Are you planning to create an educational app? You are at the right place. Here, I will give you some interesting insights about educational apps, how to build a powerful app for study as well as how to make money in the e-learning industry!

Educational app | Mobile learning market insights

These days, it’s possible to study anytime and anywhere using an educational app. Even the busiest person can join online classes, learning online, expand their skills, and get degrees without having to pay a visit to campus.

On the other hand, with the evolution of technology, the education market can be a source of good income for a farsighted businessman. So, the main thing is to find the best way to create an educational app that yields superior values for customer and make it profitable.

According to CNBC, from a $107 billion market in 2015, the industry is expected to triple by 2025 to be worth $350 billion, as more people look for learning resources online.

Moreover, education doesn’t just end after school or college. In an era of increasing education technology, an upskilling service has become ever more important to safeguard jobs for the future.

What’s more? In March, when Covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, education app downloads worldwide surged 90% compared to the weekly average in the fourth quarter of 2019.

Since the COVID-19 is spreading across the globe exponentially, the edtech industry received an opportunity to prove its worth. In general, many schools and colleges are trying to adapt their courses to online learning systems to ensure that the study is not affected.

No doubt that we should be ready for any future outbreak by realizing how important a platform like an online learning app is. Now, the question is are you prepare yourself business ideas to create an end-to-end educational app for students and teachers?

What are the benefits of educational apps?

Certainly, educational apps for kids and adults are becoming more popular every day for their high margin. If you are still considering the possible profitability of a mobile learning service, let’s see the list below.

1. Flexibility. By taking an online course, users can study online at any time and anywhere! So, by developing an educational app, you provide users with the opportunity to study subjects they want on a convenient schedule.
2. Modernity. As we all know that today’s generation likes to spend their time on mobile. But most don’t like to study. With that being said, if you connect their boring activities with interactive activities, your educational app will be a game-changer.
3. Efficiency. Education app also helps enhance the interaction between parents and teachers. Therefore, educational app development expands opportunities to obtain knowledge more effectively and qualitatively.
4. Saving. It is all about saving time and money.
5. Self-paced learning. An educational app for learning provides statistics on achievement dynamics and user level, resulting in a holistic assessment approach.

What are some good educational app ideas?

In case you planning for an ed-tech startup by building an educational app, you must check out these money-making educational app ideas.

• Language Learning App

Besides the core functions of learning a new language, a lot of modern apps offer fun games for remembering new words or watching educational videos. Moreover, you can help users find out their weaknesses and strengths for letting them know where they should focus more.

For instance, Duolingo is a great app that helps students in learning different languages online such as German, Spanish, or English through fun games and activities. In contrast, Memrise creates lessons by watching short videos with native speakers.

• Education Apps for Kids

It can be a winning strategy if you make an educational app focused on children. Nowadays, kids get ahold of tablets rather early. Creating an educational app for kids, you should focus on simple and colorful design. 

For example, Youtube Kids is exclusively made and curated for kids. It’s one of the best online learning apps for kids out there. Quick Math JR. is also aimed at making kids familiar with numbers, imparting the general math skills of students in grades 2 to 6.

• Apps Aimed at Online Courses

These educational applications usually accompany a certain training course. Users have an opportunity to pick a course, depending on their interests or working needs. A lot of universities and colleagues are ready to cooperate with an e-learning platform.

Educational apps for online learning like Coursera, Udemy, Udacity, edX, and LinkedIn’s Lynda access to numerous courses in various industries from all over the world.

• Tracking Students Progress Apps

Such a type of educational app allows teachers to automatically assign grading weight to participation, as well as interactive questions and homework to be completed beyond the classroom activities.

With Seesaw, teachers can provide concrete examples of their students’ strengths and areas for improvement to their parents during teacher-parent meetings. Whereas, as a digital grade book and classroom management app, Additio lets you take attendance, calculate grades, and plan your timetable, all on your mobile device.

• Apps for Storing Learning Materials

If you plan to offer a learning management system as a service to your businesses, you’ll need to choose a niche. Here are some examples of popular learning management systems for schools.

Google Classroom can help you share learning materials with both learners and tutors. The biggest benefit is that you can connect seamlessly through integration with Google services like Gmail, Drive, Docs, and YouTube. While Edmodo is a social network-like service, which makes it easy to use for anyone familiar with Facebook.

• Gamification Apps

Another interesting app idea is building a learning app with several quizzes and games. This helps learners from all age groups play games and quizzes according to their choices, such as difficulty, age-wise, and category.

Thankfully, Kahoot makes it easy to turn your class into a gameshow. And, ClassDojo also works best with younger students usually in the primary school stage.

Read also: How to build a dating app like Tinder?

