Online learning platforms are proliferating at a great pace, and they are also getting diversified. Now that thanks to digital tech, learning no longer requires a substantial tuition fee (except, of course, for college grade courses), humanity is more than ever willing to recognize that knowledge is power: the power that fuels economies and businesses and societies. eLearning has changed the usual ways of knowledge transfer. Some say it’s due to the recent pandemic, but the reality is, even without it, we would still see the same trends as we do now.
But is there a way to create a guide to online learning app development for everyone? Where “everyone” means both companies and high schools, startups wanting to capitalize on the trend and professionals willing to share their skills and know-hows? Digital education is a very diverse area by now, and has been ever since it progressed past the “text + multiple choice quiz” format.
We at Lionwood.software have accumulated considerable experience with EdTech, what with it being one of our core domains, and a large proportion of our specialists having a background in education – so we can say that there are some features and best practices that are universal across the entire eLearning landscape. In this article, we discuss what it takes to build an eLearning platform based on our experience and understanding of the differences between the various types of such solutions.
What is an online learning platform, actually?
So what is an online learning platform? As of now, the very notion has diversified so much that the term applies to vastly different software types, and chances are, you are here to learn about one particular variety and will be surprised as to how diverse eLearning platforms can be.
There’s one common factor, though, that applies to all: an e-Learning platform is a digital environment created to facilitate knowledge transfer. This implies several things:
- access to education content
- interactive tools (grading, assessments, forums, etc.)
- in-built instructional methods that influence the way everything is done on the platform
What makes the various platforms differ is essentially their purpose and the purpose-driven structure. Depending on these factors, online learning platforms can vary significantly in the overall approach, offering anything from structured courses with formal assessments to flexible, self-paced, “choose-your-own-experience” types.
The big differentiator is what kind of interaction the target audience wants:
(a) a comprehensive curriculum that’s more or less equated to a college course, with guided instruction and a standard certificate?
(b) hands-on, practical learning that focuses on getting things done?
These factors influence the level of personalization that’s required (either achieved through a blend of in-person learning with digital methods or with AI), the need for tutor involvement in the course, and more.
The competitive landscape and trends in the eLearning market
Meanwhile, the gears are turning. The global eLearning market was already at $399.3 billion in 2022, and is expected to grow at a 14% CAGR until 2032. What’s really important, though, is that after the pandemic, the market has started to differentiate at an even greater pace. While leading platforms like Coursera, Udemy, and Khan Academy are the headliners in the process, there has emerged an entire generation of niche platforms taking after the likes of Duolingo, Pluralsight, and MasterClass, only with even more niche applications.
And then, AI came. It’s a very welcome advent, too, since artificial intelligence allows to cater to the personalization needs, eliminating the now-traditional problem of having human tutors around or adjusting the curricula for eLearning courses every now and then. AI in education is projected to reach $20 billion by 2027, not just in automated tutoring but also in content generation.
As a related trend, Learning Management Systems are evolving into Learning Experience Platforms (i.e. LMS becomes LXS), with more focus on self-directed learning – again, frequently powered by AI capacities.
The final factor is the corporate eLearning market. As of now, 94% of businesses report that online learning improves employee retention, giving the corporate officials enough space to tinker with things like gamification, immersive technologies, and more.
Types of e-Learning platforms
As mentioned there are different types of educational tools, and it’s important to define which type yours will be. Of course, none of them are exclusive, meaning one and the same eLearning platform can combine features of different types, but the trick is, for each, there is by now an established set of best practices no one can ignore.
LMS (Learning Management Platform)
For many people, an LMS is the “default” type – a software platform used by educational institutions, companies, and other organizations to create, manage, and track online learning programs. The main purpose of this type is simply to structure the learning environment, and provide administrators and tutors with tools to organize the courses and evaluate progress.
This is the sheer basis for everything else, and LMS systems are widely used in both academic and corporate training: Moodle, Blackboard, and Canvas for the former, Litmos, TalentLMS, and Docebo for the latter. As the dominant solution type, LMS are a huge market, valued at $18.26 billion in 2023 and poised to reach $37.9 billion by 2026.
