Last Updated on January 21, 2022

The educational sector has seen a drastic change in its approach as more resources have been made available to make it prosperous. Among these resources, e-learning mobile apps have their worth in gold. E-learning apps have come into trend over the last 4-5 years and since their arrival, the overall scenario of education has changed forever. E-learning has accumulated praise from parents and students from all over the world for the methods of learning it brings alongside it.online elearning app

The basic formula of e-learning mobile apps is that all the educational stuff that students study in their schools and tuitions classrooms has been made available for students in their smartphones from the comforts of their homes. Online learning mobile applications in large numbers have raided Google and Apple Playstore. Different types of e-learning apps are available with different ways of teaching style and it is up to the students to select their preferred style of the teaching method.

Benefits of eLearning Mobile Apps

We all are aware of the fact that smartphones have become a common feature of student’s lifestyles in present times and with smartphones comes an endless number of platforms of entertainment. These platforms consume a lot of precious time of students, therefore this pinch of change in the form of e-learning apps has been welcomed with open arms from all the students. E-learning apps have shifted their mind towards learning important stuff that will help them out in their higher studies and life in general.

These apps provide top-notch methods to engage students in studying and most importantly make the studies interesting. Let us have a look at some of the other major benefits of e-learning apps.

  • These apps offer better completion rates and retention rates. They take pride in presenting the content in a concise manner. In this way, learners can quickly learn one course and jump onto the next one.
  • Lack of collaboration tends to hinder the quality of studies that a student does. However, one of the core beliefs of these e-learning apps is to promote collaborative learning through online communities within the app.
  • These apps make the learning process quite flexible as they provide various options of learning to the students in the form of podcasts, videos, and other fruitful methods.
  • One of the areas these apps intensely focus on is creating ways for higher engagement of students. They have worked remarkably on making the apps accessible for the students at any point in time and from any place.
  • Parents have also been made a part of this structure as they are kept in touch regarding their kid’s performance in school or college. The report prepared by these apps for the parents consists of exam preparedness, understanding factor, time spent in studying.

Major Categories of eLearning App-Based Businesses

E-learning business categories consist of three main types and we will discuss them all these in detail.

1. E2C e-learning – Education to Consumers

In this type, the consumers generally are students who are looking to gain educational knowledge. Students of all kinds of institutions be it school, college or university have shown a lot of interest in pursuing their studies through e-learning mobile apps. Now, this fondness for e-learning apps creates a business opportunity for app creators. But it is not a straightforward path and if you are feeling a bit perplexed than you can have a look at some of the most exciting options for generating revenues in this category.

Online education courses

e learning app coursesInternet today is full of various kinds of online courses and helps the creators earn millions. They collaborate with famous universities and colleges to provide their online courses to as many students as possible. They remarkably have helped thousands of students who want to educate themselves but lack financial support. Their ingredients are the following

  • Textbooks with a touch of audio and video lectures
  • Courses catalog, blog, and forum
  • Availability of mobile version to access all the necessary material
  • Integrated payment system to make the process of online payment easier
  • Online quizzes plus submission of tasks to peer students for assessment

2. E2B e-Learning Apps– Education to Business /Corporate Training

Any company looking to incorporate a new training program into their business can turn to e-learning in order to save them from the monotonous face-to-face or classroom learning. Efficiency and advancement are two priorities for businesses in today’s world. In order to attain these businesses turn to e-learning which helps by saving their money, time, and energy. Let us have a look at some of the benefits that makes e-learning mobile apps such a great tool to use for businesses.

Benefits of e-learning mobile apps for businesses in corporate training:

  • Cost-Effective – An e-learning app lowers the money spent on a venue, study materials, and travel costs to the classroom.
  • Flexible and Convenient – e-learning apps allow anybody to learn and join classes virtually which makes it quite convenient for learners to participate.
  • Improves productivity & performance – Another pro of an e-learning app is that it allows the user to learn anytime and anywhere which makes it easy to utilize the free time.
  • Easy access to valuable information – Allows users to access well-written notes in pdf and video lessons with references in an interactive manner. So, useful, easy to consume information on your fingertips.
  • Constructive feedback – Facility to provide feedback to tutors and courses in realtime and real-time progress check of app users
  • High retention capacity – Interactive content, easy to use, and understand lessons makes the learning process fun which makes the learners retain info easily and stay on app longer.

