In a current series of articles we have been discussing what goes into developing e-learning solutions. If you want to dig deeper into the topic, please read our previous article as well.
Top E-Learning Mobile Applications
Technology Stacks for an E-Learning App
Features in E-Learning Solutions
E-Learning Application Development Team Structure
How Much Does It Cost to Develop an E-Learning App
Key Factors that Impact the Cost of Creating E-learning Apps
E-learning solutions vary a great deal. They deliver a huge variety of courses, offer a gamut of features, and may require using a range of tech, from smartphones to VR headsets. Before developing an e-learning solution, many questions must first be answered: what type of solution you want, what specialists you will need to develop it, and so on.
In this article, we’ll offer some idea of how much it will cost to develop an e-learning solution and what factors decide the price. We will also explain the types of e-learning solutions out there, so you’ll have a better idea of how complex or simple they can be and what may suit your purpose best.
E-learning apps can be categorized in two ways: by the learning approach and by target audience.
As to the learning approach, there are two groups of e-learning solutions:
This type of learning requires the tutor and the student to be present at the same time, so they can communicate and conduct a lesson together. A “virtual classroom” is a good example.
These apps allow students to use course materials whenever they find it comfortable to do so. There is no need for a tutor to conduct a lesson and gather students at a particular time. Online education platforms like Coursera or Udemy are good examples.
If we are speaking about the end-user of the app, there are differences too:
Companies utilize e-learning platforms for corporate education and skills development, monitoring progress along the way. Many businesses want to train employees on specific aspects of their jobs instead of hiring new, already qualified employees. This is better for building corporate culture, cheaper in terms of hiring costs, and profitable for both the company and the employee.
For instance, companies such as Workfusion and PayPal experience big benefits from implementing e-learning to help their employees improve their skills.
COVID-19 has changed how we do shopping, work, and study. When the pandemic struck, many educational institutions were not ready to transfer courses online to keep students and teachers safe. Now all schools and universities have been forced to go online for at least part of their program of studies, which requires having certain infrastructure in place. For example, Cambridge University has made the decision to go online until summer 2021, which would not be possible without a proper platform.
This group consists mostly of asynchronous e-learning platforms such as Coursera. This group includes B2C platforms for personal use, providing courses on a huge number of topics, from higher mathematics, to gender studies, marketing analysis and the history of ancient Roman architecture. Any individuals who want to broaden their horizons can enroll in such courses.
Let’s review some of the best solutions on the market to see what sets them apart from the competition
Coursera is one of the most popular e-learning services out there. Providing users all over the world with educational content, Coursera managed to increase its revenue by 59% to $293.5 million in 2020.
The platform hosts a wide selection of courses that users can browse through and take for free. The subjects include physics, engineering, liberal arts, biology, math, computer science, business, and more.
Coursera provides a web app along with a mobile version to accommodate the widest learning base possible.
Users of edX can take courses offered by such acclaimed universities as Oxford, Harvard, Columbia, and MIT. The course selection includes business studies, computer science, engineering, psychology, linguistics, statistics, and many others.
The service even provides certificates of completion for courses, which can be used as proof of qualification.
Every day, edX provides almost 500,000 users with the educational content of high quality.
Duolingo is a great example of a gamified e-learning application. While specializing in teaching languages, the app does a good job of implementing gamification techniques such as levels, goals, statistics, and awards to motivate users and keep them returning for the next lesson.
All of those features helped Duolingo secure second place in the education category on the App Store and appear in the “Editors’ choice” section on Google Play.
Now that we know the most popular e-learning applications out there, let’s take a look at the technology they are built on.
This will help you learn about the best technological solutions for the kind of e-learning app you want to develop.
The app’s developers worked with Python and Go, as it is capable of handling millions of registered users and thousands of courses. Then the team switched to Scala.
The frontend is all JavaScript with ReactJS and Bootstrap, because of their flexibility and good performance.
The backend side of things is covered by PHP, since it is well suited for web development.
The frontend is developed with standard JavaScript.
The backend part of this web application is developed with Python, with the frontend built on a combination of backbone.js and jQuery.
In addition, Duolingo provides mobile apps for iOS and Android, which are developed with Swift and Kotlin, respectively.
We can see a pattern here. Many companies choose to create their e-learning application with PHP or Python for good performance and build the frontend of their solutions with JavaScript, since it offers great versatility.
| Frontend | Backend | Mobile |
| JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, Backbone.js, jQuery, React.JS | PHP, Python, Scala | Swift, Kotlin, |
The HQSoftware team strives to stay on top of the current best technologies, to provide clients with the best software solutions possible.
