Building an MVP for Virtual Classroom: Features That Guarantee Wider Adoption

13 mins read: Education on pen and paper may not be a thing of the past, but classrooms have progressed to tech-powered educational tools to make learning more immersive. Investing in digital classrooms is a big step for traditional businesses because of upfront investments. Here MVP development helps businesses test the acceptance of their solutions before hitting the ground with an all-in investment. This piece tells you about the essential features you need to include in your MVP to get a clear picture of the market. Read on:

Technology is reshaping the way learners approached education. Given the robust growth and expansion of the education and learning industry, it was a matter of time that tech tools enhanced the traditional educational assets and made learning more collaborative, immersive, interactive and easily accessible from anywhere in the world.

Technology has moved fast enough to make traditional learning accessible across devices through EdTech software and millions are reaping the benefit of it – from educational institutes to corporates, learners and teachers.

But developing a successful digital classroom MVP requires a harmonious blend of strategy, user need analysis, blueprint development and attentive execution. Minimum Viable Products or MVP for virtual classrooms are a wonderful tool to test and fine-tune products and functionalities before getting into a full-scale development cycle. In a traditional industry like education, businesses better start small and focus on core, essential capabilities through virtual classroom MVP to assimilate feedback from real-life users, leaving room for making improvements as per the received feedback.

This piece is centred around the process of building a virtual classroom MVP from concept to real-world classroom use. We are also going to talk about emerging trends in this sector, must include features and strategies to integrate success. Let’s begin:

A grandviewresearch report predicts that the global EdTech market will reach USD 348,410.6 million by 2030 with a growth of CAGR 13.6% for the period 2024-2030.

Here, we must understand one thing, the competitor for virtual classrooms is traditional classroom learning itself. And the USP of its competitor (here traditional learning) lies in face-to-face interaction, socializing, hands-on activities, direct teacher/instructor guidance – elements that are difficult to replicate in online education.

If we were to talk about one crucial factor that determines success across every segment of the digital learning industry, that’s end-user concentration – a proven metric across many trusted eLearning statistics. This is what predominantly determines and influences product development strategies, features, pricing and overall growth of the industry.

Here’s where MVP plays a major role in digital classroom success.

Importance of Selecting the Right MVP Features for Digital Classrooms

An MVP follows a simple formula – to build a successful product, businesses need to understand the user needs first. So, the role of MVP in EdTech development is to help businesses like yours validate your ideas before investing hefty money, time and resources on a full-fledged product.

Building an MVP should be a strategic move for businesses as it helps software developers test, evolve and iterate the solutions based on realistic feedback from early adopters. For the business, it proves to be a lean methodology to gain valuable insights into user needs, without the risk of investing extensive time and cost. Do not aim to blow a few whistles with your MVP, keep it to the point, simple and fair; do not overload with secondary features.

Virtual classrooms are a crucial part of the eLearning industry where there are multiple players fighting to make their mark. To stand out amidst a herd of other providers, you need dedicated experts who can integrate user-friendly and solid features in your MVP that targets the main problems your users face.

Developers must focus on building an MVP when the solution is ready to go into the development stage. They must develop a core product with basic features because that will help them launch the MVP faster and fetch feedback if the users find the product interactive and the critically intended features satisfies their core needs.

A core designing team of product engineer, product architect, senior developers and designers must brainstorm and decide what features a digital classroom MVP should consist of.

Selecting the right features for the MVP is crucial because they determine the product’s first impression in the market. It also ensures that you end up meeting the core user needs with minimal resources. The goal of an MVP is to reach your product to the market as soon as possible. This is why you must indulge in effective feature selection so that your project is able to avoid the chances of overcomplicating the product, launch on time and avoid unnecessary costs. Prioritize user experience from the first, deliver them the exact solution for their most pressing challenge.

The other side of it is that simpler features in the MVP allow developers to iterate solutions quickly and integrate feedback seamlessly, easing the way for continuous improvement and delivery. The product-market-fit established ensured at such early stages contributes largely to product success later. The crucial nature of feature selection is in its capacity to enhance the utility of MVP features and present a highly scalable and adaptable form of these features to the market.

