10 Features That Every Edtech App Needs To Succeed (2023)

10th May 2024

Some features are critical to EVERY edtech app.

Over the last year, my team & I have built hundreds of edtech apps for founders, schools, SMEs & enterprises.

Based on this experience, I’ve created this list of the top 10 features to include in your edtech app.

1. Different user roles

One basic feature in all edtech apps is the ability to create different user roles & permissions. For example, you might want to create roles such as Students, Teachers & Parents. Users are then assigned to roles & you can design a different in app user experience for each user role.

The list of critical features for user roles are listed below:

Define different user roles e.g. students, teachers, parents.
Build a database to store users & user roles.
User sign up screens, with the option to choose the user role.
Different user workflows depending on the user role.

2. Assignments & assessments

One fundamental feature that all instructors look for in edtech software is the ability to set assignments & to assess student performance.

The list of essential features for assignments & assessments that an educational app needs are:

Ability to create & assign an assessment to a learner.
Reporting on learners’ progress.
Having the option to control progress through the manual review of assignments.
Allowing teachers & learners to upload & download files.
Awarding grades, presenting a grade report, giving out a certificate of completion & so on.

These features will run on what is known as the backend of your app. To make sure that your app is fast, you should build it using a powerful & scalable programming language such as Google GO.

3. Mock tests & quizzes

In addition to creating formal assignments & assessments, edtech apps should all have the ability to create mock tests & quizzes. These can be used to assess the learners level of understanding. Results can also be combined with real-time reporting, so that educators can get immediate feedback on how well their learners are doing.

Real-time reporting is an essential feature of your edtech app in 2023. This is because (A) everyone else offers real-time reporting & (B) studies show that learners who fall behind struggle to catch up. Real-time monitoring & alerts have been proven to boost learners’ performance, since educators can proactively reach out to learners who are “at risk” of falling behind & find out what is causing their grades to slip.

The essential lists of features that you need to include in mock tests & quizzes include:

Creating mock tests & quizzes for students.
Automatically checking quiz results
Storing the results of the quizzes to track current vs historical performance
Displaying results to educators in real-time for timely intervention

As with assignments & assessments, these features will also run on what is known as the backend of your app. To make sure that your app is fast, you should build these features using a powerful & scalable programming language such as Google GO.

4. Video integration

If you’re like me, you will remember the days when teachers would wheel in a television on a stand. You & your classmates would then sit around & watch part of a documentary or dramatization of a book that you’re reading in class.

For a long time, video has been considered a powerful tool in education. Its benefits include:

The ability to engage learners, ignite discussions & facilitate learning outside of the classroom.
Videos expose learners to places or events that they cannot physically experience.
Promotes efficient memory recall of a particular topic or concept.
It allows for difficult & abstract concepts to be broken down into a more accessible format for students.

All of these benefits make video integration a must have feature in your eLearning app.

Building the ability to store & stream video content is challenging. Not only do you have to work out the most efficient way to store chunky video files, you also need to develop your own video streaming technology. These development tasks require specialist skills that are extremely expensive & rare. Furthermore, if you develop your own video storage & streaming technology, this will need to be continually maintained to support streaming on many different devices, networks, browsers etc.

This is where video streaming platforms come in. Video streaming platforms specialize in the development of video storage & video streaming technology. They allow you to leverage their technology from within your app. This means that you can offer your users world class video storage & streaming without needing to develop it yourself.

Good video streaming platforms also come with real-time analytics on your users watch times, drop off points & so on. These analytics can be used to proactively tweak your content so that it is more effective.

To integrate with a video streaming platform, you need to access the platform’s API. Some good video streaming platforms include: Vimeo OTT, Uscreen, Dacast. Each of these has an API that you can use within your development.

5. Gamification

Gamification is used to motivate people to accomplish tasks that are sometimes viewed as boring, such as learning. It can be also be used to improve:

Cognitive development in adolescents,
Classroom engagement & homework completion rates,
Education for students with special needs such as students with autism
In some cases physical development

Gamification has been used in education since the 19th Century & because of its effectiveness in education, gamification has become a staple feature of all edtech apps.

Some of the top edtech gamification tactics include:

Introduction of leader boards
Badges & trophies
Levels & progress bars
Add a reward system
Set up a points system

Gamification strategies are not hard to develop. However, they require careful product planning. Gamification should be simple, logical & intuitive & should only be used when necessary to emphasize learner performance.

6. Integration with learning management systems (LMS) & school information systems (SIS)

Most companies, schools & other educational institutions already have a learning management system (LMS) or school information systems (SIS) in place. Therefore, a new edtech platform must integrate into existing LMS & SIS systems so that you can access data on your students’ performance.

The best way to integrate with existing LMS & SIS solutions is via Single Sign On or SSO. This means that your app’s users will login to your app using the same username & password that they already use to access their existing LMS & SIS.

Using SSO will also allow your app to access data stored within existing LMS & SIS systems. This means that your app can access existing student information, such names, locations, grade averages, roster information & so on. All of this information can be used to enhance the learning experience for your users & improve adoption rates for your app.

An example of SSO technology that is used extensively throughout the North American education system is Clever. You can see an example of how Clever can be used within your app below to both provide SSO access, but also to sync up your app with SIS systems.

As you can see there is just one login button that reads “Login with Clever”. When the user clicks that button, the app automatically logs in the user & gives the app access to all of the data stored inside the schools LMS & SIS systems.

7. Security & data management

Depending on where you get users for your app, you need to stick to the data protection standards for that area. Users in Europe will be subject to the GDPR requirements, whereas if you’re developing an edtech app in Canada, you have to worry about the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA).