As of today, the largest driver behind classic LMS is the shift toward remote and hybrid learning. About 83% of organizations use some form of LMS now, and for good reasons: 58% of employees prefer self-paced training over having to show up for an instructor-led session, while personalization increases efficiency.
MOOCs
MOOCs stand for Massive Open Online Courses, which is exactly what it sounds like: big audiences, free or low-cost courses, available as far as manageable (preferably worldwide). The prominent examples include Coursera, edX, FutureLearn, and Udacity. What catches the eye about them is the sheer abundance of courses. The global MOOC enrollments, meanwhile, have surpassed 220 million learners in 2024, with Coursera alone accounting for over 130 million registered users.
“Nanodegree” is a key word here: since most careers today require updating your skills every now and then, 70% of learners enroll in MOOCs exactly to gain new granular skills that would be relevant to their career. On the other hand, that factor is also a huge challenge, since MOOCs have low completion rates (around 10% on average), which means the platform owners need to constantly reinforce engagement with interactive elements, community building, and mentorship programs. Where AI will take all of this remains largely unclear so far.
Course Marketplaces
These are for people who have unique skills and want to share them without setting up their own platform – meaning that there’s a strain of businesses setting those platforms for them. Individual instructors, industry professionals, and institutions – all of those can be found collaborating with course marketplaces. What distinguishes this type from MOOSs is a better focus on individual learning and teaching style.
Among the leaders here are Udemy, Skillshare, and Teachable. Udemy, one of the largest course marketplaces, reported over 64 million learners and 210,000 courses in 2024. Skillshare focuses on creative subjects like design and photography, while Teachable allows entrepreneurs to monetize their expertise by building custom online schools.
What really makes these platforms stand out is their ability to accommodate self-paced learning and affordability at the same time. The common challenge is assessment and course quality control, since the content is user-generated by design.
LXS
The Learning Experience Platforms are essentially the revamped version of LMS, only that instead of the linear “management” part they provide “experience”, meaning they focus more on personalization and self-directed learning. In other words, where the classic LMS will force the sequence of learning modules on the user, these will use AI-driven recommendations, flexible courses, and social learning features to drive more engagement. Popular LXP platforms include Degreed, EdCast, and 360Learning, which allow employees to access learning materials based on their career goals and interests. The LXP market is rapidly growing, projected to reach $22.4 billion by 2027, driven by the increasing demand for customized, corporate learning experiences.
It actually works: corporate learners engage 50% more with LXPs than with LMS, thanks to the approach that lets them choose what’s really important to their career. With additional gamification, microlearning approaches, and AI, it’s very likely that LXS will become the next evolutionary phase for the good old LMS, not just in corporate learning but elsewhere, as well.
Corporate training
Corporate training has its own niche, at least because skills acquired for one company do not necessarily equate those needed for another. However, employee onboarding and compliance training are too important not to warrant an eLearning course, so the name of the game here is to make that learning as non-disruptive as possible.
The corporate eLearning market was valued at $50 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow to $117 billion by 2030, fueled by remote work trends and the rise of AI-driven training solutions. Studies show that 94% of employees say they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development, highlighting the importance of corporate training. This is also one of the areas that are most likely to benefit from microlearning approaches in the short-term perspective.
Assisted Learning / Social Learning
This is where the overall model tries to reconcile digital learning with the benefits of in-person interactions. In essence, it’s where users can actually engage with instructors and fellow learners. An easy example would be Khan Academy’s forum functionality, as well as platforms like Brainly and Microsoft Teams for Education.
Common methods include chat forums, live Q&A, and group projects – making 80% of learners retain information better.
K-12 and higher education platforms
The most formal type of e-Learning platforms, those aimed for K-12 and colleges/universities use the findings generated by other types while adjusting them to the realities of academic education. In practice, this means things like virtual classrooms, curriculum management functionalities, and assessment tools that give teachers enough time to tailor their lessons.
What is really important here is that these typically serve as a supplement to the traditional methods (even if the students learn more online than they do in the classroom).
