Undoubtedly, an investment in custom education software development is among the most important aspects to consider for modern businesses. This factor concerns both educational and non-education companies. On the one hand, educational businesses need software to improve their existing practices in terms of teaching. On the other hand, non-educational businesses can also benefit from such investments because the complexity of skills required in an average workplace is growing significantly. The core goal of this post is to, thus, help our readers understand the core features of educational software development.

The first aspect you need to understand involves the features that are essential in modern education apps. Several innovations have transformed the education market to such an extent that no solution on the market can exist without them. So, what are those features?

Firstly, we highly recommend looking into all types of multimodal learning. Multimodal learning involves the combination of multiple learning pathways within one program. For example, let’s imagine that you want to learn mathematics. A traditional framework is to use a combination of visuals, text, and audio. Multimodal framework involves those types of information, but it may go further. You’ll also be able to study through 3D technologies and even video-game-like scenarios. The nature of the visuals, text, and audio is also likely to change to some extent. Modern elearning platforms include the best media technology that allows the creation of highly complex multimedia experiences.

Secondly, the rise of AI is also a big trend that can’t be ignored. In our opinion, while the rise of generative AI will likely transform the lives of all humans to some extent in the upcoming years, it’ll have the most decisive impact on the education sector. This will happen for two main reasons. Primarily, AI improves our ability to analyze Big Data. Modern AI platforms can create complex education-oriented profiles for all learners. Thus, situations in which a person feels like a cog in the education machine will decrease. It’s now possible to adjust learning towards the particular needs of the learners. Moreover, another vital factor is the ability to generate complex tasks or promote inquiry-based education. For instance, many language teachers are using platforms like ChatGPT to generate class-specific exercises for their students. Without this technology, you’ll be unable to implement cutting-edge approaches to education.

Thirdly, a major aspect to consider is the implementation of socialization features. A big problem of traditional learning is that it isolates student communication to a particular location. Consequently, the opportunities for student interaction aren’t as significant as the majority of people think. For instance, if a person is absent from a class, they’ll also miss all the core discussions of particular topics. In turn, one small gap in your education can easily lead to long-term negative cumulative effects in terms of your learning. Chats and forums as well as other social media features solve this problem once and for all. What exactly do they enable? They enable students to communicate in a way that’s visible to others. Therefore, it’s difficult to miss important contributions such as discussions with teachers.

Apart from features, a second aspect you need to understand is the nature of modern custom eLearning development. In this respect, multiple models of app creation are available to clients on the market.

The primary model is in-house development. What does it entail? You can hire a set of developers for your school or your business organization and task them with creating a certain elearning solution. This method is straightforward but has some major long-term downsides. Above all, it’s very costly in terms of management. More importantly, it may lead to excessive or insufficient investments. Hence, this method of development is typically optimal only for large organizations. Why? They can handle the large costs of development and administration. This is usually vital in situations when you need to minimize the exposure of your development information.

Other methods of development include outsourcing and outstaffing. We’ll start with oustaffing since it’s less common as a development approach in the modern world. This method involves the hiring of a person from a different company into your team. For instance, you can hire a developer working for an IT company to be a part of your team. All infrastructure will be provided by their original employer. In turn, you’ll be able to interact with the relevant individual more directly, without having to work with various types of intermediaries. The approach in question is great in situations when you have a small project and want to have full control over its development due to being equipped with sufficient expertise in controlling various software creation processes such as Flutter.

However, the need to control and manage the relevant workers is what makes this method ultimately suboptimal for the majority of companies. Thus, we recommend looking at an alternative in the form of outsourcing. Outsourcing is a development method that involves the transition of the app creation tasks to some other company. For example, let’s imagine that you want to develop an app for generating English grammar and vocabulary exercises with the use of AI. In this case, an app development company will study your demands for app functionality and then implement them within their team. All development tasks such as administration or technology choice will be handled within the relevant organization. Of course, you’ll have a say in development: for instance, Agile approaches involve periodic customer feedback. What ultimately makes this method so powerful is the reduction in development complexity. You can focus on organizational tasks rather than on the minute details of platform development.

In the end, we also have some recommendations for choosing an outsourcing app development company. In this regard, our recommendation goes as follows: you should search for partners like Keenethics that have several years of experience in software development and have created multiple solutions in the edtech sector.