There has been tremendous growth in the demand & usage of e-learning websites over the last decade.
Talking about the growth & popularity of e-learning websites, there are 2 major reasons that make e-learning platform a success:
- Ease of learning for the students as they can learn anytime & anywhere they want.
- Low cost of investment for website development & infrastructure required to run an e-learning business.
If you too are planning to set up an e-learning website, there are a few things that you need to consider before you hire a website developer & get your project started.
Here, we have shared 10 essential features that your e-learning website must have in order to run your business smoothly.
Let’s get started.
#1 Easy course creation
Of course, having an e-learning website can take away most of your manual tasks by automating them but you do need to put your time on course creation.
It is therefore essential to have an easy way to manage the courses on your e-learning website.
As an administrator, you should be able to:
- Add new courses
- Edit existing courses
- Delete or disable outdated courses
Even if you don’t possess any technical knowledge, you must be able to manage the courses easily in order to streamline your processes.
If your website doesn’t allow you to manage the courses hassle-free, you may end up having an obsolete website with outdated information.
#2 Responsive design
As we already mentioned above that one of the major benefits of building an e-learning website is the ease of learning for students because they can study anywhere and anytime, your platform must be easily accessible for them on all kinds of smart devices such as mobiles & tablets.
In other words, the mobility of your students must be the top priority.
Therefore, you must make sure that your website builder is able to develop a responsive website.
A responsive website will not only help your students to access your platform on any device, but it will also help your website to gain higher rankings on search engines.
Recommended post: What are the benefits of responsive website design
#3 Message board
It would be a great idea to make your e-learning website a hub of productive discussions so that your students can learn from one another.
A message board can help your e-learning platform in many ways such as:
- Allowing students to ask their questions freely.
- Allowing you to answer their queries.
- Enabling students to view whether their query has been answered in the past already so that they can simply refer to the mentioned solution instead of posting the same question again.
#4 Video conferencing
For conducting one-to-one classes, you may also add a feature of video conferencing on your e-learning website. It will help you to add another way to monetize your website.
You can create one-to-one courses and encourage your students or participants to enroll in these courses.
#5 Online quiz
An online quiz is an integral part of any e-learning website development. After the students finish any course on your website, they must be able to perform an online assessment or quiz.
Therefore, you must request your website developer to create a feature of an online quiz on your e-learning portal.
The online quiz feature on your website must have below essential features:
- The ability for students to view the total number of questions along with the passing score.
- The ability for students to perform the quiz in breaks. They must be able to pause the quiz and resume it later when they are ready.
- The ability for students to view their results after they finish the quiz or assessment.
- The students must get an e-certificate when they pass the quiz.
- The ability for students to view their overall score along with the correct answers at the end of the quiz.
- The quiz must be 100% responsive for all the smart devices such as mobiles & tablets to enable the students to access the quiz on the go.
#6 e-Certificates
For all the students who successfully attended the courses & got a minimum passing score on the quiz, they must be able to receive an e-certificate instantly in their inbox.
At the same time, you as an administrator must be able to change the format of e-certificates.
Benefits of issuing e-certificates:
- The students get their certificates almost instantly.
- You don’t need to invest any money in stationery or printing.
- You save a lot of time because you don’t need to issue a certificate to each student manually.
- You can change the format of your certificate quickly.
#7 Reporting
Robust reporting is another essential feature that an e-learning website must have.
With the help of a reporting feature, you can perform the below functions:
- View & download all the students’ details.
- View & download all the transactions for any specific date range.
- View & download all the courses & quizzes.
For any online business to be successful, easy yet robust reporting is essential. Only experience website builders can provide you with a robust reporting system. Therefore, you must hire only experienced web developers to build your website.
#8 Make up lessons
Some of your students may want to request you to arrange extra classes to make up their missed lessons. Therefore, your e-learning website must also have a feature for all the students to request a make-up lesson so that they don’t need to contact you over the phone or email.
You can provide these make-up lessons either free of cost or charge them for each additional lesson.
#9 Create students
Not everybody is comfortable paying online.
Some of your students or their parents may contact you to enroll them offline. Therefore, your website backend must provide you an option to create students manually if they were not able to enroll & pay online due to any reason.
It will help your database to synchronize both online & offline registrations.
#10 Students' Area
Your e-learning website must also have a students’ area for them to log in and view & manage their activities.
Once you create any student or they enroll themselves online, they must be able to receive an email notification along with the log in credentials and a link to login students’ area.
A student area on any e-learning website may have below important links/features:
- Edit profile
- View assessment
- View results
- View & download certificates
- Request for make-up lessons