Meanwhile, hybrid learning models, where students alternate between in-person and online learning, are becoming the norm. Platforms integrating AI-driven tutoring and adaptive learning paths are improving student engagement and outcomes.
Discover the NIT case, where we built a school education platform, now catering to over 120,000 of Ukrainian students at 200+ schools, from scratch.
Niche platforms
Finally, there is the category that does not fit any of the above: the truly niche platforms. While MOOCs can accommodate a lot of industries and knowledge fields, sometimes the idiosyncrasies of a particular field can make it rather hard to have an eLearning course on a generic platform that would work.
Niche platforms are by definition confined to a specific domain, like music, where the teaching methods differ much from what the usual eLearning platform can enable. Examples include Pluralsight (tech skills), DataCamp (data science), and MasterClass (creative skills).
Must-have features to create an eLearning platform
User-Friendly Interface (UI/UX Design)
When people are focused on learning a skill, the last thing they want is to have to learn how to use a platform. This means, when an eLearning tool is cluttered or difficult to navigate, users will abandon it. For all the ease of use, even Duolingo struggles to keep users engaged, and they absolutely excel at UX – so what is there to say about the other platforms? UX matters a lot.
Implementation:
- Responsive Design: People feel like learning on the spot, so it makes sense to ensure the layout is adaptable to mobile devices.
- Easy Navigation: All of us like to NOT feel lost, so clear and consistent menus, search bars, and breadcrumbs are a must, too.
- User Feedback Loops: It’s never possible to get everything straight from the first moment (unless you’re replicating an already existing solutions), so use user testing to gather insights and A/B testing for UI improvements based on real-time usage patterns.
Course Creation & Management Tools
No matter how cool the platform itself is from the developer’s point of view, the driving force is still the human who creates (or makes AI create) the courses. Anyone with a background with teaching would likely provide you with an overwhelmingly large list of functionalities they want; it’s important to distinguish what’s really needed to make the course creators shine.
Implementation:
- Templates for course structure: Pre-made templates can save a lot of time, but they need to be adjusted for the needs of the course makers all the time.
- Course calendar and scheduling: Integrate a scheduling tool for live sessions, deadlines, and content release to help learners stay on track.
Live Classes & Video Conferencing
As awesome as digital methods can be, live interaction is still the primary factor that boosts engagement, and people still tend to require real-time feedback and collaboration. And the more niche the subject matter is, the more it is true. Plus, live classes and video conferencing is good for community building.
Implementation:
- Integration with video tools: Integrate popular tools like Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams directly into the platform or build native solutions.
- Interactive tools: Include whiteboards, breakout rooms, live polls, and chat features to create an online learning platform with more interactive experience during live sessions.
Interactive Assessments & Quizzes
We all need to check our progress from time to time – it’s one of the principles of motivation. The trick here is to make assessments take up less effort than learning itself, and try to incorporate immediate feedback where possible.
Implementation:
- Variety of question types: Don’t limit the course makers to one format like multiple choice; enable things like drag and drop, matching, or graphs for answers.
- Adaptive quizzes: While this was previously hard to do, now AI can help adjust quizzes based on every user’s strong and weak sides.
- Automated grading, instant feedback: The motivation to learn something is typically the strongest immediately after assessment, which is why some prominent platforms suggest feedback and additional material automatically right after the person has completed a quiz.
Personalized Learning Paths & AI Recommendations
Of course, full personalization is the state-of-art pinnacle of modern eLearning that’s not always affordable (or reasonable for that matter) – but some degree of personalization is now fully expected. The easiest way to achieve this is to provide a mechanism that would suggest materials based on past interactions: course suggestions, review modules, quizzes, and so on.
Implementation:
- Behavioral tracking: Based on past performance and interests, machine learning algorithms can be made to suggest relevant learning materials.
- Customizable paths: If the subject is broad enough, it often pays off to allow users to select their own learning pathway to assemble their skillset. The main thing here is to have a specialist who’ll define what materials would be mandatory, and what materials would be up to the student to choose.