Our developers have worked on an e-learning system that offers the ability to easily create online courses and track student performance.
To make sure the app could support a large number of active users, we relied on PHP for the backend. The intuitive and user-friendly interface is covered by none other than JavaScript.
Now that we’ve explained what types of e-learning solutions are possible, let’s discuss their typical features.
If you apply some imagination, you can probably think of tons of features, all of which might be handy in various situations. But let’s organize the most common ones into groups and take a closer look.
First, let’s divide all features into groups by end-user.
Students come first, because they are the group that will use most of the platform’s features. The functionality and UX of an e-learning solution are built largely to cater to the needs of students, making the learning process efficient and the features convenient.
Must-have features for students are:
This group of users is also an important part of the e-learning audience, because every solution is built to provide communication between students and tutors in some way. Be it synchronous or asynchronous learning, a tutor is always involved at least as an author of educational content.
Important features for tutors are:
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When e-learning is applied by educational facilities such as schools, sometimes there is a need to develop features for another type of user: students’ parents. Younger learners sometimes need extra attention.
Features for parents are:
Features can also be categorized by their importance and popularity in e-learning platforms. We won’t discuss login, profile management, and other default features here; we’re speaking now about educational components only. The categories include:
These are features no e-learning app can operate without, no matter the type and audience. During e-learning application development, you will probably spend 80% of your team’s time on these core features; the same is true of your budget.
If the audience for the app is not quite a general learner or has specific requirements, there are advanced features that can be employed. Even if your budget is small, it is better to try to include at least one most important advanced feature in your e-learning solution.
Yes, you can live without them, but why not try to include some? Most additional features really come in handy and can enhance the app experience for all users:
Deciding which features you need for your e-learning solution is an important step to actually starting the e-learning platform development process. The features will determine what team composition will be most effective for developing the project.
In this section, we will discuss what specialists you need to run your e-learning application development, their typical hourly rates, and how long you can expect it will take to develop particular features, with a rough estimate.
A standard e-learning development team consists of:
For extra help, or if you want to develop a specific feature, you will need:
Now let’s explore their rates. We will review how much it costs to hire developers from Eastern Europe, because this location is famous for the quality of development services along with modest hourly rates (in US dollars), according to Toptal and Payscale:
| Developers | $25-45/h | System architects | $40-60/h |
| Designers | $20-40/h | 3D modeler | $25-45/h |
| Quality Assurance | $22-42/h | Team Leader | $40-60/h |
| DevOps | $40-60/h | Business Analyst | $22-42/h |
Now that we know developer rates, let’s discuss how much time they usually spend on typical features, and what these will cost.
Before we start reviewing this part, here are a few things to note. The features that will be included in the solution and the time required to build them are not the only parameters that affect e-learning development costs. Here are some other factors:
That noted, let’s get down to the bottom line. Here is a rough estimate of how much time the team will spend on some features:
Roughly speaking, all these features will cost you around $22,000.
Now that you have an overall picture of how the e-learning application development process goes, let’s take a closer look at what project options you usually have.
These are the options that software development companies will usually offer you.
This means that you have nothing but the idea, and all the software is yet to be developed.
This is an option for those who already have an e-learning platform and want to add a fresh touch to it — customize or build new features, or just continue developing the solution after the previous team has done their part.
This option is great for adding some extra user experience to the app, which is what makes immersive learning way more effective than the traditional way. AR/VR also allows for creating some gamification features that boost students’ attention.
This is a complete e-learning solution that will cover all needs of both students and tutors. It has an educational platform, a mobile companion app, and features for boosting the productiveness of students and their attention to the topic.
This table shows a rough estimate of time and money you will spend on every project type. The average hourly rate here is $35, working hours in month – 168.
| Custom development | Customization | App + AR/VR | Platform + App + AR/VR | |
| Duration | 4 months | 3 months | 2 months | 5 months |
| Total time: | 1966 h | 1172 h | 1319 h | 3969 h |
| Total cost: | $68796 | $41013 | $46158 | $138915 |
Note that we don’t take into account the cost of online course development and in particular educational content, because it varies too much to be valued even approximately. So, we will have a question for a separate article – how much does it cost to develop an online course?
Also, in picking one of the typical projects, note that you need to plan what features you may want to develop in the near future so that you can adapt educational content accordingly. For example, you may not want to integrate video education right now, but it’s good to keep it in mind for future advancements.
As you may have noticed, every option above requires a unique approach. They differ in several ways: the team composition required to develop an e-learning solution, time spent, features, and so on.
