What is eLearning Software and How It Helps Your Business Grow
Posted Sep 22, 2022 12 min read
According to eLearning industry statistics, the MOOC market is currently worth $5.16 billion. It is projected to grow at an annual rate of 32.09% until 2025.
These statistics inspire and back up the idea that eLearning is our future. Moreover, eLearning is gradually transforming into new formats and models, with such trends as mobile learning, scenario-based learning, gamification, and personalization.
Sounds interesting? Let us share Dewais experience in developing such solutions to dive deeper into an exciting world of eLearning software, its examples, and benefits for your business.
What Is eLearning?
So, what is eLearning software? In simple words, eLearning is any type of learning delivered through digital resources. Elearning diminishes any geographical borders and allows us to learn anything from anywhere.
Let’s take the school industry as an example. According to McKinsey, school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic affected approximately 1.6 billion learners. For this reason, many educational organizations had to rapidly implement eLearning strategies to provide learning continuity. However, they have faced a lot of challenges such as limited access of students to technological prerequisites, uncertainties about student data protection, lack of financial support for eLearning, etc.
That’s why, before choosing eLearning authoring tools for your organization, you need to involve a three-step approach to ensure that your eLearning strategy will meet your business needs.
- Understand why you need eLearning and have a clear vision for its implementation
- Decide on the eLearning format and process
- Improve eLearning solutions step-by-step in small iterations
- Launch a continuous improvement process
That’s where eLearning software comes to help. Let’s see what eLearning software is, what an eLearning authoring tool is, and how it works.
How Does eLearning Software Work?
eLearning software is a tool created for businesses, schools, universities, and other organizations to help them manage employee training and development and create custom courses depending on the specific needs. Usually, eLearning platforms also provide different management, communication, evaluation, and monitoring tools that optimize the learning process.
Usually, eLearning software includes the following features:
- Authentication/registration via email or social media
- Viewing courses
- Filtering courses by category, subcategory, language, price, etc
- Reading information about courses
- Enrolling on courses
- Profile creation
- Display of recommended, recently viewed, and completed courses in the profile
- Calendaring with upcoming classes
- Displaying streaming web video
- Chatting
- Notifications
- Certification
- Reports of activities
- Evaluation tools
- Managing users
- Managing courses
We’ll describe these features in more detail below, so keep reading.
Keep reading to get more in-depth insights about each feature!
Learning management enables teachers to create different assignments, prepare and present lectures, guidelines, and presentations, as well as provide detailed feedback and integrate their systems with third-party tools.
Learning management systems provide a variety of possibilities for teachers. They allow to create and process assignments, prepare and deliver lectures, do presentations, share feedback, and integrate third-party tools to facilitate the teaching process.
LMS is all about peer-to-peer communication between teachers and students and optimizing their learning processes as much as possible.
Pros and Cons of eLearning Software
Of course, there is no one size fits all solution for eLearning. That’s why before implementing eLearning software in your organization, you need to research all the pros and cons and decide if it’s a fit for you at this moment.
Let’s see the main advantages and disadvantages of eLearning software.
Pros of eLearning software
How can eLearning benefit your business?
- Saves money
First of all, eLearning is beneficial from a financial point of view. It helps you reduce resources for trainers, save employee time and money on training rooms, travel, catering, and materials. All you employees need to have is access to a computer or a mobile phone, and, of course, free time.
- Reduces learning time
According to statistics, when compared to traditional learning, eLearning reduces your employee’s learning time by as much as 60%. To be more specific, eLearning saves time on the following things: Starting and wrapping up learning sessions, travel time, breaks and meals, teaching to a group, install, so your employees or students have more time on learning itself and can focus more on the process.
- Provides a risk-free environment
There is a common misconception that you can’t simulate a risk-free environment with remote learning. However, it’s not true. According to McKinsey, simulations can help students make mistakes without the risk. How are simulations created? You need to set up a realistic environment and situations similar to day-to-day work with real-time or interactive video conferences to provide a simulated working environment.
