Education is one of the most important aspects of our lives. However, the conventional education procedure can be considered debatable.
The increasing fees of a college education are coercing many to seek various educational platforms where one can get a first-rate education at a cost that is not too expensive.
This is the reason why there has been a high demand to develop e-learning websites like Udemy and Coursera.
When we are referring to education, we do not necessarily mean conventional subjects. What makes these various e-learning mobile apps so popular is the fact that there are a huge variety of different courses.
which are not limited to the longstanding orthodox courses or subjects; however, one can choose to learn almost anything from a wide variety of courses and knowledge domains these e-learning websites are offering.
From science to filmmaking, math to abstract painting, all sorts of subjects and learning are available on these platforms.
The emerging popularity and acceptance of e-learning websites have made them a bankable proposition for businesses. Entrepreneurs are seeking a trustworthy and renowned eLearning software development company to sow the seed of their idea.
Nevertheless, the only question that keeps us wondering is how to plan and develop a website like Udemy?
So let’s go through all the steps one needs to pursue to create an e-learning website.
It’s a well-known fact that the rising requests for effective and minimal effort training and education systems are driving up the interest in e-learning apps like Byju’s, Udemy, Coursera, Lynda, and so on. However, so as to really approve your thought, we need to take a gander at the numbers.
Statistics state that by 2025, the entire global e-learning market will reach $300 billion US dollars. North America alone will establish 40% of the whole 120 billion US dollars e-learning market by 2025.
Innovation, for example, Artificial Intelligence (AR, VR, AI), enormous information, and AI, is assisting with the development of the e-learning market.
As these innovations develop more, they will just assist with the development of the e-learning market. Every one of these reasons makes the plan to assemble an e-learning site a splendid one.
In order to know how Udemy works, we need to understand it in the below steps:
Udemy comprises courses instructed by expert professionals across the globe on a variety of topics. Several are related to engineering and technology skills, business skills, and a lot of courses; others train you in performing arts, and others give you tips and instructions on how to stay healthy or fit.
Among the diverse range of topics, there ought to be some that you would want to learn about or pursue on Udemy!
No last date hassles to enroll yourself and forget about the limited seat issues, which in a way snatches your basic right to get educated. Neither do you need to get yourself anxious, wondering what the cut-off would be to get admission to your favorite course.
If you see the course listed on Udemy, you can sign up at any point in time. You can watch the lectures or you can just be all ears to them if that grabs your attention, attempt and finish exercises, take virtual notes, save and download extra or additional files, and explore and discuss learning material with your respective trainers and other trainees.
There’s no turnaround time or deadline; hence, you can give each course the kind of space and time that you think it deserves, as this medium is for the people who are passionate about learning so it should be up to an individual how much time one wants to dedicate to a certain course.
The courses listed on the Udemy platform are very pocket-friendly, as a course could cost as little as $20, and on top of that, Udemy offers various discount coupon codes that can fetch you amazing discount deals on courses generally priced at $150 to $200!
Relying on the different percentage discounts that one gets using a coupon code, one could be able to choose a usually highly-priced course for as little as $10!
Once you complete a course on Udemy, you get a certificate of achievement that you can share or take a printout of. Of course, it adds value to your resume and some certificates could be used as proof of your progress towards certain advanced certifications!
Also for the different Udemy courses, one has to go over the procedure for signing up. In order to pursue any Udemy course, one needs to follow quite basic steps.
If there is any skill that has been your dream or that you have been looking up to for learning or improving, but you don’t have any clue how or where to look, just visit Udemy and you will find it there.
Below are the relevant business models with details, you could choose for your eLearning website.
Using this model, the customer purchases paid subscriptions to the website, It could be a yearly or monthly subscription.
After buying a subscription, they are granted unlimited access to the website and all listed courses. The user would have to pay quite a modest amount of money to get access to all the course material on the website.
In the affiliate model, the course modules have integrated links referring to respective books or equipment that the customer might plan to buy to advance in the respective course.
When the customer follows the link to the e-commerce website and shops, your eLearning website will get revenue from it.
Apart from the course fee, the customer pays for a platform-verified certificate, which is a standard practice in different places.
Planning the tie-ups with many universities, educational institutions, and organizations and offering the users and learners verified paid certificates will make sure that you have an unvarying channel to bring the profit in.
As the title suggests, the corporate collaboration model is a model where you make a collaboration with different business entities and organizations to have a few specialized courses relevant to their operation.
This way, companies can facilitate training or workshops for their employees in a centralized manner. So, this would open another avenue for you to earn revenue from your website.