As leader of an Edtech business, you must understand that successful online learning business needs an agile and responsive MVP strategy for virtual classroom software. Also, the phase of transition from MVP to a fully developed solution is a path of continuous discovery and iteration. While the MVP gathers authentic user feedback, it’s your job to integrate it effectively in your end product so that your early adopters turn into paid users.

Let’s now talk about the most important features that can be used to create an MVP for online learning.

Must Have Features of a Virtual Classroom MVP

To compete with physical classrooms, virtual classrooms should be razor-focussed on delivering immersive experiences with cohesive learning. The minimum viable product for e-learning platforms should include these basic features:

Basic Features:

These include features that are essential for identifying learner and educator personas and enabling seamless onboarding to the digital classroom setup.

• Signup and Login: Build multi-sign in features combining email Id, phone number, passwords, social media integrations etc. Also include password recovery mechanism and verification elements to verify user personas.
• Search Bar: Design a robust and easy-to-use search bar with a wide range of in-built filters to seamlessly access courses, learning materials, educators and other respective users.
• User Profile: Build an easy-to-fill user profile dashboad that documents personal details of users (both learners and educators) including their age, gender, payment methods, qualifications, details of courses they are a part of.
• Menu: Build a smooth learning flow for your learners by segmenting content like courses, tasks, tests, evaluations and certifications etc. in thematic blocks.
• Course Pages: When learners choose to take up a course, it should direct them to this page which should contain all details about the course, details of the educator, the entire curriculum, details of tests involved, information on certification etc. This page should also include a ‘Buy’ option for paid courses which must guide them to payment gateways. For educators, this page must enable study material uploading, editing course details etc.
• Payments: Build a simple and secure payment page that can record preferred payment methods for user profiles.
• Push Notifications: Foster continuous engagement with notifications about updates on courses, upcoming classes, interactive sessions, evaluations, marks etc.
• Student management: Essentially for educators, this page should enable to handle the learning process and mentoring seamlessly. It should contain info like student list, their details and progress reports.
• Tests: Educators must have a dedicated test and evaluation area with which they can ensure prompt progress tracking. Test modules can be the descriptive types, or MCQ patterns depending on the nature of the course.

Advanced Features:

These would include targeted features that would enable your MVP to give adopters a glimpse of what they can expect on the full-scale solution.

Video Conferencing: Connect learners and educators from across the globe to collaborate through live lectures, demonstrations, discussions to promote engagement similar to in-person courses. You can use LMS development for adding integrations to this in the final solution to enhance the overall learning experience.

Audio Conferencing: Promote real-time collaboration and between educators, learners and parents through audio conferring calls. Enable discussions, parent query solving, receiving educator feedback and instructional guidance for distant learners. Critical courses require multiple inflictions to facilitate communication between non-readers.

Real-time Text Chats: Enhance real-time collaboration with live chats so that learners can clarify doubts during lessons and educators can drop instructions simultaneously. This also leaves a trail of written communication that both parties can refer to later.

Online Whiteboard: Promote immersive interaction with virtual whiteboards that educators can use to write, draw, present graphs, charts, images and diagrams to explain concepts and solve problems.

Learning Material Library: Build a repository of educational resources where educators and learners can access a range of learning materials, from written texts, videos etc. While educators can utilize these learning materials to enhance their teaching, learners can cross-refer for concepts on the library.

Tools and Controls for Educators:

Your educators need specialized controls to enhance the learning process and help students advance in their schedules as planned.

This could include:

• Data Tracking: Help your educators keep track of learner performances. This feature doesn’t just allow teachers to evaluate students, determine weaknesses and identify learners that need extra attention. It also helps teachers identify gaps in their teaching and evaluation processes.
• Attendance Tracking: Attendance tracking is a very crucial feature because many courses are designed to record grading in terms of attendance.

Asynchronous Learning: Although most virtual classrooms prefer real-time collaborations, self-paced courses demand asynchronous models where learners and educators don’t need to be in real-time collaborations. Instructors can assign tasks and projects with deadlines, learners can complete lessons, submit projects and take tests.

These enable the flexibility that online programs demand.

