How to Create an Educational App: MVP Feature and Development Cost in 2024

Education is no longer as tedious as most adults may remember. These days, it’s possible to study anytime and anywhere using only a smartphone. The education market has become a platform for tech innovations and a significant niche for business.

A lot of enterprises like Samsung, Dell, and Fujitsu invest in the smart education and eLearning industry. The education app market size is expected to grow by over $46 billion during 2020-2024.

Among the primary trends in education is gamification children, foreign language learning apps, and projects related to programming and digital education.

Do you want to build an educational app? In this guide, you can find data about the required features and technologies. Also, we’ll provide you with a final cost to make an education app.

Online learning is a dynamic industry that has received an unprecedented boost due to the overall global situation with the pandemic. For example, before the pandemic, global EdTech investments reached $18.66 billion in 2019, which is already an excellent achievement. Still, with the arrival of lockdowns, analysts claim that the overall market for online education is projected to reach $350 billion by 2025.

Just look at the fact that in the first quarter of 2020, the number of downloads of various educational apps in the Google Play Market and App Store increased by 30% compared to the first quarter of 2019.

However, even though the transition to distance learning is a forced measure, many have got the chance to embrace the benefits of various educational apps that have always been the reason for the popularity and stable growth of the industry.

For example, educational software is an excellent way of effective learning, as with e-learning, participants learn five times more material than in regular classes at the same time. Efficiency is also the reason why about 40% of all Fortune 500 companies are using online learning for training. In addition, online training does not tie users to one place since online software often supports mobile learning. Against this backdrop, analysts predicted the growth of the mobile learning market to $38 billion by the end of 2021.

As you can see, this market is extremely promising, and every year the market will reach new heights and it's about time to break into it with your own custom solution.

Before starting educational app development, you need to decide what kind of application you want to create. There are two main types of edu apps — for students and teachers. However, both types have a bunch of subtypes and satisfy the needs of different user groups like:

• Kids (Quick Math.Jr, YouTube Kids)
• Tutors (TutorMe, Khan Academy)
• College and university students (eDX)
• Language learners and native speakers (italki, Duolingo)
• Specialists in various fields (Coursera)
• Lifelong learners (Udemy)

Educational apps for teachers aren’t as varied as apps for learners. However, these applications make the teaching process more convenient. A bunch of apps can be used for tracking students’ progress and sharing grades with parents to keep them posted. Also, there are educational apps for teachers to schedule classes.

Apps with gamification at their core

To make the education process fun and interesting, teachers tend to use various applications. For example, Kahoot offers the tutor to prepare some questions and answers. After that, the app transforms them into a game. Monster Math allows understanding the basics of mathematics through cool games.

Apps for tracking progress

Various apps allow monitoring students’ progress and share their grades with parents. Seesaw is an application with a learner's portfolio. The parents can follow their progress and achievements. Also, students can share their most significant works. One more app, Additio, manages grades, notes, and attendance of the learners. Also, Additio allows planning timetables.

Apps for storing learning materials

Cloud-based platforms are perfect for sharing learning materials with students. Such solutions are quite convenient for both — learners and tutors. For example, Schoology, in addition to file sharing, allows making notes and highlighting essential data in the text. Google has also created an educational app — Google Classroom. This application allows working with Google Documents, making a copy for each learner, or creating folders on Google Drive. So, all the files are well-organized.

Speaking about educational app development, we tend to think about learning applications for students with various purposes. Such solutions are quite wide-spread among kids and adults because they make learning fun.

There are a bunch of various educational apps for students. Below we’ve listed the most popular among users.

Apps for learning a language

Learning a foreign language, students need to have constant practice. A lot of modern apps offer fun games for learning new words or watching educational videos. For example, DuoLingo provides users with a test to find out the user’s knowledge level of the language. The app offers a course based on the collected data. In contrast, Memrise offers watching short videos with native speakers. After watching the video, users need to learn new words.

Apps for kids

Developing an educational app, you need to consider solutions for kids. These days, children spend a lot of time playing games on their tablets. However, educational apps for kids make games useful. Kids can learn how to read, write, or count with the help of applications, so developing tablet applications for education is a great idea. For example, Poptropica English offers children to solve mysteries while practicing English. Fish School has a bunch of games to teach kids letters, numbers, shapes, and colors.

