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Best Types of Educational Apps You May Want to Develop

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If you ever thought about developing your own education app and build a startup around it, now is a right time to do it! By its own, the learning app may seem not so high-grossing product, but this is only a tip of the iceberg.

In fact, education is a second largest market after the healthcare, it is accounted for 9% of U.S. GDP.  Did you hear about those galaxy-sized student loans? This issue will make mobile learning industry even more appealing.

Here are some figures on education spending in the U.S. alone:

  • Early childhood education: $ 70 billion
  • K-12: $60 billion
  • HIGHER education: $475 billion
  • Adult learning: $ 55 billion

About 20% of all these spendings will go to mobile by the end of 2020!

Market Potential of Different Educational Apps

digital-trends-survey-of student experience

According to forecasts, the education software market will amount worldwide revenues of 7.9 billion U.S. dollars in 2020. If everything goes as planned, we will see year-on-year growth of over 100 million dollars. With such strong growth, it will reach 8.3 billion dollars by 2023.

Educational App

Education software and apps are designed for teaching and education within classrooms and at a consumer level. This market includes everything from language learning to classroom management software. In the meantime, some companies like Microsoft, and SAP decided to enter the market.

Technology became an important part of the business with a view to prepare students for professional life, universities have adopted gradually technology-focused learning techniques which eliminates paper assignments and materials. 

With an increasing number of students receiving degrees each year, the potential user base for educational software platforms is consistently increasing.

Educational App

This statistic shows the number of higher education degrees earned in the United States from 2014/15 to 2019/20. Projected numbers are displayed from 2019/20 to 2028/29. In the 2019/20 academic year, about 3.97 million degrees were earned in the United States. More statistics and market trends you will find in our comprehensive report. 

Simply as that mobile apps for education comes into play in order to redistribute worldwide knowledge by means of the internet. Because this is what are learning apps purposed for.

Key Trends in the Education Industry

The education industry is changing constantly. More startups related to education appear and bring new technologies to the learning process every year. 

  • Online academies are gaining popularity because of the interactive atmosphere. While leveraging available interactive multimedia technologies like lifestreaming and video-conferencing, the student can finish their courses online. Student and teachers communicate and have their discussions in virtual classrooms. The universities are not left out and develop more programs as well as distance learning models. They offer online courses to foreign students without any need to leave their native country.
  • Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. The first one is now being utilized to enhance learning by displaying virtual 3D models on 2D spaces. Faculty who work in science and engineering can make interactive presentations and models eliminating the creation of physical models. Recently VR is accessible only on computers and now it can be used in a Virtual Reality space. Such an approach allows users to experience the exact conditions as they would in the real real world that is a big stride in educational research and training.
  • Open-source textbooks and textbook rentals. The book industry is losing money because of alternatives like cheap rentals and digital books.

These are some of the key trends in the education industry today, but this list is far from comprehensive.

Key Benefits of Mobile Learning Apps

Key Advantagers Learning Apps

  • Increasing knowledge penetration speed. You can serve new courses and educate with new skills millions of users by simply updating your app with new content. 95% of users who study at home report it would be impossible without apps for education.
  • Enhanced engagement rate. Studying can be fun. Moreover, it is perceived as something natural if associated with such an everyday thing as a smartphone. This is why 72% of student stated confirmed an increase in engagement while using learning apps.
  • Better audience reach. 61% of students used smartphones to study in 2016 McGraw Hill Education study showed.
  • Easy collaborative potential. Mobile apps for education enables close collaboration between students, which raises average time users spent inside the app.

Categories of Educational Apps

Although educational apps include different features and can be upgraded with multiple learning modules, it is common to divide them by principal tuition purpose those apps are standing for:

  • Language Learning Apps
  • Corporate Learning Management Systems
  • Remote Tuition Platforms
  • Educational Mobile Apps for Kids
  • Learning Apps for Disabled People
  • Learning Apps For Adults
  • Test Prep Apps

Here is a chart below with top education apps for Q3 2020 that studens admited as a technology that helped them manage their education.

top Educational App

Language Learning Apps

DuoLinguo wallpaper

Back in 2015, a popular language-learning service called Duolingo has raised a $45 million investment round which gets to its total funding of $83.3 million. While the monetization method is still unclear Duolingo states it has over 100 million active users worldwide. Not bad for a company with a valuation of about $450 million.

There is also a bunch of top-rated educational apps in language learning worth mentioning:

  • Rosetta Stone
  • Lingvist
  • Memrise
  • Babbel
  • Hello-Hello

Each of those mobile apps for language learning is prospering in its own specific niche and there are no limits to find a new one for yourself. The most promising to mention: Premium Class apps for Chinese/Japan/Korean language learners.

Language learning means new words discovery, so an English dictionary app might be a good business idea if you have any significant advantage, that Google Translate lacks.

In addition, take a close look at such extinct languages as Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and Ancient Egyptian. You may find a strong support among academic and amateur communities.

Remote Tuition Platforms

Chinese tuition platform VIPKID has raised $100 million for the promise to link English native speakers and Chinese children aged 5 to 12 years. The platform offers 30 minutes one-to-one online language lesson with tested natives speakers from U.K. and U.S.

VIPKID

It wasn’t China if there were no direct competitors like ABC360 and VIPABC. You may notice how similar their namings are. One of them is funded by the e-commerce giant Alibaba.

