Mobile applications are becoming an increasingly popular way to access information and engage with the user. They can be used for a variety of purposes such as entertainment, communication, E-Learning, health care, and more. One area where mobile apps have had a significant impact is in the world of learning. E-learning platforms allow instructors to create courses that are available on mobile devices and other portable electronic media tools like tablets. This opens up new possibilities for engaging students through their own devices in real-time without having to leave their homes or classrooms! The E-Learning mobile application that Ileaf has created will help students solve the problem of not using their e-learning tools. The application will make the tools more accessible and easier to use. The application will also help students learn more effectively and to stay on top of their coursework. The application will provide a convenient way for students to keep track of their online coursework and changes to their course schedules. The application will also provide customizable viewing and study tools to help students learn better. We have seen many kinds of e-learning applications around the globe. One of our clients has a very unique type of e-learning website which is very successful in its field. What our client required from us was a mobile application for its iOS and Android.
The Challenge
To build a mobile application that must be far smoother and faster than its the parent (website).
Our team had to build a mobile application for an e-learning course website which is built with Shopify and WordPress. On the website the user could only pay for the course, they need and download the soft copy of the course contents. The requirement given to us was that it should also have all the modern facilities an e-learning application provides nowadays. This is an important feature that was not on their website.
Our basic challenges were can be summarized
- To build a mobile application that could provide more features to the current e-Learners and to pull a new user base by showcasing the mobile application features.
- Need to pull all the existing courses in various categories to a new table to load it faster and smoother in our mobile application.
- To make the Courses available offline and online and within the application.
- Course progression should be made based on user learning. Our team has to track the progression of their course based on the content tracking.
- Course videos should resume from the last time frame when the user quits the application.
- After completing the course the user will have an assessment based on the course the mobile application should keep track of the exam with the answers and keep track of the time left for each question.
- After the user completes the test successfully, the user will have a course completion certificate issued digitally and can download the course completion certificate instantly within the mobile application itself.
iLeaf's Process
To solve the objectives for the mobile application, our team decided to build it on flutter. The primary objective was to provide a user-friendly experience to the users. For that, the application must be speedy in loading and it must be very smooth. So if we build the application smooth and quick then users will hold on to the app more.
To achieve the first object we used:
Cron:
We pulled all the numerous courses from Shopify to our tables so that we could customize the course categories and list with more efficiency and provide more filters for users. This helped us provide an efficient way to list the courses and now the application loads more quickly than the Shopify listing API.
Webhooks:
Even though we pulled the data using Cron there was still a challenge that existed when our client uploads more courses every week. In this case, the user should not have a delay in viewing the new course for 10 minutes (like the duration of every Cron job). So we thought of using Webhooks API. When our client now uploads new courses to the current website, within seconds it will be synced to our table and thus the user won’t see any delay in viewing the courses.
Flutter Plugins:
We are developing the application in flutter and since dart is a very young language the dependencies for many SDKs are not available in flutter. In our case, our client used Crisp for the customer services help desk. Crisp only offers SDK support for iOS and Android natively. So our new challenge was to build a crips flutter plugin. We succeeded in that too.
Course Management:
The course contents were already available on the website in the form of video URLs and document URLs. Apart from that, we had to build everything and it had to be no lesser than other e-learning apps. We managed to customize the course tables since we were loading the contents to our custom table from Shopify. Users can download the entire course. Then we have to asynchronously download the course contents. So while downloading the course content we made a model keep track of the time duration and current progression field. So when a user stops the video, his video keyframe seconds will be noted in the model which is stored locally as well as every five minutes we will sync the models to our server and thus we can track the course progression both online and offline.
Then we had to build a course assessment that will have the questions from the course which the user enrolled for. Each question will have a period to answer and for every correct answer there will be marks and for every wrong answer, there will be negative marks. Every course has a minimum score. To complete the course the user has to achieve it and once done the user will have a digital course completion certificate that can be downloaded instantly. If the user failed in the assessment then that user will be forced to take the course again.
Technologies Used:
PHP, WordPress, Shopify, Flutter, Stripe, Crisp
The Result
Cleaner More Intuitive Mobile Application:
The result was a cleaner, smoother and faster e-learning application that helps the current user and the existing user to learn from their mobile application and not only from their desktop.
Easy Course Management:
Since the application made the facility to download the course offline available, it helps to keep track of their progress. More registrations bloomed and we were able to add new e-learners to our application. Since the course has a video resume ability users can now continue their course anytime since all the course details are synced. Users can instantly get the course completion certificate and they can publish it immediately on any social media, declaring proudly that they are qualified professionals. This improved their analytics and thus both our client and the users are happy and so are we.
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