- Offers scalability and personalization
After creating eLearning modules, you can scale and extend them to as many employees as you need in different languages. In such a way, you don’t have to spend time finding instructors and get real-time feedback on the performance of courses as well as track the progress of individual employees.
Cons of eLearning software
Everything is not so simple though. eLearning is not an exception. Here are the main disadvantages and risks of eLearning you should be aware of.
- It requires administrative costs for set up and maintenance
First, you need to learn how to use learning software and educate your employees, which may take time. Also, converting all the teachers to an e-learning model requires a transitional period. Many teachers still prefer on-site learning and may find it difficult to get used to new technology. So, make sure to spare costs for training on the system, as well as administrative expenses to maintain the software and personalize it according to your needs.
- It requires knowledge of programming
Your organization will need coding skills to customize the eLearning software and make it meet your personalized requirements. As many systems require backend coding and the ability to control the user experience, and add new features, integrations, and updates, you will need to hire developers with technical knowledge.
Now that you know all the pros and cons, let’s move on to the main types of eLearning software.
Types of eLearning Software
Depending on the size of your organization and your unique needs, you can choose among different types of eLearning software.
Online tutoring platform
Online tutoring platform is similar to the eLearning marketplace, where you can choose the right tutor, set up a learning schedule, and set up automatic billing. The key features of online tutoring platform include:
- Tutor profile management with experience description, contact details, qualifications, schedule, etc.
- Student profile with contact information, needs, and areas they want to study
- Attendance tracking to track the number of lessons visited
- Lesson notes
- Online payment system
- Reports with detailed analytics on the number of students, revenue, sessions, etc
- Notifications
Learning management system (LMS)
Learning management systems (LMS) focus on academic uses in schools. It gives access to the learning materials from anywhere and helps monitor the analytics and performance, collect reports, run assessments, and improve communication between teachers and students. Its main features include:
- Creation and distribution of content
- Sharing and storage of multimedia
- Profiles of both students and teachers
- Dashboards with analytics and customizable reports
- Calendar with schedules and upcoming activities
- Peer-to-peer feedback and collaborative learning
- White labeling to be used by other organizations
Video conferencing software
Video conferencing software is a video classroom app with live video streaming where everyone can join the virtual classroom for mutual collaboration and learning сontent. Its main features include:
- Video calling
- Audio calling
- Recordings of the sessions
- Screen sharing
- Text chat
- Multimedia presentation
- Scheduling
Main Features of eLearning Software
To wrap everything up, all these types of eLearning software share some common features. They will help you answer the question, ’What is eLearning authoring software,’ and understand how it works.
Content management
Make sure that the learning management system will allow you to upload your presentations (PPT), courses (SCORM), video tutorials (FLV, MP4), Flash clips (SWF), and audio tracks (MP3, WAV), as well as supplementary documents (PDF, DOC, XLS).
Also, some learning management systems have a special dashboard, where you can quickly develop courses, quizzes, interactions, and dialogue simulations.
User management
eLearning software should provide you with functionality where you can set up your organization structure, invite users, set user roles, set up administrators, as well as activate or deactivate users.
Training management and schedule
In eLearning software, you can select users by their team, job title, country or set custom filtering parameters. If you have different courses for different employees, you can filter the employee list by job title and quickly enroll all warehouse workers in the course. Also, such systems have an integrated calendar that helps you invite users to training sessions, remind them about upcoming events, and notify them about schedule changes.
Сustomization and integrations
It’s great when you can customize your eLearning software with your account branding to make it match your corporate identity and raise brand awareness. Also, you can assign different languages and translate the user portal into any other language to reach non-English speaking users.
Types of eLearning Content
Learning can come in different shapes and forms. Here are the most common ones.
- Training videos
Video is the most popular content format nowadays. Video-based learning continues to become more and more widely used and effective. According to the Google UK report, over 60% of smartphone users watch video content on a regular basis, marking a significant shift in behavior that transcends generations. Video learning enhances creativity, increases engagement, and helps perceive the educational content faster and better.
- Dialogue simulations
A dialogue simulation is an interactive exercise that imitates a real conversation: a customer, a staff member, or a colleague. It helps people improve their communication skills without damaging the reputation of the client and company.
