How to Make an Educational Website: Types, Features, and Cost

Before starting the education web development, you should decide what kind of website you want to create. It’s common to divide educational platforms by learning methods and by target audience. However, both types have a lot of subtypes.

How to build an educational website and achieve success? You should choose the correct way of learning.

There are a bunch of learning methods that allow choosing the convenient way of education. For example, there are interactive services with games, videos, and more. Also, some platforms offer group education if students want to study with their friends.

Computer Managed Learning (CML) and Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI)

Examples: Coursera, LinguaLeo

Computer managed learning stands for using computers to manage and access the learning process. Such systems have databases with materials for students to study. They usually have several ranking parameters showing the courses corresponding to the learners’ needs and preferences.

As for computer assisted, this method also uses software in combination with traditional teaching. For example, the system consists of multimedia like video, graphics, and text to improve the learning process.

Synchronous Online Learning and Asynchronous Online Learning

Examples: Zoom, Google Hangouts

Synchronous online learning lets a group of learners study together from any place in the world. Real-time education includes video calls and online chats. So, students can use such platforms as Zoom or Google Hangouts.

Building an educational website, you can also consider an asynchronous e-learning method.It stands for individual education at different times and locations. Learners focus on their achievements and results. It increases flexibility and lets create a convenient timetable. To share the results, students can use various messengers like Slack, Telegram, and WhatsUp.

Fixed E-Learning and Adaptive E-Learning

Examples: eDX, Udacity, Coursera, Zoomi

Fixed online education means that the platform doesn’t offer personalized learning to the students. All the studying materials are prepared beforehand.

This type of learning is common for traditional classrooms but not perfect for online educational platforms. Fixed e-learning doesn’t use all the benefits of modern technology like data gathering to give users more personalized content.

On the contrary, adaptive e-learning tends to adapt and redesign educational materials depending on the users’ preferences. The system analyzes learners’ goals, abilities, and skills and offers an individual educational plan. For example, Zoomi detects learning patterns and behaviors to determine, understand, and meet each user’s unique learning style.

Interactive Online Learning

Examples: DataCamp, Codecademy

Interactive online education provides two-way communication between students and tutors. It allows making changes to the learning plans and teaching methods.

Individual Online Learning and Collaborative Online Learning

Examples: Khan Academy, Zoom, Google Hangouts

According to this classification, individual online learning stands for a group of students with similar goals. How does this approach work? Learners study materials on their own. However, they have a deadline to finish a certain part of the material.

Collaborative online education unites a group of students with the same goals. They learn together to achieve their aims as a group. This method is perfect for practicing teamwork.

A lot of tech solutions have useful features for learners. For example, Zoom offers real-time co-annotation and digital whiteboard.

Of course, it’s also possible to classify educational websites by the target audience. The most popular types are:

• College/university students (Coursera, eDX)
• Kids and tutors (Poptropia, Fish School, Khan Academy)
• Language learners and teachers (DuoLingo, Memrise, italki)
• Specialists in a specific field (DataCamp, Codecademy)[b]

There are several steps you need to take to create an educational website and achieve success.

CB Insights says that 42% of startups fail because the market doesn't need their product. To avoid such situations, you need to validate your idea before launching the website.

How to create an educational website and attract first users? You need to analyze your niche and study the target audience. Consider the following points:

• Age
• Interests
• How they spend free time
• Where they hang out on the internet (Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and so on)

As a result, you can understand the market situation and offer users a solution that solves more problems than the competitors’ products.

You should study your competitors and their solutions. Analyze the most popular educational websites and apps among users and their content. It’ll help you find their strong and weak sides. Also, it’s great to analyze the features of competitors’ websites.

Knowing your target audience, you should provide customers with useful and engaging learning content.

For example, you can cooperate with qualified teachers or universities and colleges. MasterClass, one of the most popular e-learning platforms, offered Marc Jacobs, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, Annie Leibovitz, and other famous people to cooperate. As a result, MasterClass has managed to turn this cooperation into their main advantage.

Once you’ve done with planning and researching, you can get ready for educational website development. I mean writing down some ideas for features and design aspects you have in mind.

