Over the last year, digitalization has transformed from a trend to a necessity. Many industries felt the need to move their businesses online, and education is not an exclusion. As SkillScouter states, the global e-learning income is expected to reach $325 billion by 2025.
A healthy number of learning platforms have already launched: Udemy, Masterclass, Skillshare, Lynda/ LinkedIn Learning, EdX, Coursera, FutureLearn, and many others. Pretty impressive number!
But how to jump into this business and preserve your own uniqueness? There’s a trick: you should use e-learning design best practices.
In this article, we’ll:
- offer you a detailed guide on how to create an effective e-learning platform,
- discuss helpful tips,
- and share some ideas on where to start and make a good conversion.
Let’s hit the road!
How to Create an Online Learning Platform?
Primarily, an e-learning platform is a website or application that provides knowledge in a particular field. 60% of internet users admit that the online learning format fits their lifestyles.
What steps to take for creating a custom e-learning design?
As Panos Siozos, the CEO and co-founder of LearnWorlds points out, “Users demand great aesthetics, outstanding design and typography, and expertly-designed user journeys. Investing in the design of your online school and learning content is not a luxury but a necessity.”
- Therefore, begin with getting to know your audience. You should find out their requirements and what solutions they are looking for when choosing an e-learning platform. Think of both students and instructors–define their needs and wishes. Thus, you’ll get a list of functions to implement.
- Focus on the type of course you offer. For public speaking lessons, you should give students an option to record audio and video files, as well as get feedback in the same way. For copywriting or creative writing, embed a text editor and other tools that will help students make the most out of their learning and enjoy the process.
- Pay particular attention to the quality of content you offer. At this stage, refer only to credible resources and hire certified experts. What’s the most important: make content relevant to your users’ expectations.
- Besides, make sure your platform supports distribution of multiple types of content like texts, videos, streaming, etc. Then, customize it to all devices and ensure high quality for short and long videos, audible materials, and readable text size.
- If you allow specialists to upload their ready-made courses, try to make this process smooth. You can provide them with guidelines and support.
- Decide on the best CMS for online learning platform. You may choose from WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and others.
- Come up with ideas on e-learning design. Do your research and outline user stories.
- Create a prototype, visualize and test it.
What points should you consider when creating an effective e-learning design?
E-learning UI/ UX Design: Axicube’s 10 Helpful Tips and Ways to Use Them
Let’s have a look at the list of tips for a superb e-learning interface design.
- Whatever device people use, their experience should be equally seamless. To put it another way, e-learning website design will succeed only if it is user-friendly and responsive. Make sure that people can use it on the go.
- Make an enrollment process smooth and clear. Put yourself in students’ shoes to better understand how they choose a course. Later, you can add essential information about their studies by improving filters and a recommendation system. You get more chances that users will proceed to the page of the course.
- Keep students updated and ensure their thought-out workflow. The system should provide notifications about upcoming assignments, lectures, homework deadlines, and the like.
- Personalize notes so users can both jot down and access them anytime and anyplace, even after the course completion.
- Make communication effective. Create a feedback mechanism with lecturers and group members.
- Customize the platform for instructors and make it easy to operate, aka upload videos, presentations, reading materials, and check homework. Create a design that matches their needs with a convenient office and access from different devices.
- Motivate students by letting them monitor their progress effortlessly. For instance, set up a rating or a gamification system that could make your e-learning platform offering stand out. Users can track their results, unlock achievements, and only the best of them will receive certificates.
- Offer access to the tools for creating courses right on your platform.
- Provide a handy course constructor with a step-by-step guide.
- Use a straightforward monetization mechanism. You can roll out exclusive deals like a top-notch user experience or content to promote your course and increase an inbound lead flow.
E-Learning Platform Design: Axicube’s Case
Since you now have a collection of hands-on advice, it’s time to see how to use them wisely. Let’s have a look at our recent case. The Axicube team has recently created a custom e-learning design for MIGIS, an educational platform for qualified gestalt therapy. Also, visitors can order psychological services from competent specialists on the website.