We just discussed the features that can make your digital classroom MVP a hit with early adopters. To enhance acceptance and paid subscriptions for your full-scale products, you can integrate them with EdTech platforms, add 360-degree conferencing cameras for amplified visibility in synchronous learning environments, AR, VR and gamification to deliver immersive experiences.

Challenges You Might Face When Building a Virtual Classroom MVP

I have seen multiple technically mature businesses fall flat on their faces when building MVP that convert early adopters into paid subscribers. This is because either they do not know how to prioritize features to make a market-winning MVP, or they do not take a user-focussed approach into consideration. There could be a host of other crucial mistakes and its necessary to discuss them in detail. Read up!

1. Feature Creep: The core function of an MVP is to solve a particular business problem effectively with a couple of functions to validate the product idea. Clouding the initial scratch with a host of unnecessary features takes you away from the core purpose and development timelines. You must prioritize only the most aligned features and stick with a strict development plan to test your idea swiftly in the market.

2. Poor Audience Research: To validate a product idea flawlessly, your team’s audience research must be on point to avoid target audience misalignment. If your initial product research doesn’t analyze customer pain points, behaviours, needs etc., you will end up building a highly disconnected MVP which no body adopts. The key is to clearly define user personas, identify their core needs, addressing them swiftly through the MVP and gathering feedback for the final product.

3. Speed Over Quality: While one of the goals in MVP development is to reach the market fast and find early adopters, many businesses compromise quality for this speed. Responding to user needs is essential but many developers avoid comprehensive impact testing while preparing to launch the MVP to capture the market ahead of competitors. This usually backfires because a faulty product rarely makes an impact and early adopters rarely become paid users.

4. Not Balancing Simplicity in Features: I already said before that feature creep can mar the purpose of building an MVP. As important it is to prioritize the right set of features, it is equally important to keep the selected features simplistic for use. Your early users aren’t looking for high-end, immersive features that can very well be introduced in the final product, they seek to observe if your scratch idea is on-point for solving their core issues. When you overcomplicate even basic features, you lose the interest of your early adopters for your final launch phase. Nobody wants a glitchy product after all!

5. Ambiguous Product Success Metrics: Many businesses and their development teams struggle with establishing clear and transparent success metrics and KPIs. What they do not understand is that every MVP needs to have a clear purpose – it could be amplified user engagement, a specific performance optimization or even levelling up to a potent market demand. Without measurable goals and regular tracking, an MVP will not be able to integrate appropriate user feedback and end up as a failed blueprint leading to a product that users wouldn’t pay for.

6. Silos In Communication Between Teams: Miscommunication is a recipe for failure when building a digital classroom MVP. The development teams, customer-facing teams and stakeholders need to be on the same page about the MVP’s scope and goals so that you do not introduce a disjointed product idea to the market. It is understandable that different teams will have different priorities in mind, like the stakeholders will prioritize business goals, customer-facing marketing teams will be zeroed on immersive experiences and developers will be hinging on technical feasibility of features. Building a competitive MVP for virtual classrooms will be possible only when these teams come to the common ground, fostering teamwork and use collaboration tools.

Do these challenges have the potential to derail your MVP project? Yes! But we also have the right solutions to bring you out of this mesh. By following a set of best development practices, you can be assured that your MVP meets market needs frictionlessly.

Counter Roadblocks with Industry Best Practices for Building Digital Classroom MVPs

Building an MVP for online learning comes with a lot of vulnerabilities. However, following a couple of tried and tested principles ensure that you get the desired results from the MVP and can iterate the final product closest to user expectations.

You must understand that the success of your digital classroom MVP depends on the right understanding of the target user. Here, your users can have several personas, from students, to educators, administrators and parents. Each set will ask for very distinct needs, so you must align your MVP features as per the requirements of the intended user.

Here’s a checklist I insist on:

1. Establish the Core User: Your primary target can either be the students or the teachers. In the case where you are looking at enhancing learning experiences for students, teachers become your secondary user and your core features must be in alignment to make virtual classroom learning more immersive, appealing and fun. Your core users must dictate the UI you choose and the features you prioritize.

2. Focus on Researching the Pain Points: Go all guns with surveys and interviews with focus groups to get into the details of challenges. You cannot afford to go light on research! Before you start building the MVP, you must have a clear picture of the complexity of challenges that your users face everyday.