Apps for online courses

Adults 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 educational platforms. Coursera is probably the most wide-spread platform for online learning. It gives access to numerous courses in various industries, working with universities from all over the world. Udemy offers courses from tutors on multiple topics. The platform has a flexible search and filtering system, so it’s easy to pick an exciting course.

Apps for exam preparation

A bunch of cool apps like ExamPrep or GradeUp make students’ lives easier. Such solutions tend to offer practice tests and quizzes, flashcards for memorizing, and more. Maximum prepares students for various exams like K12 school subjects, English language, IT and programming courses, and others. TCY also offers many tests like Mick Tests, Engineering/Medical, MBA/CAT, and other exams.

Before developing an educational app, you need to draw up a list with features for your project. You need to divide features into two groups according to the users’ roles — for students and teachers.

Also, features can be basic and advanced. Basic or MVP features stand for functionality that is required to satisfy basic user needs. As for advanced, they add some exciting functionality to engage more users.

To give you a hint, we’ve listed some ideas below.

Signup/Login

It’s better to offer various options to sign up for your app. For example, you can add such options as email and password or phone number and password. To make the app more user-friendly, you need to add the ‘Forgot password’ option. To create a signup feature, developers need to use Amazon SES and Amazon SNS.

Search

How to make education app and not to fail? You need to develop a flexible search. To find the right course or subject, students need to use an advanced search. To create a search system, developers can use ElasticSearch.

User profile

This screen allows students to look through dashboards and courses they participate in. Also, here they can add their account details like subject, age, and more.

Course

To choose the right course, students need to look through the details like the course program and description. Also, here you need to add the ‘Buy’ button.

Payments

You need to integrate a secure payment gateway to make the payment process easy and safe. Developers tend to use Braintree to make these features.

Menu

To see the list of upcoming lessons and tasks, students need a ‘Menu’ feature. It may contain chosen courses, lists of tasks, and tests. Also, there should be a list of marks to track progress. As a result, learners are organized, and the learning process is easy.

Push notifications

Users can get notification about any course updates. Also, it’s better to notify learners when they get marks. Push notifications are useful for user engagement. Developers choose Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) to develop push notifications.

Signup/login

To use the app, teachers also need to login to the app. It’s better to also offer such options as email and password and phone and password. Developers tend to use Amazon SES and Amazon SNS to create a ‘Registration’ feature.

Students management

Teachers need to manage students effectively. For this, they should see the list of learners and details about them. Also, the tutor needs to check tests and put marks.

Course

How to make an education app successful? Tutors need to create a course fast and easy. Also, they need an opportunity to upload photos and videos or other learning materials. It’s also good to add a course editing option.

Test

To test the learners’ knowledge and progress, tutors need to create tests. They need to add several questions and answers. It’s also essential to let them edit the test.

Push notifications

Teachers can be notified about done tests and new students on their courses. FCM technology is perfect for developing push notification.

When you build an educational app 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
• 1 or 2 Flutter developers (in case you chose Flutter development)
• Back-end developers
• Front-end developers
• QA engineer

There are two main ways to cooperate with IT specialists — hire an in-house team or an outsourcing company. Both options have pros and cons. It’s easier to communicate with in-house teams, but they tend to cost more due to office rent, equipment for them (hardware and software), and some other things . On the other hand, developers from outsourcing destinations (like Central Europe) offer affordable rates in addition to the high quality of the product.

A bunch of powerful tools can be used for e-learning app development. If you want to make a native mobile app, you need to use a programming language — Swift (iOS) and Kotlin (Android). In the case of cross-platform development, developers can utilize Flutter.

To give you a hint, we’ve listed the required technologies to make an educational app.

Note: You should consult with professionals to choose the tech stack for your educational app. The final toolset always depends on your technical needs and project requirements.

iOS app

• Programming language: Swift
• Networking: Alamofire

Android app

• Programming language: Kotlin
• Networking: OkHttp 3

Back-end development

• Programming language: Node.js
• Framework: Express 4
• Database: MySQL
• API: Swagger

Tools

• Signup: Amazon SES, Amazon SNS
• Emails: Elastic Email
• Search: Elastic search
• Payment: Braintree
• Push notifications: FCM
• Storage: Amazon S3

In addition to technologies for standard features, you can implement advanced tools when you build an educational app for your business. They will allow you to create features to expand and deepen the learning experience.

