ELearning has existed for years as a future-driven and sophisticated facet of the educational industry, but only recently it evolved faster with new features, value additions and learning experience design elements. While traditional classroom settings are still there holding mainstream education all over the world, eLearning is fast gaining popularity and enjoying a bigger market share of the education industry than ever before.
Several factors played a crucial role in popularizing the eLearning and transforming it into a key constituent of the educational sector. The emergence of mobile apps coupled up with augmented and virtual reality, more scope of incorporating personalized learning experience and several other factors together made eLearning more sophisticated and future-ready. This is why all those so-called must-have features of the learning apps are also fast transforming.
As the vast majority of online content is now accessed through mobile apps, the popularity and enhanced buzz around the eLearning mobile apps are quite normal. But are the eLearning apps offering the same age-old features or are they offering new and innovative features now? To answer this, here we are going to explain the five must-have features for any modern eLearning app of our time.
Video Content
Just think about the vast popularity of educational videos across video platforms like YouTube and social media channels such as Facebook. This could only be possible thanks to the increasing demand of audiovisual content for explaining learning topics than old-words text.
While text content is central to the educational curriculum and courseware, video contents is fast emerging as the supplementary mode of content for fast learning. No wonder, for any professional mobile app development company engaged in building eLearning apps, video content is an invincible part of the content strategy.
Interaction-Based Intuitive Content
Intuitive learning with easy interactions is likely to have a better learning effect and reciprocation from the learners than the so-called one-sided remittance of knowledge and explanation. While all modern curriculums and advanced courses across the disciplines are more focused on making learners learn quickly through interactions, eLearning apps are particularly benefited by this approach. To make content more mobile-optimized and interactive for the learners, the eLearning app designers and developers need to consider the following aspects.
- The in-app content should be optimized for mobile viewing, mobile reading and mobile interactions.
- The in-app content should be designed and developed by keeping the target audience in mind.
- The eLearning app content should also offer some interesting statistics and engaging facts to revoke the interest of the learners.
- The eLearning content should be designed to help to learn by learners of all levels and different IQ levels.
Elearning Gamification
As of now, you must have known that gamification is not about games but creating a sense of competition in learning. There are hundreds of eLearning apps that are already using gamification as an active element to boost engagement and committed learning. Since games are naturally interest and motivation booster, the game logic and game-like competitiveness can be utilized to increase motivation and interaction in the learning process. This is why any app willing to engage its audience early and from the very start should use gamification.
To integrate gamification techniques effectively in your eLearning app, you must have a grasp on the wants, wishes, behavioral elements and intents of your subscribers to a certain extent. The use of analytics can help you to know about the learners more deeply and to use effective gamification techniques accordingly. Some of the key gamification techniques that eLearning apps can be benefited from include scores, avatars, gifts, coupons, progress levels, virtual currencies, performance-based ranking, etc.
Live Learning Sessions and Sessions
Now, the increased data speed, real-time communication and collaboration and a host of other advanced technologies made interactive education possible. The live sessions and tutorials have proven to be extremely handy and effective in improving the skills and learning the ability of the students, and hence, they are so popular among the eLearning students now. The emergence of virtual reality has made it possible for the eLearning curriculum’s to introduce virtual classrooms where learners can communicate and collaborate in real-time.
Integrated Social Media Platforms
Every student of our time is likely to be a regular or frequent user of at least one or two social media platforms. The social media penetration has achieved a phenomenal proportion through the past few years. How can your eLearning app overlook the importance of social media in learning environments? Actually, by integrating popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp and a few others, you can help students collaborate and communicate better and more proactively than ever before.
This is why it is imperative for the eLearning apps to create their own social media pages or channels. For example, an eLearning app can create a YouTube channel with the provision of allowing students access to classroom videos or audio contents or visual explanations. Social media content sharing can actually help an eLearning app to reach out to new users besides engaging the existing ones.
Personalized Learning
Since mobile apps have emerged as highly personal tools to access content and features based upon personal choices, eLearning apps are also taking advantage of personalized content creation and learning experience for their learner-users. There is no wonder in the fact that the learning engagement today largely depends upon personalized educational content and learning environment.
A modern eLearning app offering highly personalized content and learning methodology should make use of various techniques and methods in a variety of ways. From using feedback systems, mock tests, customized contents to using special behavioral approaches, personalized eLearning should utilize all possible options.
Conclusion
You can argue that besides the features as mentioned above, there are still many nice-to-have features that we should have discussed here. Well, we expect many of those futuristic and advanced eLearning features to be the must-have features anytime soon. At the same time, we decided not to focus upon certain commonplace features like push notifications that are extremely common across all types of mobile apps.
Author Bio:
Paul Osborne is Chief Technology Officer at Cerdonis Technologies LLC, a leading mobile app development company in USA expert in iOS and Android platforms. During his spare time, he likes to read and share his knowledge on the latest innovations and trends which help web and mobile app developers.