3. Analyse the Learning Environment: Implementation of technology differs greatly as per the classroom environment. The features you need in a virtual classroom will be way more complicated than the features your traditional classroom environment requires. You must pivot your MVP accordingly.

4. Streamline Experience Before MVP Launch: Make your MVP as flawless as possible before it reaches the classroom environment. Build a functional prototype to test the basic functionalities with a focussed group to validate the assumptions of your development teams. This user acceptance testing will help you gather feedback on usability, UI and feature effectiveness.

5. Develop the MVP for real virtual classroom environment: Iterate on the feedback from this prototype. Your MVP is only the starting point of an iterative development process. Identify the features that solve the most pressing problems identified during your research.

6. Integrate a Controlled Environment to Pivot The MVP: Keep enhancing the MVP as per the feedback received. Now this process may include refining features, adjusting the UI, even adding or eliminating a few. After this process you must first pilot the MVP in a very controlled classroom environment with a limited number of students and educators so that you are able to map its impact accurately and roll out refined a highly refined version in the final phase.

Now that we have discussed the best industry practices, let me take you through a list of highly successful online classroom MVPs that went on to leave quite an impact on the eLearning industry.

Explore Some Extremely Successful Digital Classroom MVPs

We will now tell you examples of successful MVPs in EdTech that have evolved into successful EdTech products down the line, fetching millions as revenue. You’ll see there’s one thing they have in common; they all had employed the industry’s best MVP development companies.

Coursera: This platform predominantly focussed on delivering free online MOOCs courses in partnership with prestigious universities. In the MVP stage, Coursera enabled top-notch, easily accessible courses and specializations from big levels which propelled their popularity.

Khan Academy: What started as a series of free YouTube videos to enable free, accessible education gained huge popularity in no time. The makers soon launched a full-proof, structured solution with personalized learning mechanisms and robust progress tracking.

Duolingo: One of the most preferred language learning apps, Duolingo’s MVP focussed on boosting user engagement through simplistic language learning exercises and gamification. Through the MVP, Duolingo’s team gathered invaluable data on user learning patterns which they used to enhance their adaptive learning algorithms.

Quizlet: The idea of this simplistic learning tool was developed by a high school student. It’s MVP consisted of simple digital flashcards which became a hit with learners. The final product expanded to various study modes and most importantly, also included user generated content.

These EdTech MVPs across diverse categories and different complexities are proof that the common ground in all these products is building the alignment user feedback and market demands. A user-centric approach is the secret recipe for success in case of MVPs for digital classrooms, as they pave the way for scalable and undeniably impactful full-scale solutions.

How We Drove A 65% Course Completion Rate for an eLearning Platform - A Real Impact Story

A Yemen-based leading educational institution wanted to expand their user base in rural areas for helping rural job seekers upgrade their professional skills.

However, they were faced with a couple of challenges. From slow and unreliable internet to old, incompatible devices, translation services for integrating local languages and ease of understanding, issues of low engagement and course abandonment.

To bridge these learning gaps, we devised a strong EdTech development strategy that enhanced multi-platform access, immersive learning tool integrated courses, and interactive forums to boost engagement and sort doubts.

The client achieved remarkable results in the form of 17X increase in student influx, 65% course completion rates and over 20K+ certificates processed.

If you want to know how we bridged this digital divide, read the full story here.

MVP to Classroom Testing to Product Market-Fit – Let’s Help!With over two decades of experience in developing MVPs for remote team management solutions, we have pivoted over 3000 businesses with successful tech products. In fact, our experts have significant experience in building simplistic MVP versions and transitioning these solutions into full-scale enterprise solutions with educational app development services.While handling MVP development services for virtual education, we have a record of helping clients test these versions on real-life classroom environments. From Pilot testing on early adopters, to analyzing user data and direct testimonials for establishing iterative feedback loops, constantly monitoring learner engagement metrics, aligning educational outcomes with course goals and virtual learning scalability assessment – we have helped our clients transition to product-market fit based on these crucial metrics.If you have a digital classroom idea and want to build a smart yet simple MVP to get hold of the market, get in touch with us and we’ll help you build market relevant products.