What makes this niche so lucrative is a Chinese obsession with all American and Wester-faced. Such obsession makes the opportunity to connect your child to the western demigod so precious and highly valued.   

Educational Mobile Apps for Kids

ABCmouse

There are many types of kid app for education, for example, alphabet application, foreign language, etc. Our expert team has great experience in developing educational apps. One of them is LabbaYo language app.

LabbaYo language app is the only kids’ app that works with proprietary LabbaYo Language Flash Cards to allow children to HEAR and SAY the words to practice their pronunciation. Beautifully drawn images are designed to engage and captivate children. The app is initially offered in Spanish, English, and French. The pronunciation module offers rewards when the word is said properly and encourages practice. It’s a fun new way for children (age 3+) and the whole family to learn new languages using smartphones, tablets and physical flashcards.

School apps is another perspective learning category. From here you can start using classes and subjects as a targeting method. What is great about the apps for schools is the high demand and willingness of parents to pay for such content.

It also integrates other innovations such as gamification.

Note: Your app should comply with COPA law - U.S. Child Online Protection Act which required all commercial distributors of "material harmful to minors" to restrict their sites from access by minors. COPA only limits commercial speech and only affects providers based within the United States.

By the way, the success recipes of best apps for school always include gamification ingredient.

Learning Apps for Disabled People

A kid with a tablet

Perhaps the most undeveloped and stealthy mobile learning category. Also known as Special Education. If you want to succeed in this niche our suggestion is to cooperate with non-profit organizations or secure a government funding, which will provide your access to resources and audience.

Here’s some suggestion of mobile applications for disabled people and their purposes:

  • Apps that encourage shy students to speak more often.
  • Picture-based communication apps for children with communication disorders.
  • Choice boards for people with disabilities to help them express their wants.
  • Apps that help people keep track of their tasks and help them with visual guidelines.

Building an app for disabled people requires the high level of user experience. Consider hiring a skilled UX designer and get a consultation with a specialist working with disabled people. That allows you to ensure you include all the features covering your audience needs and build your app in a manner that is easy to understand by the end users.

Learning Apps For Adults

From here you have nothing to limit your imagination. Deadline keepers, homework reminder apps, math hints, proofreading apps, research citations managers, apps for collaboration with classmates, choose any of categories and go ahead!

Unlike educational app development for kids, best apps for students should always have a messaging feature. Also, you should open your app for additional integration like campus maps, reminder systems, schedule and learning databases.

Test Prep Apps

Introduce yourself to all sorts of quizzes and tests. Starting from basic language memorizing app like Anki, and ending with specialized Aviation Study Guide we’ve made specifically for military aviation pilots.

Apache helicopter

In our case, we’ve developed Aviation Study Guide as a memorizing app for helicopter pilots. The app features PDF Reader ware gathered documentation on Apache AH-64D and Blackhawk UH-60A/L helicopters and special quizzes and flashcards that help users to memorize previously covered materials.

We also added a simple admin panel so the client could add a new content, so the client could add new documentation, helicopter models and keep the app up to date.

Screenshots Apache

Note: Think about monetization method before starting making a quiz or testing app. Users of particularly this kind of learning apps do not tolerate mobile ads because they are highly distractive from a memorizing process itself.

Bottom Line

As you can see mobile learning industry is gaining strength and becoming more profitable year over year. Therefore, if you’re about to develop education app, it’s about time if you want to get enough momentum.

FAQ

The price may vary depending on many factors as complexity of your future application, amount of features and etc. To choose best features for your app we recommend to go through discovery phase and also to get a consultation of a Business Analyst. To ease your research we decided to give as an example of the general list of functionality that the marketplace should have: User profiles with the outline of all experiences, services, portfolio. Ability to post a request on the marketplace. E.g. “I’m looking for a tutor to provide daily English language teaching” Search by job requests and by profiles Ability to apply to the Job Requests, or invite teachers to the Job Requests Private chats where roles can talk prior to starting the educational course Open jobs, this is where users can hire one another with agreed and defined terms Complete job once the service is provided and automatic charge for the service with online payments Feedback forms should become available on completed jobs and should not be visible to one another until they leave their feedback. The feedbacks should be available on users’ public profiles Report functionality should provide the ability to users to report the offensive or abusive content. Social Sharing would help you with the marketing and spread of your application. The price is around $50,000+ from scratch but there are also ready made on demand solutions available that allow to save costs.
Yes, it is possible but you have to make sure that your business can work from home/office. To gain that it is recommended to build a platform where your teachers can live stream their lessons and class can join to study it. One of the most important things is to make people involved, so live streaming with cameras and screen sharing is most important for users. Even the tests have to be available with the live broadcasts.
The time that is required for the development process totally depends on the type of app and its complexity. If we are talking a language app it may take 2-3 months to build it from scratch but if you are going to build a marketplace or live streaming app it takes take up to 6 months. More about types of educational app, terms and etc you can read in this article

Another thing worth mentioning is that mobile apps for education appear to be a relatively simple category in terms of development. They need no complex integration and benefit most of the creative design and logic behind. Moreover, in case with education apps for kids, the educational content for them can be easily acquired from offline sources, with absolutely no need to make it unique.

More about educational app development and want standarts it should have you can reade in our article New Ways to Boost Education Industry with Tech

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