3. E2E – Education to Educators

e-learning mobile apps have not only been for the growth of students but e-learning apps also take teachers under their consideration. It is true that e-learning has proved to be hugely beneficial for the students but that is not the whole picture. These e-learning apps have also helped the teachers to grow leaps and bounds.

Since there was a shift in the method of teaching with the discarding of physical classes and acceptance of virtual online classes, educators needed little tweaks in their style of teaching. E-learning apps have come a lot handy in their pursuit of learning the new methods of teaching.

Benefits of teaching through e-learning mobile apps include:

  • Assigning work and tasks to students and keeping a track of their progress in real-time.
  • Scheduling of class at any time according to their comfort.
  • Better communication with students and their parents
  • Flexibility to access information at any point of time
  • Availability of push notifications about any important activity
  • Availability of e-learning apps for institutions

E-learning business by Technologies

The various means of online learning by technology consist of:

e-Learning Web Portals

Topics today that are taught in schools and colleges are mostly not relevant to what will make a student grow in life. Students of the current generation have become smarter and know what will serve them the best in the quest towards achieving their goals. Tuition fees of schools and colleges have also skyrocketed which gives the students another reason for shifting towards the E-learning web portals.

E-learning web portals have taken the world by storm as they offer the students just the content they need in order to boost their overall knowledge of life. These E-learning web portals focus primarily on improving all the important quotients of the student.

E-learning Mobile Apps

Mobile E-learning is also known as M-learning and is a new way of accessing content using mobile devices. It allows you to learn from any place and any time with the help of a mobile device and internet connection.

According to research more and more people in the current scenario are accessing the internet through their smartphones. No doubt, laptops, and computers are still popular but nowadays people use different devices to perform various activities at a single moment of time.

Students have access to smartphones and through these smartphones, they use mobile learning. Students are taking up various courses from various e-learning apps in order to prepare themselves for the future. Apart from taking up courses, students are using mobile learning to prepare for various entrance and government exams.

In corporate sector too mobile apps for e-learning provides an outlet to reach out to employees that use to travel a lot, work remotely and who are willing to perform the training regime after their working hours.

Virtual Classrooms

virtual classroom in e learningVirtual classrooms are an online learning environment that provides a platform for live interaction between the tutor and students or learners as they look to indulge in learning activities. It is a shared online space that allows tutors and learners to work towards a goal together.

The interactions that take place in this learning environment usually takes place through videoconferencing. Individuals involved in the task of online teaching are provided with tools of presenting learnable content in different formats. Apart from this, they can also implement collaborative and individual activities. In this process, the tutor has a key leadership role to play as he is the one who marshals the learning process and supports group activities and discussions. Let us have a look at some of the key tools that provides essence to virtual classrooms.

  • Online Whiteboard for real-time collaboration
  • Video Conferencing
  • Participation controls
  • Breakout rooms
  • Instant messaging tools

Learning Management System

The role of a learning management system depends on a number of factors and those include online training strategy, organization’s objectives, and desired outcomes. However, the role of LMS is to deploy and track online training initiatives. Assets are typically uploaded to the learning management system which can be easily accessed by the remote learners. While on the other hand, in many cases, the LMS even has built-in learning authoring tools that importantly helps to develop online training materials without additional third-party software.

Delivery Methods for e-Learning Apps & Web Portals

Synchronous Learning

Synchronous e-learning events are the one that takes place in real-time. Synchronous communication requires two people to be present with each other at a particular moment of time. Prime examples of synchronous e-learning are chatting and IM (Instant Messaging), live webcasting, video and audio conference, virtual classrooms, whiteboard, application sharing, and polling.

