Building an E-learning app
Our view on why this market is so important.
In high school I was a terrible student. I didn’t do my homework and failed many tests over and over again. This resulted in going to private school where I passed my exams and later found my passion: creating and building products.
Where university helped me in finding my interests, I was bored quickly again with the lessons.
The current school system is facing a lot of obstacles. Many of these problems become the way for many startups who are trying to solve the failures of learning institutes.
These startups build a product from scratch for a specific group. They do research, make decisions without boards, governments and move quickly and iterate based on the feedback of their users.
When such companies build poor products, they will not find a proper market. They won’t exist anymore in a year or so and make place for companies who do better.
They focus on:
👍 A great product which is fun to play with
👩💻 Make sure users learn something
👨🏫 Helping the teacher: Teach
👬 Connecting people
🔎 Discover interests
👩🎓 Make sure users build confidence
Less than two years ago we started helping an E-learning platform with improving their product. We are now in the testing phase. Next school year they will launch their new version.
This post is about our adventure of building the product, why we believe this is important and about our lessons learned.
Learning something new is scary.
You always feel a bit anxious while you learn something new. It’s outside your comfort zone. Besides the anxiety there is always some adrenaline, curiosity and motivation in this area.
“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” ― Benjamin Franklin
Señor wooly is a platform where American students can learn Spanish. The company, led by a Spanish teacher, is trying to solve some puzzles in how we learn.
They create an insane amount of content, videos, storylines to give teachers the tools so students can learn a completely new language at their own pace. Online and offline.
They believe learning should be fun, and without any real pressure. This open minded approach is really inspiring to me.
They build a product around a story. They are building a brand, with music, videos, books, merchandise so people can fall in love with what they do: learning.
We helped them with designing this playful approach with a new product & we are working on some new games.
Learning should be fun from the start.
While you learn something new, you have all kinds of emotions. On the one hand it’s exciting, but in some moments it’s difficult as well. We all have our moments of procrastination. It’s important to think about features that motivate users to keep learning and in making progress.
The start is important.
Make sure users can directly see where they stopped last time. It’s also important that they directly see what progress they made and what their most important tasks are for the moment.
Learning something new should be efficient, something without obstacles besides the knowledge it self.
Mobile friendly games.
We designed all the games mobile first. We were looking for simple interaction patterns so students could focus on the task at hand; learning a new language. Interacting with the product should be intuitive.
From paper prototypes, to clickable demos and working concepts in HTML. We did it all.
The end result is developed in React.js and Go for great user experience. Because the design and interaction should be flawless, speed of the platform is an important part of this. These two languages made that possible.
The platform handels many GB’s in videos, audio files and images. So this was a real challenge.
We are now optimising everything across all devices. The way of interaction is almost exactly the same as on mobile. Again: Consitancy is everthing.
Gamification
The buzzword from 2014. But learning something new, certainly as a young child deserves some extra motivation. Earning points helps you in achieving the next level, along the way you can earn badges and new avatars. The term might be old fashioned, but the meaning behind it is something we all need, the extra push to just do it.
Next steps
My biggest problem in university was the big difference between students and what they were actually able to do. Software can cover for this by presenting each student their personalized environment which adapts to their specific level of knowledge. The speed in which they learn is different but also the interests they have. Technology has the potential to adapt to those variables.
Hopefully in the next 5 years, schools will focus more on the psychological aspect of life; in how our brain works, empathy, self-awareness, sales and patience. More focus on macro level subjects and less on stuff which can be googled in 5 seconds.
Some friends, that went to completely different universities, now have the exact same jobs.
Hopefully technology can establish bringing people together with the same interests. Broader studies like ‘school of economics’ should be a thing of the past. Topics should be narrowed down to detailed subjects. With the best teacher adding value to the courses, worldwide.
Many problems in the education system are to big to cover, let alone come up with the solutions right away.
Dropping out of college shouldn’t be a badge of honour. But change is necessary in this fast moving world.
My experience with schools is that they’re seeking confidence in the values that were true yesterday. However, they should be focusing on how to be right tomorrow.
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Thanks for reading this post, and would love to hear your feedback! if you would like to know more about this project send me a E-mail sven at moij.co
Then I’ll be able to give more details on the work we did.
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