- AR and VR simulations
AR and VR technologies can become one of the most effective features of your eLearning software. That’s all for the reason of deep immersion, the safety of training, cost reduction, and easy access to any topics. However, you better keep in mind that the production cost of AR/VR content is quite high since it requires plenty of time and effort.
5 Best Software and Tools for eLearning
Let’s now review the most popular software for learning and its functionality. What is the best eLearning software? It will help you find the answer.
Moodle
Moodle is a free learning management system that provides educators, administrators and students with a secure and robust learning environment. It’s an expert system that fits educational institutions and K-12 perfectly.
Moodle is regularly updated and maintained by its active community, professional engineers and partners. Moreover, it’s open-source, which means it can be scaled and customized according to organizational needs. The LMS is available in over 100 languages and has a fully customizable design and layout.
Canvas
What are eLearning authoring tools? Canvas is one of the fastest-growing education technology companies today. It’s a cloud-based system that complies with institutions of different sizes as well as universities and different educational programs. It’s an emerging technology in education that helps teachers innovate and students succeed.
Users claim Canvas is more user-centered and easier to navigate than Moodle. Teachers can create and store lectures within its virtual classroom, communicate with students, and track progress. On top of that, Canvas has a user-friendly interface and a lot of practical guides on how to use it.
Google Classroom
Google Classroom is a web service Google developed for schools. It definitely simplifies the process of sharing files between students and teachers. It already gathered over 100 million downloads and became one of the top tools for teachers and students during the lockdown.
Technically, Google Classroom is not an LMS. It’s used mostly as a digital organizer where teachers and students can keep class materials. However, Google regularly updates it with different features, turning it into a sophisticated learning management system.
Adobe Captivate
Adobe Captivate is a tool that allows the creation of digital content. Some examples are software demonstrations, software simulations, branched scenarios, and randomized quizzes in Small Web Formats and HTML5 formats. One of its most significant benefits is that it empowers you to easily create all kinds of fully-responsive eLearning content, without programming.
isEazy
isEazy is a new cloud-based authoring tool to create interactive and professional e-learning courses without hassle. All the courses are 100% customizable and easily editable with different corporate templates and customization options. Also, they provide diverse distribution. You can choose what works best for you – from downloading a SCORM package to utilizing in-built course distribution and learner-tracking platform.
eLearning Software Development. Our Case Study
We at Dewais have dealt with numerous projects related to various industries and business objectives. Here, we will describe Lingu eLearning platform case study. We will provide you with our insights, the challenges we faced, and the technologies we used to meet our client’s requirements.
The initial goal was to build a robust web platform for a leading Norwegian language training provider. The client wanted to develop a digital solution for more flexible, scalable, and engaging education service.
Our team consisting of six professionals worked on this project for six months within the dedicated development model. The key challenge was to join the client’s engineering team and build several products in the shortest time possible. Thus, our specialists’ onboarding was lightning fast.
The effective work of our dedicated team and the developers’ extensive expertise helped the client to fulfill all tasks. We managed to keep the budget within reasonable limits and meet the deadlines.
To complete a full-stack web development project, our engineers worked with powerful and future-proof technologies, including Ruby, Rails, React, Postgress, and others.
As a result, we managed to deliver the desired solutions, and the client successfully launched their product. Here are the key development stages we dealt with.
- Architecture phase. Our specialists guided the architecture stage and provided the required consultations.
- MVP. We helped the client meet strict deadlines and launch their MVP on time.
- Several platforms development. Our engineers came up with result-driven solutions for multiple MVP platforms.
Dewais creates eLearning software that helps your organization grow faster
To conclude, eLearning software is an effective tool for growing your employees inside the company and improving their knowledge while saving costs and time. That’s why before developing such a product, we recommend learning about all the available solutions on the market and their pros and cons.
We at Dewais have experience in different industries, including learning. We will help you create requirements for the eLearning system depending on your unique business needs and come up with the product development roadmap from MVP to large-scale solutions. Contact us right now for a free consultation!