The paid course model is another avenue via which the website can generate a lot of revenue. Once the users buy a paid course, a part of the earnings goes to the tutor who designed and uploaded the course content, and the remainder will go to the website owner.
The business model of Udemy is quite different, with two basic client sections that are integral to making this business model a rage:
Individuals or entities that prepare online courses in which they are experts.
Pupils or trainees who are interested in pursuing the web courses
The application gives six essential incentives: accessibility, customization, convenience, worth, cost-effectiveness, and brand/status.
The main channel of Udemy is its website. The organization promotes and propagates its several offerings via its other subchannels, like social media platforms.
The relationship with clients is basically more oriented towards self-benefit. Various clients use Udemy via its website and phone application. The site “Udemy for Business” has an “Assets” area that has white papers, contextual analyses, infographics, and eBooks, The parent site includes all the queries and answers to almost all inquiries.
Apart from these, there is a separate help section for day-in and day-out email support.
The general features are those features that even a simple user visiting the website will find useful. These general features will be used by both learners and tutors on your website.
Udemy has listed 15 main courses ranging from engineering to software web development to performing arts to vocational courses, and then it includes 15 subcategories of each main category.
For example, in the musical instrument subcategory of music, there are almost more than 30 different courses for piano students and a more or less similar number of courses for violin students.
The students get a wide range of choices to choose from, too, without any prerequisites or eligibility.
One can always choose or go through the courses on PCs, laptops, standalone computers, tablets, and smartphones.
The most popular driving feature is that almost 10% of courses offered by Udemy are without any cost, while the remaining ones are more often than not priced under $200.
There are a few exceptions, though, with a couple of courses priced up to $1,000, but these are just exceptions.
Udemy refunds 100% of the tuition fees In case the trainee doesn’t want to continue the course for any reason.
Each trainee gets the option of instant access to their chosen course, all resources, like courses, PDFs, financial templates, guidelines, and checklists, are electronically available for easy download to any device.
If one needs to retake or revise any section or part of a course, one can do the same numerous times without any additional cost.
Each student is different so this platform comprises video lectures ranging in length from 5 minutes to 15 minutes. When viewing the lectures, trainees can pause, stop or reply as many times as they want.
This feature will help students and instructors alike; they can sign up, make their respective accounts on the website and customize their experience on the learning platform.
It is a mandatory feature, as it allows the instructor to manage the specific courses they join and upload, and helps the learners pursue the course without any issues.
Profile management is also a very useful and common feature one would require for online training platforms like Udemy.
Users who make a profile by putting in the required information would be allowed to use the profile management feature to take care of those details, add, modify or remove the courses, manage their respective certificates, and follow instructors as well.
Customer support is one of the most significant features of your learning site.
The feature will assist visitors and customers in getting in touch with customer support when they are facing any issue on the platform. It could be that they are not able to sign in to their respective accounts or that a course is not being uploaded.
24×7 customer service will definitely increase customer satisfaction and eventually, it will lead to more users on your website.
Big organizations and government organizations generally go for tie-ups with online learning websites to launch courses that are specific to that organization.
This uncomplicates several issues that government organizations and big brands might confront while facilitating these courses on their own.
So a tie-up is always a mutual benefit for both parties, as they can get their employees trained in a centralized way and track the progress in collaboration.
The chance to learn on the go is inestimable for present-day students. The least you can do is grasp the users of the web form and permit them to take advantage of an e-learning mobile app like Udemy.
Further, users will greatly appreciate your effort in bringing in the courses over the mobile application and engaging with the latest innovative technologies of AR and VR.
The learners, who will register on your website to learn, will look for multiple features that can improve the user experience. Below are a few useful student profile features:
There would be multiple courses available on the learning site, and the learners would look up a feature that they could easily sort out and find the course of their choice on the website. To do the same, there has to be a search, categorization, and filtering feature.
The recommendation feature will help the users find related courses to the ones they have just registered for and enrolled in. This assists the learners in finding more courses that can always help them further hone their skill set.
To build a smoothly functioning website such as Udemy, you would require expert tutors and instructors who would design, modify and upload their respective courses and related content on a regular basis.
And in order to achieve the same, the instructors will expect some vital profile features. These are two of the most common tutor profile features you must have for eLearning website development.
The course creation and update feature is an essential feature. The tutor or instructor must be able to prepare and customize a course based on his expertise and skills. There is another feature called course updates, where instructors can update the course with new content.