Asynchronous Learning

Unlike Synchronous e-learning events, Asynchronous events are independent of time. A great example of asynchronous learning is a self-paced course as online learning can be performed at any given place or time. Prime Asynchronous tools consist of e-mail or discussion forums. In these scenarios, students complete the course at their own comfortable pace with the help of a learning program like LMS. Major examples of Asynchronous learning is Audio/Video, Discussion forum, E-mail, Webcasting/Conferencing, Wiki/Blog, Game-based learning, CBT and WBT, Simulations, Self-paced (SCORM).

Hybrid Learning

Hybrid learning is a different approach to the above-mentioned ones and focuses on delivering courses by combining face-to-face classroom instruction with online activities. This type of learning significantly reduces the overall amount of seating time in an otherwise traditional face-to-face course. Hybrid learning allows students to engage in collaborative learning experiences that will serve them well in the future. Hybrid learning takes pride in striking a balance between face-to-face and online aspects.

Why one should invest in an e-learning mobile app?

Going by the stats, e-learning apps stands at third in terms of most frequently downloaded apps on mobile devices with a current rate of 8.47%. Another set of statistics reveals that the overall market of m-learning apps was worth of total $165.36 billion in 2016 but going by the exponential growth of this market it is expected to cross $243 billion by the year of 2022 at a pace of 5.08% CAGR. This virtual classroom technology is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11% in the coronavirus pandemic period.

Some Stats About e-Learning Apps & Portals

e learning global statistics

  • The Global E-Learning market is expected to reach around $325 billion by the year 2025 as per Research and Markets
  • As per IBM training research, each one dollar a company invests in online learning and training results in $30 return by an increase in employee productivity
  • The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is expected to reach approx. 25.33 billion USD by the year 2025 as per Zion market research.
  • The corporate e-learning market could increase by 38.09 billion USD with a CAGR of 11% between 2019 to 2024. – corporate e-Learning market research Technavio
  • 89 percent of smartphone users download various apps and out of those 50 percent are used for online learning

Global e-learning Market Volume from 2011 to 2020

global mobile education market from 2011 to 2020
This graph shows you the current global e-learning mobile and web portals market volume from 2011 to 2020. In 2020, worldwide mobile education spending is estimated to reach up to 37.8 billion USD, compared to 3.4 billion USD in 2011.

The above stats are a clear indicator of the fact that in the upcoming years, a lot of profitable opportunities will be presented to the businesses to develop an e-learning mobile app to skyrocket the revenues. Plus, we all are aware of the fact that demand in the field of education is pretty unlikely to come down and that is why these m-learning apps present the people interested in the best chance to earn high profits.

Monetization Opportunities in e-Learning Apps

In-app advertisements

In-app advertisements have been a superb monetization strategy for mobile publishers. Here the E-learning app businesses get paid for advertising a specific college, educational institute, or its services. Apps are a key driver of mobile usage and along with that they also drive global media consumption. All of this in turn makes in-app advertising an attractive marketing channel for the E-learning mobile app businesses. Sophisticated data tracking and user tracking creates a favorable in-app environment which permits the advertisers to reach consumers with high accuracy.

Featured listing

E-learning apps receive commissions from colleges and educational institutions in return for the courses they provide to that app. However, these educational institutions provide another source of revenue to these apps through the featured listings. All the courses inside an app are not created by the app owners therefore they include the educational institutional courses created by top educators. When a student search for courses on a particular subject, the courses of these institutions appear right at the top of the search bar. This happens because the colleges and institutions pay an extra amount to these e-learning apps to make their courses appear at the top of the courses list. This in turn increases the popularity level of a particular institution which proves to be a win-win situation for both parties.

Certifications and Selling Courses

E-learning apps include courses in numerous fields and because of this diversity in courses, they are able to attract students interested in different subjects and fields. Now, the process of earning revenue from this starts when they offer learning and certification to a student in exchange for an enrolment fee. The student after paying up the fees gains access to a certification course of a specific subject for a certain amount of time. After completing this certification course, the student is offered a certificate that opens up a door of new opportunities for the student like applying at a job of his liking.