Augmented Reality

Augmented reality takes the learning experience to a whole new level by allowing standard learning content to be augmented with augmented reality models and images. For example, it can be 3D models of ancient ruins or a model of a human skeleton. For example, you can implement the integration of EON Creator AVR - a tool for creating your own AR content that will allow teachers to significantly diversify the presentation of educational material. The most popular technologies for implementing custom AR features are ARCore and ARKit.

Virtual Reality

Virtual reality is a new branch of the development of technologies that are already actively used in teaching. VR allows you to immerse the user right in the center of the action and provide an experience of interacting with the learning object. One of the great examples of using VR for educational purposes is Unimersiv, an application that combines various VR experiences where the user can walk through Acropolis, Ancient Rome to study anatomy, and much more. Popular tools for developing VR features are Google VR NDK and VR SDK (for Android and iOS, respectively).

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is a powerful feature for creating a personalized learning experience. Using machine learning algorithms, an application can adjust the pace and complexity of learning to the student's personal abilities.

The most famous example of artificial intelligence in educational apps is Duolingo, already mentioned in this article. This application has AI-fueled chatbots with which the user can have conversations in foreign languages. The main task of such chatbots is to imitate communication with a live native speaker, thereby developing the user's communication skills in a foreign language.

If you want to implement something like this in your educational application, you should use Motion.ai - one of the most popular tools for implementing AI-powered chatbots.

Gamification

Gamification plays an important role in increasing the engagement of educating as learning through play is something we all have experienced. Gamification of learning apps can include the following elements:

• Badges. They serve as a collectible item that reflects the user's achievements and their learning progress. A kind of medal for the efforts of the user.
• Levels. This element of gamification carries with it an incentive role, since with each level, the challenge of learning increases, and with it the interest in learning.
• Points. The most basic form of reward for the user’s efforts is because we all want to be the best at everything. This is great for encouraging more thoughtful learning in order to get as many points as possible.
• Leaderboards. Another element of motivation is comparing the user's success with other users. Again, we all want to be winners, and the leaderboard plays on that feeling very well.
• In-game currency. Another form of reward that allows the user to buy different virtual items from within the app. It can be all sorts of icons, customization of the appearance, and so on.

A good example of gamification is the Khan Academy platform. In addition to the standard leaderboards, medals and progress points, this application has a feature called Skill Tree. It visualizes the learning subject in the form of a branching tree so that the user can see the direction of learning and his progress in mastering the "skill".

Educational mobile app, or learning management system development cost consists of various parts. The most significant amount of development time and cost take features. In the previous section, we’ve singled out the required features of the learning application.

So, let’s find out the time developers need to build each feature for iOS, Android, and web (back end). We’ve also added the Flutter estimation to show you the difference in price.

Below you can find approximate time and cost to develop an educational app. To calculate the final price, we need to know the project requirements.

Now, let’s single out the time demanded for developing teachers’ side of the app.

How to make a learning app outstanding? You can add several advanced features. Here are some ideas:

• Chatbot
• Video meetings
• Personalized recommendations
• Gamification

The cost of custom software development consist of several more parts in addition to features. Below we’ve listed the main factors that can completely change the final price of the application.

Platform

There are three popular platforms for software development — Web, Android, and iOS. If you want to create iOS and Android apps at once, you need to double the price of one app since they require different programming languages. However, Flutter development allows creating cross-platform solutions for iOS and Android. As a result, you can reduce expenses, but Flutter specialists are quite demanded.

Developers’ location

Developers from different regions tend to have various hourly rates. For example, the most expensive software development services are in the USA and Australia. At the same time, such countries as Estonia offer more affordable rates.

Design

Creating an educational app design can be a struggle. Creating an attractive and user-friendly UI/UX design tends to be a time-consuming and expensive process. However, the design is a crucial success factor since customers prefer to use intuitive apps. UI/UX designers require at least 120 hours to create a design for one platform — iOS or Android. In the case of Flutter development, designers create only one design, so it takes 120 hours.

Admin panel

Admin panel offers a bunch of cool features to manage users. For example, it allows blocking, editing, and deleting users. You need an admin panel since it’s impossible to handle a lot of users manually. Also, the admin panel provides payment management. To create this part of an educational app, developers need at least 100 hours. However, the good news is that you need only one admin panel to manage all the platforms.

QA time

Quality assurance services are vital for any tech project. QA engineers carefully test the apps to find bugs and fix them. The final cost of testing depends on the complexity of your project. To test an educational app (MVP for Android and iOS apps, and back-end), QA engineers need approximately 1,300 hours.

