Since mobile apps took over everything in our daily life, the popularity of eLearning apps continued to rise. But after the global Covid pandemic and the resulting lockdown measures around the globe, eLearning apps and distant schooling apps became the primary means of education for millions of kids. In the recent past, we have seen an overwhelming increase in the number of ventures that began to create an educational apps from scratch. The pandemic accelerated the popularity and growth of educational apps to an unprecedented level.
There can be hardly any doubt that educational apps went through the most drastic change in recent years thanks to an array of advanced technologies, tools, innovative learning features, and best development features. Naturally, a lot of new app ideas for eLearning apps keep coming every once in a while. If you want to know how to create an app from scratch to cater to the eLearning audience, here we explain everything you need to know.
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Educational apps: revising the opportunities
If you want to create an educational app from scratch, you should first know about the value propositions offered by an educational app in the first place. While the overwhelming popularity and lightning-fast growth of eLearning apps are too well known to everyone, it is important to understand how educational apps are performing compared to other app categories. Here are some relevant statistics.
- Educational apps in terms of popularity stand at the third position among App Store categories and are only behind Game apps and Business apps.
- In the Google Play Store, educational apps are more popular and stand at second position among app categories.
- According to recent statistics published by a market research firm called Technavio, the market of educational apps will continue to expand and by 2024 will reach a market value of $46.9 billion with a whopping 26% year-on-year growth.
- Another farm Research and Markets estimated that the global e-learning market value is going to be $398 billion by 2026. That is at least 3 times the growth compared to the figure in 2015.
- In a global scenario, the investment in educational technologies has already touched $18.66 billion. Huge investment is queuing up behind education apps involving the most sophisticated, immersive, and intelligent technologies.
Quintessential Benefits of Creating an Educational Apps to Consider
Education as an app category is most popular on all mobile platforms. Apart from dedicated courseware, people tend to use these apps also as handy tools for richer and faster learning. The advantages are obvious for anyone to ignore. Here below we explain the most quintessential advantages that you need to consider when trying to create an educational app from scratch.
Key benefits for learners
Let’s understand the benefits learners get from an educational app. Here we go.
- Easy & Convenience of learning: Edu apps offer you an easy and convenient way of studying without any constraints of classroom attendance and timing.
- Highly affordable education: eLearning apps make education affordable as the whole physical infrastructure is not required.
- Flexible skill development: Many businesses simply take their brain on how to create an app from scratch simply because they need to develop certain skills for employees.
- Engaging and interactive: Modern educational apps are highly social in nature and allow continuous interactions and engagement through social media and chat integration.
- Immersive learning: Today’s educational apps use immersive technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) for making learning a thoroughly lively experience.
- Huge scope of Personalization: eLearning apps allow you to choose your own set of tools, preferred learning modes, and content and learning pace of your own preference.
- Fun-filled learning experience: eLearning apps keeps learners engaged and addicted to learning through gamification, fun-filled content, and visually engaging content.
- Productivity boosting: eLearning apps also come with integrated productivity tracks to monitor the performance of learners and offer help.
Key benefits for businesses
- Unmatched profitability: Many businesses simply want to create an educational app from scratch because of the sheer growth opportunities and profitability of these apps.
- Going ahead of the innovation curve: Many educational institutions simply build apps because of staying ahead of the competitive curve through innovative learning technologies.
- Diversifying business model: If you just produce high-quality lens and camera products, you are likely to be pretty loaded with expert photographers who can help you create a photography learning app and diversify your business.
- Enterprise skill development: Modern businesses also build their own eLearning and training apps to educate staff and develop new skills.
Most popular educational apps across niches
Over the years, we have several leading educational apps that offer us the best examples of how to create an app from scratch for learners of different subjects and niches. These apps exemplify the best learning experience in their respective categories.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy is a leading eLearning app offering free educational content with sophisticated features and tools like a library of educational videos, real-time teaching, virtual blackboard, interactive quizzes, unit tests, and in-app homework. When you want to create an educational app from scratch, this robust app serves as a nice example to follow.
Byju’s Learning App
Byju’s is a widely popular eLearning app particularly among school students and career aspirants preparing for competitive exams. Offering a vast coverage of multiple board curriculums and all government exams is a key value proposition of this app.
Udemy
Udemy is a powerful learning platform offering interactive and audiovisual courses across diverse niches and learning subjects. Udemy instead of following school syllabus and institutional curriculums basically offers skill development-based courses for more than 2,000 different topics. When you want to create an educational app from scratch targeting professional skill development needs, this can be the ideal example to follow.
Duolingo
Duolingo is the world’s leading language learning app that offers a unique interactive method to learn foreign languages. Offering a vast array of language options ranging from French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Polish, Hebrew, Esperanto, Swedish, Welsh, Swahili, Romanian, Ukrainian, Danish, Swedish, German, Greek, Hungarian, Norwegian, Turkish, Irish, and obviously, English.
