6 Easy and Clear Steps to Build an LMS from Scratch

Quick Go-Through: The number of individuals utilizing digital learning worldwide is steadily rising as remote learning has become the benchmark. So, if you consider embarking on a journey to learning management system development, now is the best time. Modern learning management system platforms are a convenient and flexible interface, comprehensive functionality, and distance learning on a new level. This blog is your step-by-step guide to help you develop your LMS from scratch and multiple other aspects.

It was the year 2000. An American multination chemical company called Dow terminated 50 employees and took action against 200 more for sharing inappropriate emails over the company server.

And to make sure such incidents don't happen again, the leaders of Dow decided to train all 40,000 workers from 70 different countries on workplace etiquette and manners. And they did so very successfully by developing a web-based learning management system.

Needless to say, the company could have spent a fortune on the training if they did it in the traditional way – instructor's salaries, classroom arrangements, manual records, hardcopy materials, course handouts, etc. But since they leveraged the power of technology, they were able to save a whopping $2.7 million.

Inspiring, right?

It has been more than 25 years since this huge LMS success story, and as a prominent custom software development company, we have encountered a myriad of technological advancements shaping the eLearning world since then.

Today, almost every organization, including Google, BMW, Salesforce, and Stryker, uses a digital learning platform to educate their workforce, hone their skills, and create a future-ready business ecosystem.

But does everyone know how to develop an interactive and resourceful learning management platform? We hope you find the answer in this article.

Here we go!

Starting with the Basics: What is LMS?

An LMS or learning management system automates the entire learning or training process for students, employees, or other users. It allows you to assimilate all learning materials/courses in a single platform and make them accessible to everyone.

Additionally, you can differentiate learners based on their job roles and profiles, assign respective learning materials to them, and track their progress throughout the session.

The COVID-19 pandemic acted as a catalyst for the popularity of eLearning platforms and pushed decision-makers, whether they want to build a profitable EdTech startup or upskill their workforce, to harness the power of LMS.

This has been reflected in the rise of the global LMS market, as it is estimated to generate around $44.49 billion by the end of 2028. These statistics also indicate the deep impact of AI in LMS that has led to enhanced organizational efficiency, offering a personalized learning environment and access to quality courses.

There are two main components that essentially make up learning management software:

• Admin panel – This is for managing all interactions on the system, such as creating new courses, managing existing ones, communicating with learners, evaluating progress, etc.
• User interface – Learners use this interface to register for the course and access the learning material.

What is LMS Development?

LMS Development refers to the creation of educational platforms designed to manage, track, automate, and deliver educational materials, training courses, and learning programs. This web-based technology helps educational institutions and corporations manage, optimize, and monitor various online learning courses. In short, an LMS is an online application that can be accessed anytime and anywhere via the internet.

Different Types of Learning Management Systems

Now that you know what does LMS mean, let’s walk through what type of eLearning portal is suitable for your unique business requirements. Each of them comes with a specific set of functionalities and use cases that you might want to know.

1. Commercial vs Free LMS

Commercial software is perfect for serious educational environments with a range of features, flexible plans, and 24/7 support. However, the development cost of such systems can be overhead by some agencies that lack the needed resources.

On the other hand, free learning systems come without any cost and are often open-source, allowing you to modify them according to your needs. However, they might have to compromise on quality and support from the developer, unlike the paid versions.

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2. Individual vs Enterprise LMS

The primary goal of individual LMS apps is to address the needs of particularly a small company or educator. They consist of limited yet important features that allow you to create and manage specific content.

Talking about enterprise LMS apps, their goal is to meet education and training requirements in large firms with 500 or more employees. Some important features of such systems are an extensive list of built-in functionalities and unparallel flexibility.

3. Cloud-Based vs On-Premise LMS

Users of cloud-based application solutions can access the platform from any device and host it someplace on the external server. The good news is that platform maintenance falls under a vendor's purview (server, uptime, security). Additionally, cloud-based systems offer scalability and frequent updates to include new features.