These e-learning apps also offer videos of certain courses on their platforms but they don’t offer the basics of a subject in those videos and these in-depth basics of a particular course are offered in their premium courses for which they charge the students. E-learning apps these days are using online courses as a great way of monetizing their channels. Websites and apps generate a great amount of revenue within a day of launching an online course. Various benefits that this type of monetization technique involves are financial stability, growth of client base through student enrolments, connection with course creator community.

eCommerce integration

This method of monetization has become quite effective in recent days where the e-learning apps have involved the commercial setups in their style of doing business. All the stationery items and several other products related to education can be purchased through their website. Items like pens, registers, pencils, files, folders are made available to the students through an online store. Books on various subjects in which the students are interested are also up for sale through the websites of these e-learning platforms.

Hire eCommerce developers

Top e-learning Mobile Apps and Web Portals

Edx

edx logoUsing this app, students can take a virtual trip to Mcgill and MIT. One can use Edx app to attain some higher source of education that will help him in his course for the future. This app help students even earn a degree for themselves by taking part in lectures, tests, quizzes, and personal schedule provided by the app. The downside regarding this app is that some courses charge some pretty high fees.

Coursera

coursera logoCoursera is a highly influential E-learning web portal that has collaborated with museums, institutions, and universities in order to offer free classes to students on a vast number of topics and for all age groups. Coursera has over 1000 courses of various subjects in its kit bag. A student who is pursuing his learning through Coursera can complete the course, take a test, and by clearing it receive the certification of his education.

Udemy

udemy logoUdemy is an e-learning app that goes beyond all the common subjects and offers classes related to subjects such as science & technology, yoga, banking, designing, cooking, drawing, marketing. It has over 130,000 video tutorials for 32,000 online courses. This app is trendy among the learning section of public because of its unique features and simple design.

Lynda

lynda now linkedin learning logoLynda has a catalog of 564 business courses which includes things such as content marketing, management training, accounting fundamentals, advanced Google AdWords tutorials. This app is available both for ios and android. Lynda allows you to access courses, save and share courses for offline viewing, steam course videos to a television set, and create course playlists. As of now, Lynda is merged into the Linkedin learning portal.

Byju’s

byjus logoByju’s is a well-managed education startup that has put all its focus on making learning fun for students. It has become a reputed education app in India on the back of its unique way of teaching. Byjus has pretty engaging video lessons on various topics that help in adaptive learning. The app contains all the mock tests and sample papers for class 7-12 for all the board exams which helps the students prepare for competitive exams like IIT-JEE, CAT, and NEET.

Skillshare

skillshare logoSkillshare is a remarkable online learning community of America that was created for people who want to learn their trade through educational videos. The courses are not accredited and can be acquired through subscription. All the courses that are provided through Skillshare focus mainly on interaction instead of lecturing. They want their students to learn by completing a particular project. Their courses are on subjects such as design, entrepreneurship, creative arts, technology, and lifestyle.

Upgrad

upgrad logoUpgrad is an Indian education Startup that was created in 2015 by Ronnie Screwvala, Mayank Kumar, Phalgun Kompalli, and Ravijot Chugh. It has established itself as a successful e-learning education platform over the course of the last few years. Upgrad was developed with a motive of helping students in their professional journey via advanced online programs from world-class professors along with industry experts.

Udacity

udacity logoUdacity’s name was originated from the company’s desire to be “audacious for you, the student”. When it was created it focused mainly on offering university-style courses but at the moment it focuses especially on vocational courses for professionals.

Khan Academy

Khan AcademyCreated by Salman Khan and his team, Khan Academy has set an industry-standard in the field of education by creating a self-paced, free source of online education. What Khan Academy does is that it creates an effortless path for students from all spheres to choose any subject of their liking and begin to explore the science behind it.

Khan academy is extremely popular among the youth because of its avatars and its ability to earn badges but apart from that, it is also a great option for adults. Adults can hone their technical skills and learn about subjects such as entrepreneurship through this platform.

W3 Schools

w3schoolsW3 Schools is a great free e-learning website that is popular for teaching students about various aspects of web designing and web development. Students are offered a variety of choices to learn. The most popular tutorials are HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, SQL, jQuery, Java, Python, C++, C#, React, Node, etc.

