictly verified, academic content from universities and colleges.

Institutes and organizations working with Coursera are the illustrious names such as Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale along with other 149 reputed institutes across 29 countries.

Coursera is respected for its quality of education and affordability of courses, making for a solemn competition in the space of traditional education method.

The app gives you the same quality of learning as provided by those glorious universities. Moreover, Coursera also affords students a facility to apply for financial support in case they need help funding their education.

Mandatory essentials to build an eLearning platform like Coursera

If you want to build an eLearning platform that is as successful as Coursera, you must first consider the following essential features that will bring the educational experience alive.

Search

Where there is a catalog, there should be an organized, precise search function. Since your eLearning platform will nestle a wide catalog of courses, you will need to enable students to browse smoothly through the heap of courses and provide a quick, comfortable access to them.

Amazon Cloud solution will come handy when managing huge multitude of courses and establishing a sophisticated search in place.

If you want to store more than 50,000 courses, you may consider implementing Elasticsearch, too, which helps fetch the close matches to user’s requirements in no time.

Categories

Initially, Coursera decided to go with only 5 categories and some relevant subcategories depending on the course type. However, after some time they increased the number to 2,000 and more, adding new topics from medicine, computer science, humanities, etc.

In 2015, Coursera brought in special algorithmic system to enhance organization of courses by grouping them in clusters.

Recommendations

Having recommendations adds new directions to user’s search and helps them discover the interesting, most relevant courses from the eLearning app.

Coursera system collects insight from user’s personal interest and views on courses as they create an account online and processes the information present suggestions depending on its:

• Trends
• Popularity
• Certifications
• Recent activity/history
• Categories and subcategories

User Profiles

Registration process for users involve secure and convenient method depending on the type of end users on the eLearning platform.

1) Student Profile

This account stands for students to enter detailed information on courses and interests. Basically, the student profile should include:

• User information
• Active courses and enrollments
• History of Purchases, transactions
• Wishlist and settings
• Accomplished certificates/credits

2) Teacher Profile

Although Coursera is stringent and limited to courses created by instructors who belong to Coursera Partner Institutes, you can also allow other individual instructors to create a teacher profile and use publishing tools to share their lessons.

Complete Course Creation Tool

Teachers and instructors must be able to create course in your eLearning app. For doing so, teachers can insert questionnaire along with correct answers to be reviewed.

The course wizard tool empowers the entire process and allows users to create a course structure, add audio and video content, write explainer script, illustrations, slides, quiz, PDFs tutorials, reference links, assignments, exercises and practice tests and many other resources.

Course Enrollment

The eLearning platform will facilitate access to courses students select after they register in the system. Users can add courses of interest in their shopping cart and pay for it.

To educate them on course content and its application, a free trial period for courses will be appreciated before purchasing them online. The details on enrollments and its period should be visible in user profile as the list of courses selected.

Read Also: How Much Does It Cost to Develop an eLearning  App Like Byju’s

Dashboard

Users like teachers and instructors can own a dashboard in eLearning app to track their activities and monitor different parameters of student interactions.

Like Coursera, the app can deliver insights in Dashboard on what all Courses are presented by teachers. They can check the performance analytics as instructors and know the student enrollments, revenues, ratings and conversion.

To make it more insightful and precise, build a feature for market insights that give valuable research data on a topic/subject preferred by teachers for making courses.

Secure Payment Method

Your eLearning platform has monetization business model for courses and lessons. Users who avail services can purchase courses with secure and flexible payment method. For this purpose, you can integrate:

• PayPal
• Stripe
• Webmoney
• Payoneer
• Skrill

Emails and Push Notifications

Students can be informed about newly published courses, recommendations on categories, reputed tutors and instructors, or online events via email or app’s push notifications on phone.

Admin control

There should be an Admin control that helps manage, add or edit the content and features in the app. You would be able to:

• Add/delete/edit users
• Add/remove/edit/ courses and content
• Assign roles
• Edit/Add subscription plans
• Reward/certification generation
• Statistics reports
• Send notifications and emails

eLearning for Enterprises

MOOC platforms are not just restricted to offering educational and career training services for students and academicians. You can make a separate online platform for mobile users for promoting concentrated, industry-specific education for enterprise companies or government bodies.

Such solution centralizes and brings all types of training content on a single spot for companies so as to educate employees without opting for special infrastructural facility for the same.

In this case, like Coursera, the statistical data about the progress is tracked and sent to the CRM via API. Companies can monitor the statistics, generate reports and even add online certificates to employee profile upon course/training completion.

Coursera has Skills Benchmarking feature that allows companies to monitor their human resources to develop a training program for workforce.

Support

With ample amount of courses and content, it is difficult to manage all the inquiries and QnA. Without an impeccable support for curious students, they are likely to be frustrated, resulting in an ominous start.

To make the learning experience smooth and transparent, your eLearning platform needs to build a hassle-free support system.

To enable efficient query resolution, it is advisable to adopt the power of machine learning that tracks activities and interactions of students to deliver quick and relevant responses.

Integrating a smart solution for sending automated emails with right steps to solve course-related problems is also recommended.

Factors to focus on while developing an App like Coursera

Developing a legendary eLearning app like Coursera also demands thorough brainstorming on what can possibly influence the development process and final outcome.

A few crucial factors to consider are:

• Feature compatibility
• Ease of maintenance
• Minute administration
• Compliance standards
• Data Security
• Scalability
• Affordability
• Changing requirements

Technical Stack to build an eLearning platform like Coursera

Language: JavaScript, PHP, Python

Database: Amazon DB service, MySQL

Web server: Nginx

Search: Amazon Cloud search, Elasticsearch.

Read Also: 13 Best Apps For College Students

Conclusion

Educational landscape is getting transformed with MOOC platforms that enable a modern, convenient and affordable solution to achieve educational certifications from the best associated universities and institutes.

In this blog post, we just saw how you can build a contemporary benchmark eLearning platform. If you want to step into the eLearning industry, it is important to stand out among others by crafting innovative features with unique technologies such as Machine Learning.

If you are planning to build a successful eLearning platform using latest resources, RedBytes would be your perfect technology partner. Your eLearning solution is just a brief consultation away.