8 essential features of successful education app

Now, it’s time to think about the educational app features. Generally, the features you need will be different depends on the kind of app you’re building – for learning or teaching. However, here are must-haves in any education app.

• Login/ Signup

It’s better to offer various options to sign up. For example, an account can be created by email, phone number, or via social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others.

To make the app more user-friendly, you need to verify the account and add the “Forgot password” option.

• User profile

Through these dashboards, users can check which courses they participate in and adjust to their schedules. Here, they also can add their account details like subject, age, education, etc.

School Management App to help manage teaching and learning process in schools (Source: Dribbble)

• Learning materials

First, learning materials must be proven scientifically. Depending on the educational app, it can vary from different types:

• Video/ audio materials
• Interactive exercises to test knowledge
• Online courses

• Push notifications

Push notifications are useful for user engagement. What should you notify about? It might depend – an opportunity to get a discount, new interesting features, any course updates, etc.

• Social networks integration

Today it’s impossible to imagine a mobile app without the implementation of such a feature. In fact, it has several tasks, namely – to allow the user to share their achievement with friends.

• Search functionality

In addition, the faster the user gets the desired result, the better the chances they keep your educational app. Students can find online courses they need or come back to completed soon. For teachers, they are able to adjust to the programs they teach.

• Payments

When it comes to paying online, you have to keep security in check. Moreover, you should provide users a convenient payment method via credit cards, PayPal, Braintree, etc.

How do you make an education application?

For starters, the process of building an educational app demands a lot of planning and preparatory work including.

• Market research

Now is the time to check the originality of your idea for an educational app. To avoid getting lost among competitors, you need to clarify the way to stand out among them. First, let’s look at your audience. Next, start by asking yourself these questions:

• What impacts of your business need to improve?
• How can education app impact that problem?
• How to increase overall client satisfaction?

Other key areas include your market and competitor research, timeline, budget and more.

• Quality of the content

If users have to spend too many hours doing the task, they will get bored. So, using instructional videos is a notice-worthy suggestion to teach and keep the approach to the whole learning process. And, of course, don’t forget to reward the learner when they successfully completed the task.

Learning app can be implemented as exciting games. And if we’re talking about an educational app for kids, then this is especially necessary!

Hard mode concept from Duolingo app

• UI UX of the app

The first impression is very important. Students, teachers and schools will be going to download it only if the educational app must be simple, nice, and clear. And again, when it comes to children, the simplicity of design is primary. At the same time, the bright graphics and interesting sound should accommodate the needs of all customers.

Read also: Top 8 UI/UX Design Trends for Mobile App 2020

• Testing an educational app

When you have used cases and wireframe your app, it’s time to test your app’s flow and user experience. Testing will help you know which topics are weak and have to put more effort. You can also share your eLearning app with your colleagues to test the user’s journey, from opening the app to reaching the goal.

• Hiring educational app developers

Creating educational apps for iOS and Android, you need a development team. Here are the specialists you’ll need to build your project:

• Business Analyst
• Project Manager
• UI/UX designer
• 1 or 2 Android developers
• 1 or 2 iOS developers
• QA specialist

How much does it cost to make an educational app?

As you understand, creating a learning app development needs to be considered a lot of things. The higher your financial capabilities, the more advanced functionality you can offer. But first, let’s start with the MVP versions. 

There are many extras for different types of an educational app. If you’re making a language learning app, you’ll also need to hire native speakers to record words and sentences. Additionally, when creating an education app for kids, it should be compatible with a variety of devices.

Read also: How to define mobile app budget in 3 steps?

Educational app development includes the following steps:

• iOS, Android development.
• Backend development.
• QA engineering to test the project
• Public your learning app

The educational app development step requires about 1000 hours. 

The design stage includes:

• UI/UX
• Create app logo
• Develop app screens

In general, the design stage lasts about 200 hours.

Read also: How much does it cost to design an app?

Moreover, the cost to develop educational apps depends on the partner you choose to outsource. If you choose an IT specialist in Vietnam, the price will cost from $10 to $25 per hour. Of course, if you prefer companies from other countries, your costs can increase several times.

Again, the price depends on the e learning app idea, its complexity, the number of supported platforms, the design style, etc. Above all, if you consider to developing the core app, development services for each platform will cost you about $30,000 and up. 

Are you ready to develop an educational app?

Today, we do know that education is already a profitable sector in the mobile market. If you invest in smart education now, it will help you become full of unlimited opportunities further.

Improving and growing your business through mobile applications should be expensive, time-consuming, and intimidating. So, it’s really important to find a reliable technology partner.

We’ve been developing solutions for the education industry for years. To make sure of this, take a look at our portfolio and get acquainted with the experience of our experts.

About Agiletech

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