What query did our team receive?
To become certified gestalt therapists, students need to pass a long way, which usually encompasses courses, workshops, practices, intensives, etc. And what’s more, they need to track their progress manually without missing a thing. Sometimes it’s hard because education is a long-lasting process, and some steps can be overlooked.
MIGIS needed a platform:
- for lectures to tell about their achievements and courses;
- and for students to monitor their academic performance instead of addressing administrators all the time.
What did we offer?
We created an e-learning website project where students can monitor their hours spent on numerous activities. Our beta-testers got satisfied with new educational and time-management opportunities.
As a result the e-learning platform development:
- increased the institution’s credibility
- diminished administrators’ workload
- sped up access to students’ performance data.
The Latest E-learning Design Trends: Where does the Industry Move?
Considering skyrocketing e-learning industry development, we can peep in the future and deem what tendencies will come to play soon.
#1 Mobile and App Versions
First and foremost, people will be even busier and need fast access to e-learning anyplace and anytime. Therefore, you should envisage how to create own learning interactive platform available on mobile devices and apps. Users will especially enjoy their e-learning process with the latest tablets like Apple iPad or Microsoft Surface.
#2 Podcasts
Podcasts are all the rage nowadays and particularly in e-learning, making it informative and fun. Their integration into your platform is worthy of your effort and time, yet again don’t forget about the quality.
#3 Card-based Design
Card-like content boxes aren’t new, but they are prone to become the new normal in education website design. They are effective and functional for getting an immediate look at short pieces of information.
#4 Video Deployment
Educational video content has been at its peak for a while and will only increase in the years ahead. Carefully consider how to make it a key component of your e-learning UX design.
#5 Gamification
Many have tested game effectiveness when teaching both old and young learners. When embedding elements of games on your platform like leaderboards, points, experience gains, level-ups, achievements, or daily quests, you liven up a traditional learning process, reduce tension, motivate and better engage with your users. As a result, they eagerly get back to your courses.
#6 Performance Support Tools
Performance Support Tools (PSTs) increase the efficiency of corporate learning. They are meant to support and guide employees by using images, video, consuming, or tracking data. E-learning UI design solutions are supposed to provide simple platform navigation to the required information.
Overall, trends in the e-learning industry are continually shifting mainly because of the development of advanced technologies. When developing an education platform it’s crucial to keep in mind your users. You should make their studying engaging and interaction with a platform really easy. Besides, these points will ensure satisfied clients and revenue.
What Are the Main E-learning Design Tips?
Eventually, we collected efficient suggestions on how to design a social networking education website. Don’t waste your time – keep reading!
- Think of users when designing an e-learning platform. Make their experience engaging.
- Provide hints and step-by-step assistance.
- Personalize notification system.
- Inform about recent updates in e-learning resources or academic performance.
- Optimize a mobile version of your e-learning platform, but make it the same as a web one.
- Design well-thought cabinets where students can interact with their mates and teachers, as well as take notes.
- Ensure every participant with access to feedback. It may improve students’ progress.
- Praise students with little bonuses (stickers, symbols, etc.) for their hard work.
- Give teachers access to the course constructor, so they can create new courses or upload additional materials.
- Adjust your e-learning design platform with current trends to stand out from your competitors.
If you want to make your educational business digital, design a platform from scratch, or just upgrade it, then you need a team of high-skilled specialists who can do it for you. With our expertise in e-learning design for web, mobile, or mixed, offline, and online courses, we apply a traditional approach and account for specific requirements. We implement research methods, prototyping, and usability testing to help you stand out on the market.
We’ll wrap your knowledge in an exclusive design.
Looking for a sound UI/ UX design company for your e-learning platform project? Axicube is the right one. Let’s discuss your ideas.
