What is Learnapt?

a great place to teach and learn, anything.

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Learnapt

5 min readSep 13, 2016

We have been working hard on Learnapt for over two years now, and I am extremely proud of what our team has achieved. For the first six months, we worked hard and had great fun creating content based on CBSE syllabus for Class 6, 7, and 8; English, History, Civics, Geography, and Science. The best part of the content creation process, for me, was seeing how difficult concepts, for example, Tracing a case from lower to higher courts, got transformed into an amazing comic.

a page from the lesson Judiciary on learnapt.com, teaches the appellate system and traces the case from lower to the higher court in India

The content we were(are) creating convinced us that a robust platform was required to publish lessons that would have comics, videos, quizzes, discussions, articles, texts, any form of content that modern educators will need to teach their students and keep them engaged.

Taking all of these aspects into account, we set out to build a great place to teach and learn, anything, using anything.

The platform was ready in another six months, which we opened up to our in-house educators to create Lessons and Courses. It was pretty magical to see how our team created over 300 Lessons in just a few months using our platform, and it was even more magical that all these Lessons were instantly available to our learners on the device of their choice: Website, Android App, and iOS App.

I am excited to now open up the platform to educators around the world so that they can make their content available to the world instantly for free, on any device. Educators will also be able to publish paid content soon.

Following were some of the goals that we wanted to achieve with the recently released version of Learnapt:

Goals

Educators should be able to create Lessons and Courses on any topic, using any type of content: images, videos, quizzes, text, articles, etc.
Learners should be able to find the content, quickly.
Learners should have the best learning experience on any device, especially small screen devices.

Let’s take a deeper look into how we tried to achieve these goals:

For Educators

We enabled the Content Manager for all the users on Learnapt. Now, Educators can go to their Content Manager and start creating Lessons and Courses. We make it easy for Educators to organize a Lesson by breaking down the content into smaller chunks called Sections. Each Section can hold multiple Items. Each Item can be a text, an image, an image gallery, a PDF, a video, a question, or a quiz. Check out our Lesson, “The Earth in our Solar System”, to get a better idea of what can be achieved using our Lesson Editor.

For Learners

We focused on two key areas to help our learners: Navigation and the Learning Experience.

1. Navigation

A simple navigation seems an easy goal to achieve. But believe me when I say it’s hard, because it can be done in so many different ways. Every way seems right. We had to find the one right way. After many revisions, we have found what works for our learners. This is huge, because it’s very important for our learners to quickly discover and find what they want to learn.

We have kept it very simple. We organize Lessons and Courses by category. Each category can have multiple categories under them. So our users can drill down and find what they are looking for in just a few clicks. We also allow users to mark a category as favorite, for personalized navigation and quick access.

an example of how a student of Class 6 will navigate to find Lessons and Courses for his/her curriculum

Having a large number of Lessons and Courses across categories can make it a bit difficult to navigate, especially, when you are looking for something specific. To handle this, we have implemented an easy to use search screen.

search for something across Learnapt or within a category

2. The Learning Experience

Once a learner finds an interesting Lesson we need to create the best learning experience that allows him/her to focus and learn. Based on these core principles of clarity and focus, we created the “Lesson Player” for Android, iOS, Windows, and the Web, to provide a consistent learning experience across devices and platforms, emphasizing clarity and focus.

the Lesson Player allows learners to learn a lesson via images, text, videos, and more

It’s also important to check if the learner understands the content at regular intervals. For this, we allow educators to add questions and quizzes anywhere in a lesson. So, for example, if a quiz is added after a video, based on a learner’s performance in the quiz we can know if he/she needs help in understanding the video.