Building an e-learning platform
Hey there fellow indie hackers!
I wanted to know what is your experience with building an e-learning platform to host your courses?
I have 2 online courses (others are coming) hosted on Udemy platform and I am thinking of building my own platform to host my courses on it.
I have some experience with Django for the backend and I might start learning React soon for the frontend (I only have experience with Flutter when it comes to the frontend and it's mostly for mobile apps and not websites).
What do you think about my choices for the backend and the frontend?
What things should I consider from now before starting to build the platform? For example what would be the best options to host my video lectures?
What are some lessons that I can learn from your journey of building an e-learning platform from scratch?
Thank you in advance for your feedback :)
I second what @ricki_io said - you will be surprised how much work it is to build your own. The good news is that for CourseMaker we'll be open-sourcing our GatsbyJS Theme for our open-beta, which starts in January. You'll be able to customize that to your heart's content, and it works with Stripe/Auth0/Netlify/YouTube to allow you to create a commercially viable online course for free.
Thanks Christopher! CourseMaker looks like a cool option for customizing an online learning platform.
Hey there!
What are you trying to acheive by building the platform from scratch?
Why not use platforms like teachable, Podia, etc? You'll be able able to get up and running in no time and can focus on the hardest parts like building your community, creating more courses, etc.
That's also a possibility that crossed my mind. In terms of costs, which one will cost more : using a platform like Teachable and Podia or building something using Wordpress? I have never used any of these options before.
I'm not sure about the exact cost but it won't differ much. Maybe a $10-$30 difference. In general, I would go with the option that will require the least amount of ongoing operational overhead on your part. In my opinion, as an Indiehacker, you should focus your limited time and effort on activities that bring value. Admin work and DevOps aren't part of that.
Good point. Thanks!
GetTeachr ( https://getteachr.com/ ) is the best eLearning software to build an eLearning platform for online learning, teaching and training. You can set-up your own platform within a few hours at an affordable price. This platform can be fully customizable according to your needs.
Hey, there! I built my own platform and haven't regretted it for a second. It didn't take much time, it let me be more unique and I can do anything with it!
I put my ebook inside it! I made easter eggs. I even built a feature/content request page. It's integrated in ways that an external tool never could be.
It's not just me, either. Jeffrey Way, Wes Bos, Chris Oliver, David Geddes and pretty much every programming-focused video course creator I've learned from did the same, unless you count Adam Wathan's ebooks. But even he built his own extended markdown renderer for them.
On the tech stack choices, I'd strongly recommend against a SPA like React unless React is what you teach. It will slow you down a lot. Also I'd swap out Django for Laravel, Phoenix or Rails. There's a reason Rails won by so much for startups the past 15 years, despite Ruby never having major corporate support.
Despite its advantages, rolling your own has a cost. The faster iteration your tech stack allows, the less the cost.
Hello!
I can help you a bit with what we learned at Senseily, the e-learning platform that we started building 2 months ago.
I would recommend using a high quality video hosting/streaming service for the lessons. You will reduce server workload and get many benefits like video quality selector, etc.
I also recommend focusing on solving one specific thing. We started wanting to do everything but now we will release a batch of features to focus on audience grow and up sells.
If you try to solve everything you will get burned. It doesn’t seem, but its quite a complex project if you want to solve everything with a minimum of quality that can compete with stablished services. We worked monday to sunday around 10-13 h per day and still have only the basic features.
Glad to help with any other question if you have!
Good luck with the project! 💪🏻
Very cool project ricki_io!
So for you, it's better to build the platform from scratch instead of using Wordpress or Teachable or something similar?
If your only desire is to sell online courses in order to make some passive income, I would recommend just use some existing tools (free or paid).
I would only recommend making your own platform from scratch if you:
In my case, I don't have a full-time job and I know the tools I'm using really well so it allows me to go fast with the development. But if I had a job or had to learn to code, it would be too stressful, slow, and the code would be full of security issues.
Alright thanks! I understand your approach now :)
Wow this project looks really complete! Can you share which video hosting backend and video player you guys choose to use?
Again awesome project, looks great
Thanks, but we still have lots of interesting features to launch in the next days!
We are using the Vimeo API and player for uploading and displaying lesson videos.
Wow Awesome! Thanks for sharing! Keep up the great work!! Like to hear your sharing next time! (10k MRR achieved!)
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Hi @NourHacker. This is a great question. As others have mentioned there are lots of options with the likes of Teachable, Thinkific, Podia etc...
We built our own platform with Startup Sanctuary to curate courses related to business, entrepreneurship and no-code. If you want an additional distribution channel for your material, please feel free to reach out.
Thanks Gordon! My courses are in a different category than what you guys are offering at Startup Sanctuary so it may not be a good fit.
Really think about it again, and why you want to build that platform.
Do you want to build something unique that others can use as well, or do you simply like the thrill and challenge of building this on your own?
I think about stuff like that every now and then as well (common developer problem imho), and it's easy to get carried away by a cool idea.
BUT: If you simply want to sell great courses, your platform doesn't matter. I run the Ionic Academy and it uses Wordpress and Memberpress. I'm a developer and hate it - but I know it works. It does the job and I can focus on creating great content.
Writing your own course platform will likely taking weeks, maybe more like months. Time that you can otherwise invest into better and more products instead!
So take a moment and really think about WHY you want to build this platform.
Thank you for your feedback Saimon! The Ionic Academy looks very cool by the way :)
"Do you want to build something unique that others can use as well, or do you simply like the thrill and challenge of building this on your own?"
That's exactly my dilemma! On one hand I want to focus on building a "business" but on the other hand I like building stuff. But I think I'll focus more on growing a business for now so I might take your approach by using Wordpress to build something quickly and test it.
Here's an idea :) if you don't want to pay the commission on udemy. Why not just setup a selfhosted webshop? Why reinvent the wheel? There's wordpress, prestashop, magento etc.
If you want to create a platform where others can sell their course you can still use these and have people submit their courses.
Talking from experience here. Building the platform is easy but time consuming. Solving the chicken egg problem is the tough part.
Thank you for the comment ccostel!
That's exactly what I want to start with in the beginning. Just a self hosted shop for my courses.
So what you are suggesting is to use existing templates (from wordpress for example) instead of building the whole thing from scratch using Django with React.
Yep. I personally don't really like wordrpess. If I were you I'd make a simple landing page (static, no backend) that has a nice custom design. The landing page I'd link to a prestashop setup :) I had prestashop before and I really liked it. 8 hours of work and you're all set up :)