Furthermore, we’ve seen that in certain states in the USA, data regulation around student data can get more complicated. In Colorado for instance, technology vendors are required to indemnify the state in case of any data breach. This means that most schools are required to run their apps in house or pass on the liability to software vendors under third party data agreements. Therefore, depending on your users security requirements, you need to choose a technology that is adaptable & can be customized to meet security requirements if required.

At Dittofi we operate a model of shared responsibility. This enables you to choose how much of your security & data management you would like us to be responsible for. You can either run the data on our infrastructure, which has been configured according to security best practices. You can also run the app inside your own hosting environments or directly on your customers own infrastructure. This level of flexibility gives you the option to meet any of your clients security requirements.

8. Data analytics

In God we trust, all others bring data. This quote, made by W. Edwards Deming, refers mainly to the importance of data measurement and analysis when doing business. As in business, data analysis is equally important to your edtech app.

Data is important for your app development since it will help you better understand your user behaviour, what features do they like, which courses do they enjoy most & so on. This will allow you to adjust your app & its content to make it more relevant for your users. In product development, you should gather two types of data on your app’s users. Quantitative data such as, what percentage of your apps users completed a particular course & qualitative data, for example requests for new features.

To get access to data for your product development, you can use tools such as Google Analytics, Mixpanel, your own user database & data from third party APIs such as a video streaming platform. Below is an example of a metric called Monthly Active Users (MAU) plotted in Mixpanel.

The MAU metric tells you how many users you have active each month in your app. If this is going up, it means that your app is getting more users each month & indicates that your app is being built the correct way. If the number of MAU is going down, this means that your app is losing users.

Data is also important in edtech app development, because it can be used to build a more valuable user experience for your edtech app. For instance, you can build analytics dashboards that graph learners’ performance, flag users ‘at risk’ of failing a module & reach out with timely support.

Most companies will start by building their edtech app & will then layer in more advanced data analytics over time. For instance, the first version of your app may just look for student scores that are outliers i.e. those that are extremely good or extremely bad.

Beyond these relatively simple checks are more advanced statistical models. To use these, you will normally need to hire a data scientist. You should definitely NOT hire a data scientist to work on your edtech app before you have real data that needs to be analyzed.

9. Artificial intelligence

No article on edtech app development would be complete without some mention of how artificial intelligence (AI) is being used in edtech app development in 2023. AI-powered educational tools have several benefits. These include:

AI tools can analyze data on student performance & provide tailored support to improve their grades.
AI tools can provide instant feedback. For example, AI powered educational tools can provide students with immediate feedback on their work, allowing them to identify & correct mistakes immediately.
AI can automate repetitive tasks, freeing up time for teachers to do better lesson planning & to spend more one-to-one with each student.

There are several companies & edtech apps that already use AI extensively within their edtech apps. Kidaptive for example was a Silicon Valley based startup that developed a cloud-computing platform that provides adaptive learning programs, & predicts academic performance by applying underlying data patterns & relationships. The platform uses the Bayesian-IRT psychometric framework to suggest the next tasks that learners should take in order to maximize their performance. Kidaptive was acquired by McGraw Hill in 2021.

There are also some things to be aware of when integrating AI into your edtech app:

Some teachers fear AI. This is because they worry that it will automate their jobs & make them redundant. However, it is important to remember that AI is not meant to replace teachers but rather assist them in their work. AI is a tool that should be developed & used as such.
Many people think that it is difficult, time consuming & expensive to develop AI tools for your edtech app. Whilst it is true that there are many challenges in developing AI tools from scratch, there are now many developer tools that can help drastically shorten the time to get AI into your app. For example, TensorFlow that was developed by Google is a way that many developers approach building AI products. At a higher level, you can use tools such as OpenAI, that gives you access to the ChatGPT models via their API.

For instance, below is an example of how quickly you can integrate the ChatGPT models into your app using Dittofi & OpenAI.

There are some other challenges with AI that you need to be aware of in the edtech space.

There is a lack of human interaction & emotional support that a student gets when they are supported by AI. For example, whilst AI can provide personalised learning & instant feedback, it cannot replace human interaction & support that students need to be successful. This means that overusing AI can cause students to be impacted negatively.
Privacy concerns are a limitation of AI in edtech. OpenAI for example was accused of breaching data privacy laws in 2023. They were accused of collecting & storing personal data which raised concerns over privacy & security.

There is currently no overarching regulation on how we should use AI. This means that edtech companies have a responsibility to use AI as a tool to provide a better quality educational experience for their users. This means you should design your edtech solution so that it does not aim to replace teachers, human interaction or violate privacy laws.

10. Options to monetize

When you plan how to monetize your app, you need to think about the entire sales funnel from start to finish. This begins with targeted marketing campaigns using paid search, SEO, email marketing or other techniques in order to drive traffic to your businesses website or product.

In the world of edtech apps, most companies will target one of four groups:

University administrators
Students
Professors
Offer a free service with revenue generated through ads

You can target any of these groups with subscription based billing either by offering a free trial or a freemium based model.

To implement billing within your app, you will need to use a payment gateway provider. The top payment gateways for businesses are Stripe & Paypal. There are also those that specialise in edtech solutions such as ACI worldwide, Salesforce.org Elevate & PayMyTuition.com.

Are you building or plan to build a custom edtech app? Check out some of our case studies of the types of edtech apps that have been built using Dittofi’s visual app development technology. Dittofi enables you to build performant, reliable, secure & scalable apps 600% faster than traditional coding.

Article by

James Virgo

Co-Founder of Dittofi