Contrastingly, on-premise learning management systems consist of a platform that you install on your server and for which you are solely responsible. Due to company security requirements, large enterprises often go for this option.

Key Features to Include in an LMS

Sure, there is a sheer variety of learning management platforms that provide hundreds of unique features for every industry vertical. However, a decent system has a well-balanced set of features for which you must first examine the business requirements for your desired system.

This will also enable you to reduce software development costs in the long run.

Although every learning system has distinctive features that make it stand out from the competition, you will find a core set of functionalities that remain consistent across every platform. Have a look at them:

• Content Management

The training and teaching of students and employees is the primary goal of any learning management software. This is one of the essential LMS features as it helps instructors develop content and courses for learners and staff. You can create anything with this tool, whether it's a course, assignment, test, or project.

• Course Builder

Build an eLearning platform that makes managing and creating courses as easy and simple as possible. Increase your use of various course formats, such as text, audio, video, live sessions, etc. An effective combination of these formats can create a stimulating learning environment within your company.

• Progress Tracking

You should be able to track a learner’s progress using a learning management system. It should show the number of tests, quizzes, or tasks learners have taken and how long it takes them to complete. In addition, you can use surveys and statistics for better understanding.

• Skills Assessment

Skill assessment is one of the crucial features of learning management systems in order to determine whether the training you are providing is yielding results. Such systems should come with a tool for tracking and evaluating the skills of users and ensuring they are on the right track. Tests, quizzes, and assignments are some of the common methods of skill evaluation.

• In-App Collaboration

In-app collaboration promotes group learning and offers real-time communication, a virtual community, and problem-solving capabilities. It might be user-generated materials, a forum, team-based games for learning, and so on. Making learning a shared activity is the main purpose of this feature.

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• Advanced Reporting

Reporting and analytics are two highly useful LMS features. Create a learning management app that uses descriptive data to generate reports on training history, course activity, test results, etc. The system must also enable you to export and send the report to learners so that they can keep a check on their educational progress as well.

• Alerts and Notifications

Manually managing the entire learning process is not an easy task, even with a feature-rich system. Therefore, automated alerts and notifications are essential components of quality learning management software. Your system will deliver feedback to the right people at the right time by alerting users about impending training deadlines or updating them with any new relevant program.

How to Create an LMS from the Ground Up

All those features mentioned above describe what does LMS stand for. Now with those and a suitable type in mind, it’s time to know how to create a resilient learning management application. Remember that you must execute the software development process to build such systems with an ordered and step-by-step approach. Starting with:

Step 1: Validate Your LMS Idea

Organizations often make unrealistic investments in inappropriate items and hence, fail to build the right product. That is why it is crucial to have an in-depth understanding of your target market and carry out extensive market research in order to foresee your ROI and prevent financial losses.

Therefore, figure out the market value of your LMS project plan before beginning to develop such a web platform.

Apart from product consultation services, we suggest answering the following questions to validate your idea:

• Why do I require an LMS?
• What user issues will my LMS address?
• Who will work on developing the LMS?
• What is the LMS development budget?
• Who are my competitors, and how do they deliver excellent UX?

Step 2: Choose the Right Tech Stack

Make sure to pick the best web development stack, as it can make or break your project. Based on the type and functionality of your custom LMS solution, choose suitable frontend, backend, or hosting technologies that help you create an ideal learning management software.

For example, some of the popular backend technologies you can consider are Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Python, Golang, etc., for clean code and added flexibility. For databases, you can rely on MySQL, MongoDB, or PostgreSQL for speed, reliability, and compliance.

In the case of hosting services, you should look for a perfect combination of cost, security, and efficiency. And our top picks for hosting service providers are AWS, Hostinger, and SiteGround.