DevOps time

DevOps services allow filling the gap between developers and the IT operations team. DevOps specialists consider the right tools and automate the code flow from development to production. DevOps time takes about 200 hours during education app development.

Considering all the factors we’ve discussed, let’s single out the final time and price to create an education app.

All the estimates below are based on the average rate in our region (Central Europe, Estonia) — $50 per hour. Having development hours, we can calculate the final price.

You need to add back-end development time and iOS or Android development time, according to the chosen platform. After that, you need to multiply the time by the team’s hourly rate.

In case of the Flutter development, you do the same. You add back-end development time to Flutter development time and multiply the time by the team’s hourly rates.

To build an educational app, you need at least $134,850 for one platform (iOS or Android) and $202,500 for two platforms.

To give you a hint, we’ve decided to discuss three educational projects that have already reached success.

DuoLingo is a perfect platform for learning foreign languages. The app offers to choose among a bunch of popular languages like German, English, Italian, and more. Also, the app is quite convenient since users can choose their native language. It makes the education process faster and has customers from all over the world.

The app is famous for introducing various gamification elements into the educational process, making it more seamless and engaging. For example, all training is divided into certain stages, and at each stage, there are several levels associated with a particular topic. The user starts from the first level and opens new stages as the levels are completed. All training is permeated with gained experience points added to the total score and helps the user increase the league’s level (a kind of leaderboard).

The platform got investments from such companies as General Atlantic, CapitaIG, and others. The total funding amount reaches $148.4 million. Besides that, the total number of Duolingo app downloads reached 500 million in 2020.

Khan Academy offers a lot of online courses, lessons, and practices. Students can take math, arts, informatics, and other classes. The platform offers iOS and Android apps to let learners study anywhere. Developing an educational app, you can consider Khan Academy features since the platform is popular all over the world.

A distinctive feature of Khan Academy is the content format that is present in the courses on the platform. All courses are video tutorials that display drawing on a virtual board and during this, the narrator explains the topic of the lesson (which is quite close to the standard form of training). Besides that, the progress of the course is tracked by the application. But the most important feature of Khan Academy is the complete free course. No hidden fees, subscriptions, or anything else. All courses are in the public domain, which is one of the goals of this platform - to provide knowledge available to everyone.

Omidyar Network invested in this project. These days, the total funding amount reaches $10.2 million.

One more wide-spread educational platform that offers online courses with an audience of more than 50 million users. Udemy cooperates with individual tutors to provide high-quality lessons.

Udemy is famous for various courses for adults. There are such categories as software development, business, accounting, personal development, and others. In addition, this platform benefits both ordinary users and instructors. For example, one of the distinguishing features is Course Marketing. This feature allows teachers to promote their courses and create their own brand with a personal target audience. Marketing tools include retargeting ads, external partner promotions, email campaigns, search & discovery, and other useful tools for instructors.

Such companies as Benesse, Prous & Naspers, and Stripes invested in Udemy development. The total funding amount reaches $223 million.

When it comes to online learning, Coursera comes to mind for many. And this is not surprising since the user base of this platform has more than 77 million users. The application has won users’ trust due to the presence in its database of more than 3000 courses on the subject of Data science, business, information technology, self-development, language learning, and much more. On the website, in addition to paid courses, there are also free courses available. However, for the user to get access to graded assignments or earn a Course Certificate, the user must pay for it.

How to create an educational app and make it profitable?

You need to consider the following monetization strategies to get the revenue.

Let’s single out the details of each option.

Business model canvas allows studying the platform and singling out the interesting features. Below you can find business models of two educational giants — DuoLingo and Coursera. We’ve added value propositions, business partners, and revenue streams.

We’ve been developing solutions for the Education industry for more than five years now. Our developers are experienced in creating scalable solutions for iOS and Android.

We’ve recently developed an educational app called School App. School App keeps students and teachers in touch. The app has a lot of details about teachers, clubs, sports activities, and more. The solution has iOS and Android apps, along with a web version.

We’ve developed School App for three platforms at the same time. There is also a responsive admin panel, in-app calls, and support for two languages — English and Spanish.

Developing an educational app is a complex process that requires professional help. We at Cleveroad have extensive experience in different EdTech solutions like learning management system development, designed to meet different requirements and are the cornerstone of training.

We are ready to create a custom platform and application that will combine our technical experience, your brand vision and fully meet the needs of your business.