The dashboard feature is important for the trainers to keep a watch on the modules they uploaded on their profile, the count of learners who have enrolled for their respective courses, their earnings (revenue) that have been made, and overall supervision of all their activities on the website.
The UI/UX is the decisive factor that will be directly proportional to the success of your website. The ease and efficiency with which an average customer can use the website will help the customer make up their mind whether they want to continue with this website or not.
When planning and designing the UI/UX for your website, which will be straightaway compared with bigwigs like Udemy, just keep the below points in mind while designing the UI/UX design.
The primary thing you need to keep in mind while designing a website like Udemy is that the design has to be user-friendly and consistent.
Complicated design, despite being enticing, wouldn’t help when it comes to drawing the attention of users.
The maximum number of visitors to your website will be students and expert tutors, so it would be better for them if the e-learning design is not complicated and user-friendly. With easy navigational pointers and a simple interface for first-time visitors.
After user-friendly design, another important factor is consistency. The interface design, with its choice of colors, logo, and theme, has to be in accordance so that the user can sense the continuity.
This will create a sense of conformity and assurance among the users when you plan to develop a website like Udemy.
The visual design comprises the images, illustrations, and animations you use to make your eLearning site look different, fun, and enticing to the user.
Although it is necessarily a learning website, i.e., a platform where users visit for different kinds of skill training, that doesn’t mean that the website has to be an example of monotony and blandness.
With the use of colors and illustrations, you can make your website attractive and enchanting so that users visit it every now and then.
Now that we have an idea to start our own educational website, let’s check out how we should go about it.
We’ve looked at and observed Udemy’s tech stack to comprehend what technologies we can go ahead and use to create a platform for educational development.
As one can assume from the title, a backend is a server component of a learning management system that handles managing users, sending notifications, storing data, and creating and delivering courses.
As suggested by Freelance, the Udemy backend is in Python with an in-house MVC framework that lets them customize the platform as per the varying user requirements.
The frontend means the user interface, which opens in the Internet browser, facilitating learners, website administrators, and teachers to operate or perform their individual tasks.
The front end of Udemy has been designed on the HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, and Bootstrap frameworks.
When it’s about the database, Udemy selects MySQL. Udemy has also used Cloudflare as a content delivery network and Fastly as a cloud platform in order to handle the high workload created by different visitors to the website.
So to prepare an eLearning platform, you’ll generally require different APIs, plugins, and add-ons that connect the system to the third-party API.
The development cost depends on various factors, like:
The hourly cost for building up the application is not the same from one locale to another. The US/UK-based designer’s costs are around $150–$250 every hour. and Eastern Europe-based engineers costs are around $80 to $180 per hour.
Consequently, Indian engineers’ costs are around $20–$70 per hour, which is the most sensible rate.
Additionally, a normal general improvement in the cost of e-learning mobile application may cost close to $10,000 to $30,000. Whenever propelled highlights are added, the improvement cost may increase.
The online learning industry is evolving day by day, and since the outbreak of the COVID pandemic, the usage of online education has been skyrocketing like never before.
Educational institutions are heavily entrusting e-learning apps to impart quality education remotely. Hence, we can say that it is a fulfilling idea to build an e-learning app like Udemy.
At Arka Softwares, we leverage the knowledge of emerging technologies like AI, Blockchain, and IR/VR to craft immaculate applications to empower their digital learning systems so that they can avail themselves of the benefits of the Ed-Tech revolution in the market.
Our experts follow an easy-to-use and intuitive design methodology to design highly efficient apps, that can make learning effortless for learners and educators. Everything from the app interface to the color scheme is configured to minimize confusion and distractions.
We are also working to incorporate the gamification index, where the best-performing learners could be rewarded so that they remain motivated in multiple aspects.
If you are seriously planning to build an e-learning platform for your enterprise, then you can certainly hire a reliable and reputed mobile app development company like Arka Softwares.
Our consultants will help you through the app development lifecycle and make your e-learning platform development voyage easier.
Jeeto11
The app quickly earned over 1,000 downloads within two months of launch, and users have responded positively. ARKA Softwares boasted experienced resources who were happy to share their knowledge with the internal team.
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While the development is ongoing, the client is pleased with the work thus far, which has met expectations. ARKA Softwares puts the needs of the client first, remaining open to feedback on their work. Their team is adaptable, responsive, and hard-working.
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I started my project with Arka Softwares because it is a reputed company. And when I started working with them for my project, I found out that they have everything essential for my work. The app is still under development and but quite confident and it will turn out to be the best.
