Creating an online educational platform - how to get started (on a minimal budget)?
Hello fellow IHs!
A dream of mine, is to create an educational platform - much like udemy or skillshare. The site would eventually contain educational material in all kinds of categories, but for starters it would only contain courses made by me, in the topic of programming. Monetizing the site is a goal, but the main point is providing quality education, mostly free.
The thing that I am struggling with, is that I don't have much of a budget, and I don't want to get investors, because then it would become a primary goal for the platform to make money. But, to start the site, I would need a LMS (Learning Management System). Most of those are in the price range that I cannot afford.
Also, I want to add parts in a course, where people would have to submit some of their work, to prove, that what they have learned, they put in practice. For example, after learning about what a function is in programming, they would have to submit code snippets, where they declare a function, which does a certain job. I am not sure which LMS supports this functionality.
As a developer myself, I want to code the platform, but because of the things I mentioned above, I would probably have to code the LMS myself. Are there any tips, on how to get started, and how would an MVP look like?
Do you want to create a marketplace or an online school?
If it's a marketplace you can check out Open edX. It's the platform behind edx.org, if you want to code as part of the experience, I might try to build on this one. It's an open-source project and many things are already done for you.
If it's a school you want to set up, checkout LearnWorlds, feature-wise they're the best I've found when I researched that area.
Greg, I am happy to chat and give you some ideas. I run an LMS company and even though you cannot afford the cost, I am always happy to chat with fellow indie hackers and share ideas and tips.
Coding your own LMS will be a huge undertaking and to build something production ready, you are looking at may be a year and not to mention that you don't know what you don't know about the edtech industry.
Feel free to email/contact me and I will share some of my experience with you.
If you are looking for a free (as in free beer) LMS system you should look to MOODLE which is a free (as i freee speech) software : https://moodle.org/
They have a huge "customer" base and you can find a lot of resources online. Thousands of Universities are using it around the globe. You have to catch the pedagogical philiosphy behind it and then you can use it from very simple to very complex courses.
I love this idea! For me, I am doing something along the lines of an educational site as well, and since I wanted something very specific in the LMS, I decided to code the platform myself. So I guess it depends on what features you want, how much you know, and how much time/money you can spend.
Eduflow (not affilated) may be something try out. WordPress also contains some LMS plugins (some free, some not), although I'm not sure how good those are.
That’s a cool idea. I recently stumbled upon exercism.io where one can upload their code for review. Maybe you can use it for inspiration.
This is very interesting tool, thanks!
It's a dream of mine as well, to develop a competitor to Udemy (Skillshare sucks).
I think an MVP for this kind of thing, especially with features such as, having assignments, quizzes, exams, is going to take a long time to develop.
The great thing is that, online learning is not going to slow down any time soon.
For MVP, I think the most simple thing would be to host one of your videos up on a webpage. Something that lets someone view an educational video that you've made.
I don't know what tech you'd like to use but I'd start with that as your goal. Once that's up, you can think about more complicated "features".
Things like, authentication, (login / signup), organising videos into categories, payments, etc etc.
I'm sure someone else here can help with the marketing side of things.