When it comes to custom digital product development for the education sector, it might seem that only schools and universities should be doing this. In fact, though, any business can launch its own educational project – for customers, employees, and even business partners. The key is to be aware of a few things that can either help your business grow or cause a lot of problems.
We want to share with you what challenges you might face during the custom ed-tech software development process. As an example, let’s take one of the solutions we’ve developed – an online platform to upskill and support specialists in the construction sector.
🗣️ Research and consider the educational needs of your audience
Before beginning any development, learn more about your target audience: what is important to them about learning, what are the specifics of the educational process, what type of content they use, and so on. Any detail can give you a hint as to what your unique selling proposition will be.
For example, our client wanted to create an online platform to provide professional training courses for their employees. So we carefully researched what educational activities the company had implemented before. We found out that they had recently focused on online classes because many employees work remotely. So our team came up with and suggested an online academy concept where they could take courses in a video call or video recording format, track learning progress, take assessments, and more.
🚀 Ensure scalability and compatibility of your ed-tech software
While developing software for the educational sector, consider where you are going to expand in the future and prepare for that in advance. We’re not saying to develop a feature-rich product for the global market right away, but when it comes to choosing the tech stack or architecture features – trust us, it’s better to take care of that now than to redo everything later.
In the case of the online academy for staff training, the client initially wanted to create a simple platform with video courses. However, while exploring the client’s business needs, we also found out that after successfully completing the courses, employees receive e-certificates, and it would be nice to have access to them at any time. So our team developed a PWA where the user can see all the courses completed and certificates received, download them, or share the file with others.
🛡️ Comply with security and privacy standards
Remember that educational software often uses students’ confidential data, from their grades to personal information. Therefore, compliance with security standards is not an additional benefit, but a must.
The construction company we mentioned above employs a large number of people. So we ensured that the system we developed would collect and store the minimum required amount of users’ personal data. We also set up two-factor authentication when logging into the PWA account to secure the data stored there.
🤓 Provide a smooth user experience
Don’t downplay the influence of UI/UX in digital product development for the educational technology sector. After all, if the user finds your product challenging or inconvenient to use, they will not likely come back to you again. On the other hand, a user-friendly, well-designed, and developed product engages users over and over again.
Developing a custom educational online platform we made several UI/UX options and discussed them with the client before settling on the most convenient one. When creating the designs we put ourselves in the users’ shoes, and this helped us create solutions that are easy to miss from the business or the developer’s perspective.
Read more about the case study of developing an online training platform to upskill workers in the construction sector.
The challenges of developing custom ed-tech software platforms are certainly much more, but so are the solutions. That is why, to reduce the number of possible mistakes you can ask the experts to develop it for you. The Corpsoft.io team has already developed more than 50 digital products in different niches, including ed-tech. We know how to create an application fast and efficiently – all we need is to know more about your business.
Tell us your business idea and we’ll be happy to help bring it to life!