Gamification & Engagement Tools
Gamification exploits the human lust for winning to help learn the material, and the key is the reward that comes with the feeling of having won. It is a nice way to motivate users to complete courses in areas where they wouldn’t otherwise.
Implementation:
- Points, badges, leaderboards: They actually work well enough to make a person dedicate an hour of their evening to finish several lessons.
- Progress bars: For many people, it is important to feel in control of their own learning process, and a progress bar is a relatively easy way to provide that, plus, it is a constant non-intrusive reminder.
- Interactive challenges: For some platforms, things like weekly challenges work well, e.g. completing a number of modules or spending some time on the platform to earn a badge.
Multi-Language & Accessibility Support
Depending on who your platform is aiming to cater to, global (at least, multi-language) support might be a must. Regardless, accessibility is key, so it should be ingrained into the UX at the very start (e.g. possibility to change font to a larger one, or modify contrast).
Implementation:
- Language options: While automatic translation tools are quite advanced these days, it is still better to have course creators or translators do the job. Anyway, the possibility to add multi-language support is very important and is best implemented early on.
- Screen reader compatibility: Ensure that all content is screen reader-friendly and supports accessibility standards (e.g., WCAG).
- Subtitle & сaptioning Tools: Provide auto-captioning for videos to make content more accessible to non-native speakers and hearing-impaired learners.
Secure Payment & Subscription Management
If your model involves paid courses or paid subscription models for organization, the convenience of payment (and, importantly, security) is a vital factor for credibility. In this way, it’s like eCommerce on steroids: while no one likes to order a trinket from a site that offers poorly managed payments, stakes are higher when it comes to a school-wide, company-wide, or any other subscription.
Implementation:
- Integrating payment gateways: Use secure, trusted payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal, or Square.
- Subscription plans: It is ideally up to a seasoned marketer to define the subscription policy, but it’s also a good idea to think it through even before implementing the platform.
- Refund & cancellation policy: While many still think of these in negativistic terms, cancellation policies mostly act as another reassurance to the user, and are important to secure the platform’s status.
Data Analytics & Reporting
Today, most of eLearning hinges on real-time data, since it allows to compensate for the lack of immediate, instinctual feedback you as a teacher get in a classroom – while also providing insights for business decisions. Learner performance, engagement, completion rates and more – these are vital.
Implementation:
- Custom reports: Enable course instructors and admins to generate customized reports on learner progress, engagement, and activity.
- Behavioral analytics: Track learner behavior, drop-off rates, and interaction patterns to identify potential areas of improvement.
- Predictive analytics: This is more of a business-oriented feature, allowing to make informed decisions about where to go next with the platform.
Certification & Credentialing
System Granted, the importance of certifications varies between target audiences, but in any situation, they serve as a tangible token of achievement, and a testament to the credibility of the platform, so they should exist in at least some form. Plus, intermediary certificates along the course are an element of gamification and can further motivate learners.
Implementation:
- Digital badges: Offer digital badges and certificates that learners can share on platforms like LinkedIn to showcase their skills.
- Blockchain verification: For high-stakes credentials, implement blockchain technology to ensure authenticity and prevent fraud.
Success factors for an eLearning platform
It’s one thing to build an e-Learning platform (a generic one), and quite another, to build a really popular one. Experts have discussed and researched the success factors of eLearning platforms for well over a decade now, and there are several ones that almost everyone agrees about.
The first is content quality and relevance. There are several ways to achieve that. Platforms like Coursera secure collaborations with well-known universities and institutions (Stanford, etc.) to provide their courses with more trust potential. Another way is the path of immediate relevance, i.e. engaging experts in particular niches to create and sell their own courses (that’s what Udemy does). The main factor here is what distinguishes your courses from similar ones – the more fundamental, the more authority-endorsed, the more niche, the more hands-on and expert-generated.
Secondly, there’s UX. It’s where the old principle “users want to learn something, so they won’t want to learn the platform itself” comes into play. Plus, especially with adult learners, it’s important to ensure they can access the platform at any time anywhere, meaning accessibility is important.