Let’s now analyze what factors affect the cost of e-learning development, and how.
Developer rates differ from region to region. For example, middle-level developers from the USA and India will charge a different amount per hour of work. According to the HackerRank report, developers from the USA charge three times more than their Indian colleagues on average.
So, how much does it cost to hire someone to build an e-learning website or app?
We recommend you turn to developers from Europe, for example, Estonia. This region is home to leading IT companies that also boast modest rates and uncompromised code quality. For our estimation, we took an average hourly developer rate of $35, which is pretty typical for the aforementioned countries, as a basis for calculating e-learning development costs per hour.
Team composition matters as well. The more complex your project, the more specialists you want involved. For example, developing a mobile e-learning app with AR features requires hiring extra specialists such as designers, AR and mobile developers, which results in an increase in e-learning development costs per hour.
Now let’s talk about the starting point of your e-learning solution — the educational content. What does that content look like when you start the development process? This will affect the cost to develop an e-learning platform.
A project may start with just an outline, or a simple PowerPoint presentation, which isn’t sufficient for an e-learning solution.
Sometimes, businesses underestimate the amount of work they will need to put into preparing educational materials, for example converting them into proper data formats, so that they can be used in e-learning solutions. Even if a business possesses a well-recorded video of a qualified subject-matter expert presenting well-prepared professional materials, sometimes a solution requires an additional montage or content to build a series of quizzes and tests. With this additional work, the cost to develop an online course or an app rises.
So, allocate part of your budget to designing educational content that will fit into the selected format of your future e-learning solution, and of course, consult with a subject-matter expert.
As discussed above, content comes in various formats, and developers need to adapt it first, which means an increase in custom e-learning development costs.
Another facet of this issue is the diversity of content elements. One e-learning solution can provide educational materials in a variety of content types: text, images, video, voice recordings, AR visuals, and so on. The developers will need to determine what types of content will be used, whether they will be custom-made or not, and so on.
So, an e-learning solution with custom-made content that includes videos, animations, and other visuals will cost more than a simple text-based course. Here, businesses need to find their sweet spot, where the cost of e-learning content and its attractiveness to users are optimized.
Modern e-learning solutions are all about interactivity. Traditional cramming of text doesn’t sit well with students nowadays, and e-learning solutions incorporate more interactive ways of learning. These approaches are much more engaging for students, but they will increase the cost of developing an e-learning platform.
Modern ways to keep students motivated and engaged in the process of learning include:
The cost of e-learning development that includes modern features will definitely be higher than offering a traditional course. But you will profit from higher engagement. Students will be much more motivated to complete courses and engage in learning activities.
Here, another question arise: businesses need to pay attention to the instructional complexity of their e-learning solutions. Complicated solutions that require custom e-learning development cost more, are more daunting to develop, and may result in bored students who can’t figure out how to use all the features.
Employing a good instructional designer will help to solve this issue, but it may increase initial e-learning development costs. The designer will help you understand all types of modern learning approaches and pick the ones that will best support your instructional goals, while staying within budget.
Often there is more than one way to achieve a particular learning objective, so experienced developers and instructional designers will help you pick the most relevant educational techniques from an abundance of scenarios, complex simulations, and so on. This way, students will get an efficient solution for learning, and businesses will save some money.
There are several ways you can go about monetizing your e-learning application.
Let’s review them one by one.
Basically, users pay a monthly fee to use the software. You can start off by offering a limited set of features for free, with an option to switch to a premium plan and unlock all functionality.
Another great option is a free trial — all of the features are closed, but users can be given a short period of time to try the app out. If they end up liking it, they can renew the subscription and start paying.
With implemented in-app purchases, users have access to the software from the start, but they have to purchase courses in order to take them. To attract more customers, you can make a “starter pack” of sorts with a couple of courses available for free. Or just offer discounts for various activities — for instance, users can access some courses at a lower price for getting a friend to join the app.
You can also offer ad placement in your e-learning application. This way, the users can access all of the features for free, but they have to watch advertisements.
Now, having all this information at hand you can run the numbers and have an approximate price of the solution you want to build. Usually, it depends on the features you want to include, team composition, developer rates, and whether or not you will include expensive extra features like VR.
Educational content creation is also a costly process that needs to be taken into account. Good educational content and an e-learning solution developed by professionals could do wonders, be it for corporate education or a solution for educational institutions.
To learn more about online education, read our previous article onhow to build e-learning apps.
Technology Researcher
Experienced author with HQSoftware. Keen on writing about education, healthcare, and technology progress in general.
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