Challenges in e-learning Mobile App development

Developing study material and documents to access

Creating quality study content proves to be a big challenge for app developers. The success of an e-learning mobile app depends very much on the study material they are providing. Apart from the online live classes, students and learners need notes and documents to revise the stuff they studied in the class. Creating this study material is paramount if you want your learners to stay on the app and continue with what you are providing.

Video content development

Creating an online video takes a lot of work behind the scenes. Similar is the case with e-learning videos. Shooting a video with an educator teaching a particular subject is not the final or first step, there are other aspects associated with it such as editing the video to make it worth-watching without any unnecessary content, mixing other important elements such as sound, proper light effects, camera angle, and framework.

Tutor training programs development

The tutors who are chosen to teach the learners on the e-learning platform need to be taught the insights that are necessary for taking a class online. The programs for tutors need to have stuff on various topics from which the tutor can learn and broaden his overall knowledge on a specific subject. Addition of a variety of courses such as video courses, written format courses, online tutoring programs that facilitate classes through video conferencing, whiteboards, text chat messages, etc.

Server load balance for hassle-free streaming

Load balancing is the methodical and efficient distribution of network for application traffic across multiple servers in a server farm. There need to a load balancer between the client devices and backend servers which will receive and then distribute incoming requests to any available server capable of fulfilling them. This process is very important as the live video classes need to shot before any interference otherwise the whole flow of studies will be interrupted.

General Features in an e-learning mobile app

Student Panel Features

user panel e learning app login (1)

  • Social Signup/Login
  • Browse through various subscription plans
  • Payment for courses and e-learning plan
  • Pick and view available subjects
  • Post questions and doubts
  • Search and filter through online tutors
  • Select teachers/tutors
  • Subscribe for test series and quizzes
  • Consult with tutor via live chat, video call or through a forum
  • Rate and review courses and tutors

Teacher Panel Features

  • Registration
  • Create and Manage detailed profile
  • Manage account settings
  • Push Notifications for student interaction
  • Schedule live classes
  • View ratings and reviews
  • Sort and answer queries posted by students
  • Interact with students via text, audio or video

Parents/Guardian Panel

parents panel in e learning app

  • Registration by social or email
  • Track student performance
  • Track course progress
  • Consult with teachers via chat
  • Check assignments and test results
  • Manage subscription for courses
  • Push notifications by Teachers and Admins
  • Track attendance of students
  • View student leaderboard

Admin Panel Features

  • Manage teachers and students
  • Manage subjects and courses
  • Student information system management
  • Manage subscription plan prices
  • Manage community content
  • View reports for earnings and user engagement

Advanced features to include in e-learning mobile app

Sign up/Log in

This is the first step that you have to complete before accessing the app. If you are a new user then you need to sign up and in case you already have an account then the app will ask you to log in. After you entered in, you will have to create a profile of yours.

AI (Voice Command)

The availability of Voice command eases the process of using the e-learning app for visually impaired students. AI can help a student select a course of the desired subject through voice commands installed in the system.

Push notifications

Push notifications allow the app to send notifications and alerts to the students regarding a new video, an upcoming class, availability of new material, and a lot of other purposes.

Real-time analytics

Real-time analytics act as measuring stick for app performance and user behavior with the app. Through this feature, one can easily track mobile learning assignments, learner progress, course completion, assessment score, and social learning development.

Role-based dashboard

These dashboards help in measuring the overall performance of the app. This overview of the functioning of the app aids in ironing out any deficiency in the app and work on improving the efficiency and productivity of the app.

Multiple languages support

Integrating an e-learning app with multiple languages can prove to pretty significant in the success of the app as the option of multiple languages allows users from all over the world to be part of the app.

CRM Integration

Customer relationship management is a vital part of the e-learning mobile app as this feature allows the app to create great rapport with its customers which are students and learners.

CMS Integration

CMS stands for a content management system and as we can guess by its name, its job is to manage the content of the app. CMS plays a key role in the app as it keeps constant tabs on the content of the platform.