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Must-have features for most educational apps
Obviously, not all educational apps boast the same features. But at least some features remain constant across all educational apps. Some of the key features you need to create an educational app from scratch include the following.
- User profile
- Menu
- Educational content storage
- Push notifications
- Learner Feedback
- Course scheduling
- Search function
- Video content
- Virtual classroom
- Integrated social sharing option
- Payment processing
How to Create An App From Scratch for Educational App
When you create an educational app from scratch, irrespective of the niche you need to follow the below-mentioned steps. Here are the steps for building an educational app from scratch.
Discovery
Any great app project invariably begins by knowing more about the app concept, its potential, and feasibility, its audience and competitors, etc. This is the discovery stage that any app project must pass through. The discovery step to create an educational app from scratch needs to find the following things.
- Is the app for teachers or learners? In the case of the teaching app, how uniquely it is going to help teachers?
- You need to know what devices and mobile platforms most of your learner audience is attached to.
- What shortcomings do most of your competitor learning apps have?
- What is the most crucial feature that sets apart your learning experience from the competitors?
- What are the average age group, gender, and region of your learners?
- What technology stack you should choose for the said app project?
Prototyping
As soon as you have a clear idea about your audience and competitors, you need to create a design prototype as a step to create an educational app from scratch. The prototype should be realistic enough to give a real look and feel to the app.
At the next step, you need to validate the prototype by releasing it among the target users and notch by notch make it better through meticulous observations. Since students by their very nature are always inquisitive and maneuvering, you need to take steps so that they can stick to the conventional path and fulfill learning objectives. The user interface should be flexible enough to accommodate the preferences of wider demography.
Development
This is the central stage to create an educational app from scratch. Development basically consists of coding inputs and app testing. Obviously, you need to hire an expert development team or a reputed agency for the job. At least, by using DIY tools you cannot build a super-efficient educational app. It needs manual expertise.
But obviously, to create an educational app from scratch, you have a multitude of sophisticated ready-to-use tools and APIs that can bring in the most advanced features in your app project. From tools to incorporate AI to teleconferencing SDKs, you have a lot of options for your app.
There are also a lot of testing tools to streamline the entire development process.
When it comes to testing, you can opt for automated testing by using testing services such as BrowserStack that can be used to test the app on thousands of different and actual mobile devices. Always insist on regression testing to detect and remove bugs early and often.
Deployment
Now you are at the very last stage of the funnel to create an educational app from scratch and all you need is to upload the app to the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.
As a run-up to deployment, carry out stress testing to ensure that the app performs consistently when the user traffic is too heavy. Make sure, you have made it easier to update the app frequently.
How to create more value for your educational app project?
To create an educational app from scratch, you also need to know what are the most effective and best practices these apps follow and how they create more value for the learners. Here are the ways an educational app can create value for learners.
Gamification
Gamification or game-like features make an app more engaging and entertaining. These small but significant features also boost the morale of the learners. Incorporate awards, trophies, bonuses, and different in-app incentives to make learners competitive. Provide learner ranking to keep motivation high. Lastly, to support gamification uses lively animation and animated gestures wherever applicable.
Social network features
The app must create the feel of a learning community by allowing learners to follow each other and sharing their scores and progress. Offer them rewards and bonuses as well for inviting their friends and acquaintances for using the app. When you create an educational app from scratch with social network features, Duolingo serves as a nice example.
Offering lessons in small portions
When it comes to structuring the learning content and materials, the most effective method is to divide the chunk of learning content into small byte-sized materials so that learners can engage with and learn faster. To make things more effective when you create an educational app from scratch, always provide a revision and a quiz at the end of each section.
Provide optimum control to users
Every educational app should constantly strive for delivering a more fine-tuned and seamless learning experience. Offering a better learning experience always starts by providing more controls to the users. If your app provided two options for hearing a spoken word, based upon the learner’s feedback you can create a third option balancing the two opposites.
Give emphasis on enhanced onboarding
Since today’s learners are smart enough to judge your app within the first few minutes, you cannot take the onboarding experience lightly. Offer a lean, functionally optimized, staged onboarding experience that keeps learners in confidence from the very first moment.
Conclusion
Building a great educational app that by every chance wins the heart of millions of learners through its intuitive and engaging features and user experience, is not easy. You need months of meticulous planning, app market evaluation, user research, and study of competitor apps to come up with a strategy that resonated with the demand.
This detailed guide on how to create an educational mobile application from scratch would definitely have helped you understand the methodology of an effective educational mobile application development, at IndianAppDevelopers we tend to solve the technological problems with modernize mobile application development approach for various industries, being a mobile app development company India we have helped numerous startups, SMBs & Small Business & Enterprises.