e-Learning Development Challenges Faced by eLearning Solution Providers

| Last Updated December 21, 2021 - by Softcrylic under application engineering

EdTech Industry is highly versatile with disruptive innovation affecting and effecting all aspects of modern Education. E-Learning Solution Providers go beyond the extreme to continuously engage students, tutors, administrators, parents, legislators and accommodate emerging business changes in the Education Industry.

Developing and scaling-up technically advanced adaptive learning platforms involve addressing a wide range of challenges. Here we have listed a few set of challenges faced by e-Learning Solution Providers across the e-Learning development life cycle along with suggested workarounds.

Application Development

Continuous Integration

Continuous integration (CI) eliminates risk from earlier stages of development cycle. Continuous Integration minimizes development overheads and improves efficiency of synchronized product roll outs and code coverage.

8% to 14% – Gap between desired and actual hourly deployment time

DevOps

Adoption of DevOps has proven to be effective in achieving faster time to market, especially when collaborating across cultural barriers and working with multiple internal, external stakeholders and 3rd party vendors.

Organizations that adopt DevOps report

46x More frequent deployments

96x Faster recovery

440x Faster lead time

Software Quality Assurance

Device Fragmentation

Developing and scaling-up code that is modular, scalable, responsive, battery efficient yet stringent on memory is no more a fancy ask. Service oriented Architecture on Cloud supports scalability and distributed computing.

24,000 – There are more than 24,000 different Android smartphones

Software Testing

Adopt a rigorous software testing strategy. Launch continuous testing to assure quality of Agile projects with frequent deployment. Use Automated Testing Frameworks and practise “shift-left” to infuse quality early in the project and support scalability & growth.

$10,000 – Cost of a bug during requirements-gathering phase is $100, $1500 during QA testing phase, and during production $10,000.

Integration

API Dev & Testing

Always stick with modern technology stack. An e-learning platform integrates with adaptive learning systems, formative assessment tools, analytic tools, content syndication engines etc. Consider using Micro Services with Containerization if you have robust functionality.

50% – By 2020, 50% of Managed APIs Projected to be Event-Driven

Data Integrity

Cloud computing has its advantages. But if not managed well it triggers vulnerabilities. Secure Backend Services, API Calls with Token based Authentication. Improve coding standards & add SSO, role-based privileges, encryption for preventing un-authorized access and data leakage.

$4 million – On average, the cost of a breach has risen to $4 million per incident – up 29% since 2013.

Analytics

Data Diversity

e-Learning platforms generate structured and unstructured data such as learners’ navigation, heat maps, scores, course progression, comments, reviews etc. Use Hadoop to analyse, text analytics to discover sentiments, visualize using Tableau or Power BI and use insights in real-time to sustain a competitive advantage.

93% – By 2022, 93% of all data in the digital universe will be unstructured.

User Behavioral Analysis

Context and Personalization in real-time maximizes the success of user focused applications. Taking advantage of Learners’ clues is helpful in personalizing and offering contextual help material. Analyzing behavioral data for insights improves usability, performance, functionality, engagement, cost of development and even visual appearances.

33% – Only 33% of new features have a positive impact on outcomes, 33% have no impact, and the final 33% actually have a negative impact

Maintenance

Security

An average of 200,000 new malware programs Monitoring are launched every day. Security is of prime concern while working with sensitive data. Use oAuth, multi-factor authentication, encryption at source, network and infrastructure monitoring to proactively address compliance, downtime and productivity issues.

$3.8 million – The average consolidated total cost of a data breach is $3.8 million.

Monitoring

Minor config changes or breakage across interdependent cloud services, APIs, web services could severely affect availability, performance and user experiences. Rely on sophisticated live monitoring tools, custom hooks, alerts mechanisms to pre-emptively address downtime.

$700 billion – North American companies lose up to $700 billion a year related to IT outages.

Launch

Compliance

e-Learning platforms are subjected to several industry Standards like ESSA, AICC, SCORM, xAPI and compliances COPPA, FDA, PCI-DSS, ISO, Tin-Can API. To avoid compliance issues, train developers, get them certified, and take necessary development or audit help from 3rd party technology service providers.

$1 million – Software “license true ups” (i.e. paying for the gap between what a company uses and their license) regularly clears the $1 million mark.

Performance

e-Learning platforms host layers of rich media content for delivering interactive user experiences. Poor coding, ineffective testing and multiple streaming of heavy content could cause potential performance issues.

64% – 64% of smartphone users expect pages to load in less than 4 seconds

Project Management

Scope Creep

Scope creep is caused by lack of defined goals, poor communication levels and continued enhancements. Systematic re-baselining the scope, change protocol, and excellent documentation help in tackling scope creep.

34% – Over 1 in 3 (34%) projects have no baseline.

Agile Delivery

Though Agile projects are 28% more successful than traditional projects, only 11% of organizations employ Agile all the time. Globally distributed teams especially could achieve faster time to market and increased team productivity.

14% – The average percentage of projects that are deemed failures is 14%.

Content Development

Content Collaboration

Converting abstract knowledge into engaging digital learning content demands experts’ availability, process maturity, efficiency & syndication of 3rd party content, so that immersive learning experiences are created.

$507 – Average cost of developing a digital learning material is $507 per Hour

Digitization

Millennials and Gen Z have shorter attention span. The digitization, design, storytelling, animated rich media content needs to be created, proof-read, tested for seamless rendering for a guaranteed omni-channel user-acceptance.

100-160 hours – 1 hour of consumable online learning content takes 100-160 hours to produce.

Design

UI/UX

Use automated visual testing to deliver device-agnostic apps with responsive user interface, impressive usability, consistent branding for 1000+ web & mobile browsers, screen resolutions and operating systems.

6 Billion – # of smartphones in 2017 and 50 billion IOT Connected devices by 2020

Architecture

Adopt a Cloud-First strategy to launch high available, scalable, multi-tenant applications by leveraging IaaS, PaaS on AWS and Azure Cloud Environments.

$216 billion – The aggregate amount of cloud shift in 2020 is estimated to reach $216 billion