Lastly, to build a visually attractive interface for your LMS apps, the best frontend development frameworks are React.js, Vue.js, or, Angular, along with the best static site generators like Tez.js, Gatsby, or Gridsome.js. These technologies will help you create the expected appearance with high responsiveness and quick loading.

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Step 3: Find a Competent LMS Development Partner

Sure, open communication and granular control are two major advantages of having a hand-picked in-house team. The bigger the project and the longer the development process, the more significant these factors are for creating a learning management app.

However, the hiring and training processes for an in-house team consume a lot of time, cost, and effort. Since hiring people is a long-term commitment, you must maintain a steady stream of activities.

Hence, IT outsourcing is a viable choice if it is a one-time LMS project. You get to spend less as you just have to pay for the work done instead of bearing the cost of LMS development and maintenance team.

However, you need to take a number of factors into account when choosing the best tech partner. A software project may fail due to challenges like communication, poor planning, and inadequate quality control. Hence, focus on the following factors while choosing your development partner:

• Refined methodologies
• Development experience
• In-depth business research
• Clear communication
• Rigorous A/B testing
• Post-launch support
• Pricing model

Step 4: Create an MVP of the LMS

We advise starting with a minimum viable product in order to perfectly design a learning management system. By developing an MVP that contains only the core features, you can test your idea. The key objective here is to gather honest user feedback and implement it going forward to gain complete user satisfaction.

Making an actual product that your users can test is the best part of MVP development and estimation. You can proceed with building the product after seeing how users react to it, keeping in mind their preferences. In this way, you can shorten the time and reduce the work required to build a successful product. You can also avoid developing a product that users won't want to use.

In a nutshell, you get a clear idea of what features and improvements you should implement next before starting the actual development.

Step 5: Begin the Actual Game – LMS Development

Let's understand how the custom LMS development process goes with our developers.

At Radixweb, we follow an Agile development methodology where we break the development task into multiple iterations and roll out each new release.

First up, we held a kick-off session. Developers go through the design and requirements for a feature. Then we set up a meeting to decide on the best solution and timeline for the task. We return to the user stories to decide how to test the new feature and how to effectively incorporate it into the LMS design. We show the final outcome of the discussion to you for approval.

Next, we follow a project schedule for the development of the overall system as well as specific features. It defines who will work on what task and what specifically developers, engineers, and QA testers should do. We also set milestones and provide examples here.

We divide the work into multiple sprints, as mentioned above, for maximum efficiency. Planning, task completion, task analysis, and sprint evaluation are all included in each sprint. We held daily and weekly meetings to maintain tabs on the job completed and problems encountered.

Towards the end of a sprint, as a client, you participate with our team in a demo session so that we can make sure that the development is going well and that the final product won't require any major fixes.

We do a number of manual and automated tests to make sure the newly developed custom learning management system is operating properly. Each new version of the system follows the same procedure.

Step 6: Launch and Maintenance of the LMS

We deploy the code as soon as testing shows that each feature is working exactly as our client wanted it to. The Radixweb team follows the best software development life cycle methodology to keep everything in check and prevent delays. We also create an extensive guide on how to use the LMS features before the big day.

Moreover, we provide end-to-end support and maintenance services after personalized LMS development is complete and it is functioning at its full capacity. You can request modifications and/or changes as you track the software functionality and gather user feedback.

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Radixweb as Your Learning Management System Development PartnerThe most valuable resource for any company is its employees because businesses rely on their commitment, abilities, and knowledge. Using an LMS to retrain or update your workforce is far less expensive than paying for staff recruitment and onboarding.We are ready to go through your list of features and requirements if you're ready to start using a bespoke learning management platform. Or we can just talk about your goals and create the roadmap together.Radixweb does more than only building software. Something grander beyond the end-to-end development of digital goods is what our team aims to offer to our clients. Our aim is to collaborate as a true partner with our clients.You see, it’s a win-win proposition. You can hire an accomplished development firm that is committed to your achievement in this way. Visit our custom LMS development services page for further details.Let’s roll it out, shall we?