The website design should be attractive and user-friendly. It’s a good idea to show UI/UX designers some ideas of the designs you like. You can show similar platforms and discuss points that you like and dislike about their design.

To make an educational website, you should create a list of required features for developers. To give you a hint, there are some ideas:

• Registration
• User profile
• Video content
• Chats with tutors
• Calendar

How to create an online education website faster? Create an MVP version!

Minimum Viable Product includes only those features needed to satisfy the users’ basic needs. MVP lets you attract first users, collect their feedback and adjust the product strategy depending on both business metrics (retention, LTV, churn rates) and users’ thoughts on the product.

MVP reduces time-to-market, so you can release the product faster in comparison to full-fledged solutions. However, be careful while choosing a partner among education software development companies, and primarly pay attention to your potential IT provider experience in e-learning solutions delivery. Additionally, having an MVP version, you have more chances to get investments. A working product makes stakeholders trust you.

Creating an educational website, you need to consider the monetization strategy. There are several to get revenue from an educational platform.

Let’s take a look at three most wide-spread monetization strategies:

How to create an online education website and not to fail? You should integrate useful and problem-solving features.

Educational websites are different depending on their types and goals. Educational platforms with courses are different from what Italki or Codecademy offers.

However, it’s possible to highlight the most basic features.

It’s common to divide features into two groups: basic and advanced. Must-have or MVP features tend to satisfy basic users’ needs and expectations. On the contrary, advanced features add some exciting functionality to engage more users and can be added some time after the release.

To give you a hint, there are some ideas of MVP features below:

• Registration and login (via Facebook, Google or email and password)
• Search for a course
• User profile
• Progress tracking
• Video calls
• Chat
• Payments (several payment options like PayPal, Stripe)
• Feedback
• Admin panel

Speaking about education website development, it’s possible to divide features depending on the user’s role.

It’s quite complicated to calculate the final price of educational website development. It depends on various factors, from project requirements to the development team’s location.

To give you a hint, we’ve estimated the Coursera website (its MVP version). The cost varies between $54,750 and $62,500. Mind that this price is APPROXIMATE and based on average $50/h rate (Central Europe, Estonia).

To calculate the accurate price of your project, we need to know your project requirements. After that, we can estimate the number of hours demanded to create your own LMS website.

The rough estimation made by our business analysts showed that the time required make an education website ranges between 1,095 h and 1,250 h. How to calculate the final cost? You need to multiply the number of hours by the hourly rate. We’ve calculated the final price for different regions:

• Central Europe. $54,750 and $62,500 (based on $50/h)
• Eastern and Western Europe. $109,500-$125,000 (based on $100/h)
• USA. $164,250-$187,500 (based on $150/h)
• Australia. $109,500-$125,000 (based on $100/h)

The cost of creating an educational website is impressive. So, the question arises: what does this cost include? Here’s a list:

• Discovery phase. During this stage, we analyze all the project requirements and business goals. During the discovery phase we create the specification, a document describing all features, required technologies, and their dependencies. Specification allows developers to understand how the client sees the project and avoid misunderstandings. According to the specification and wireframes, we can make a detailed project estimation. It has the final time and price to create a website for education.
• UI/UX design. An attractive and user-friendly design means a lot for website success. The UI design should be eye-catching to capture users’ attention, and the UX should help them solve their problems fast. During the UI/UX design process, designers create wireframes. They stand for a schematic representation of the future interface with essential elements: buttons, links, forms, and others. Then, designers move on with the website pages and their conditions.
• Development. To make educational website development more structured, we divide it into sprints. Each sprint takes two weeks. During the software development process, engineers implement the determined part of the website features, and QA engineers test the platform.
• Testing. Mind that QA services are vital for your website success. This process lets the development team find and fix bugs.
• DevOps. 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.

Our team has been developing solutions for the Educational industry for more than five years now.

We’ve recently created an educational app called School App. School App lets students and tutors to keep in touch. The app offers a bunch of details about teachers, clubs, sport activities, and so on. We’ve developed iOS and Android apps, along with a web solution.