Personalization is becoming more of an expected feature now, especially seeing as how AI has entered the equation. Personalized recommendations are good for retention for two reasons: first of all, they ensure the courses are relevant, secondly, the learning process feels less of a chore to the user.
Finally, there’s community building. Humans are hardwired to view learning as a social activity, so letting users interact with each other and the mentors is a good strategy to boost motivation and retention.
How to build an e-Learning platform: step by step development guide
1. Understand Your Target Audience
This influences just about everything. Does your target audience involve corporate employees, freelancers, university or K-12 students, or someone else? Their age, location, education level, tech proficiency and motivations influence not just their learning patterns, but also their main factors for choosing your online learning platform.
Action items at this point would be to clearly delineate and prioritize the audiences, conduct surveys, research existing competition, and have a good discovery phase with the software development service provider you want to build the platform.
2. Define the Platform’s Features and Functionality
Over time, eLearning platforms tend to become more and more comprehensive, but to achieve the first grasp at the market, you would need to prioritize features and create an MMP, or at least a prototype. This means you would need to define the basic core features and how they would work:
- course management (uploading and modifying content)
- principal multimedia types
- mobile compatibility
- user profiles
- progress tracking and integrations
- gamification
- etc.
3. Design the User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX)
Once you have a vision of the core functionalities and generic understanding of what the user flows would be, it’s time to create an e-learning website prototype with a focus on the UX. What user experience design is created at this stage will likely become the cornerstone of the platform’s identity.
A team of UX designers with experience in eLearning and EdTech is the best option to go with here, since they could create a wireframe or prototype that would embody the already existing best practices in your niche.
4. Choose the Tech Stack
The choice of technologies typically comes at the project discovery phase, and is determined based on the priorities (like a pre-existing digital ecosystem, scalability concerns, etc.) The main areas here are front- and back-end, database management, hosting, and integrations.
5. Develop the Platform
It is common for feedback from pilot groups to arrive when the development team is already engaged in developing the platform, so a good practice is to follow Agile and Scrum methods and go iteratively, sprint by sprint. The more experience your provider has with online learning platform development, the more likely they are to follow these principles.
6. Create High-Quality Content
While content itself is typically developed when the platform is ready, it is a good idea to have at least some drafts at the very early stages to serve as a guideline for content types and for usability testing. For finalized content, it is best to engage subject matter experts or actual tutors, preferably those who were there from the start (i.e. at the discovery stage).
7. Testing & Quality Assurance
With any eLearning software, the best possible approach to testing is to integrate it into the process itself, that is, to test everything simultaneously with the development process. This includes performance testing, user testing (where feedback on beta versions can be collected quite early on), and, of course, bug fixing.
8. Deploy the Platform
Deployment is more than just moving the platform from staging to prod; it also involves working with the (properly chosen) cloud hosting, setting up CI/CD pipelines for automated updates, and implementing security measures like SSL certificates and data encryption.
9. Market Your Platform
Marketing is a concurrent thread of activity; in essence, it is nice to start paving the way as soon as possible, e.g. during the pilot stage. Very commonly, e-learning websites start by word-of-mouth marketing to save reputation and spare the really important positioning moves until there’s enough real-life feedback. Once things are settled, though, SEO, SMM, and emailing can help immensely. For some models, referrals are also an important tool.
Conclusions
So is it possible to create guidelines for online platform development that everyone would use without alterations or nuances? Not really. But the general principles of any eLearning are those that stem from human nature itself: our curiosity, our desire for timely rewards, and our drive for community building. All the different types of eLearning platforms and EdTech solutions that exist today are like projections of a complex 3D figure from different angles, and by staying true to the original mission, you can adjust your concrete vision to match the shifting currents of the market.
Lionwood.software has been focused on EdTech development for years, and our teams have accumulated a large arsenal of best practices, from K-12 platforms where eLearning is coupled with school administration functionalities to corporate learning systems and “free artisan” course marketplaces. If you have an idea to develop an elearning platform that would be unique, the best course of action we all could suggest would be to start with a proper discovery phase and consultation – and discover the full potential of your idea.