Discussion board

This functionality in the app helps in increasing the interaction among the app users. With the help of discussion forums, the app users can easily create a new topic or add a comment under the already existing topic.

Leaderboard

Increasing the competition among the students or learners is a great way of motivating them and leaderboards are integrated in the app to do just that.

Quizzes and assessments

Creating and presenting these quizzes for students on a daily basis proves to be quite exciting and also allows the students to keep track of their performance. These online tests can be a practice test on a particular topic or can be presented to the students as a part of their curriculum.

Document management

This feature plays a key role in the functioning of the app as it manages all the necessary documents that have been delivered to students or are to be delivered in the future as a part of their learning course.

Lesson download

Students on some occasions might not be able an online class but missing a class can prove to fatal in understanding a topic. To help the students in this conundrum, the e-learning apps provide an option of lesson download through which a person can download a live online class to watch it later whenever he has free time.

Chat room+Video steaming

This option allows the students to ask their teacher a doubt regarding a particular topic through a text in the chat room even in the middle of the class. The teacher can stop proceeding further to pay attention to the doubt of the student and only moves on after giving the student the solution for his problem.

Video lesson streaming

E-learning apps are primarily in attention as they provide free video lessons on topics of interest for the learners. Through the e-learning apps, the learners can stream a live video lesson to gain proper knowledge on the topic they are looking to master.

Tech stack needed for e-learning mobile app

  • Mobile SDK – Android and ios
  • SMS, Voice, and phone verification – Nexmo, Twilio
  • Push Notifications – Twilio, Push.io
  • Payments – Braintree & PayPal, E-wallets, Stripes
  • Datastax – for data management
  • Debian – The universal operating system
  • GWT – for powerful programming
  • Database – MongoDB, Cassandra, HBase, Mail Chimp Integration
  • Cloud Environment – AWS
  • Mandrill – for everything related to the emails
  • Streaming Media System – Helix Universal Server, Nimble Streamer, Wowza streaming engine
  • Real-time analytics – Spark, Hadoop, Apache Flink, Cisco, IBM, BigData

Team structure for e-learning mobile app development

  • Project Manager
  • Android/ios Developers
  • Back-end developers
  • Front-end developers
  • UX/UI Designers
  • QA Testers
  • Delivery Manager

MVP Product vs Full Fledge e-Learning App Development

When tech companies develop products, they tend to use an approach in order to identify and launch their MVP which stands for Minimum Viable Product. Through this, the company can minimize the time to the market. MVP needs to have a student-centered approach which means that the activities are working smoothly and students are immersed in an experimental way of interacting with the content, teacher, faculty, and one another.

On the other hand, a full-fledged app is the one that has been completed and is ready to be launched in the market. All the basics and advanced features have been added to the app and the app is all set to reach the users in the market.

Cost of developing an e-learning mobile app

Cost of developing an e-learning mobile app depends on three factors:

1. The complexity of the app

The cost of developing an app like e-learning will go high and low depending on whether it is loaded with basic features or with advanced features.

2. Number of platforms

An e-learning app developed on a single iOS or Android platform will cost less in comparison to the one loaded with two or multiple platforms.

3. App development region

The development cost per hour for an app differs from region to region, for example in the USA, the development cost per hour is $150-$250, in eastern Europe this cost is in the range of $80-$180 while in India this cost ranges between $25-$50.

Conclusion

COVID-19 has really changed the way the world used to operate. New norms issued by governments across the globe emphasize strictly on social distancing which makes the e-learning a hot prospect for current and future times .E-learning has already become popular but during this pandemic, it has become the focal point of education. If you were looking to create a website or app that focuses on e-learning then these times are the best opportunity to kick start their journey. So, hire an experienced and reputed mobile app development company that could help you build an awesome app.

Avatar photo
Author

CTO at Emizentech and a member of the Forbes technology council, Amit Samsukha, is acknowledged by the Indian tech world as an innovator and community builder. He has a well-established vocation with 12+ years of progressive experience in the technology industry. He directs all product initiatives, worldwide sales and marketing, and business enablement. He has spearheaded the journey in the e-commerce landscape for various businesses in India and the U.S.