The conventional learning system has been overpowered by the new age online learning management system. The global pandemic has expedited online education. Today, not just the education industry, the industry-specific businesses are also leveraging the custom lms development solution integrated with the latest technologies to render an exceptional learning experience and enhance productivity.
A robust & scalable learning management system is an amalgamation of multiple courses, users, reports, learning, permission management, and a dedicated team of professionals with expertise in developing them.
This article will delve into the development of learning management through a robust framework and content management system – React and Strapi. But, before that, let’s quickly analyze the market of elearning globally.
Market Analysis
As per the market, the elearning industry is continuing to grow every year at 10% with annual revenue of $50 billion. Elearning platform helps both internal as well as financial gain.
The last 3 years were witnessed with a steady growth of 5% with expectations to reach almost $22.4 billion by 2023.
Another report observing the LMS market growth was about 19.05 billion with 24% CAGR till 2022 by Zion Market Research based on a 5-year prediction.
The upsurge of the learning market is the need for filling the skill gap and reaching its full potential. In fact, 60% of college students prefer online learning over on-premise learning.
Benefits of elearning
Developing and implementing elearning programs allow organizations and educational institutes to manage all aspects of course administration ranging from monitoring, delivery, to reporting. Learning management solutions offer many more significant benefits listed below.
Better Communication
With the help of a robust and efficient learning management system, brands can build a seamless connection with users.
Recurring Income
A learning management system is a revenue-oriented platform. With effective learning, organizations can improve the productivity of the employees in order to enhance their productivity and scalability of the business.
Higher Reach
Compared to conventional methods of learning and teaching, online learning can outreach multifold users at the same point in time.
Cost-Effective
A learning management system can prevent several rational costs, such as material print, travel, lector payments, infrastructure, and venue.
Before creating an LMS, prepare a list of questions that can be solved by an online learning solution. For instance,
- What problems can your LMS deter?
- Do you need a white-labeled or a customized solution from scratch?
- The amount you are ready to invest in the LMS.
Let’s move forward with the development of learning solutions through robust and headless CMS, Strapi and framework React.
Building a Learning Platform Using Strapi & React
Also known as headless CMS, Strapi makes content seamlessly accessible with the support of GraphQL APIs, Git workflow, and REST APIs. Strapi is a 100% JavaScript that is highly customizable, offering freedom to the developer to choose the frontend as suitable.
On the other hand, React is a declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for crafting user interfaces with the help of web components. These components direct React what to show on the screen. Components use parameters and the render method to do so. In order to make structures easier and lightweight, a special syntax, JSX, and DOM component <div />
Beginning with Wireframing/Prototyping
The web solution must be responsive and easy to navigate throughout pages of the course. With the assistance of a reliable web and mobile app development services partner your LMS website can run on multiple devices. The designing of the main course page must offer a separate course data view allowing easy navigation of lessons.
Strapi can create and store courses, training audios, and videos, provide REST endpoints for the courses, and provide endpoints to handle authentication in order for seamless fetching, playing, and displaying the training content.
yarn create strapi-app strapi-learning-backend
// or
npx create-strapi-app strapi-learning-backend
The command installs necessary dependencies, configurations, and plugins for the website as well as dictates Strapi to start the dev server.
yarn develop
// or
npm run develop
Some developers use the drop-down lessons menu from the libraries for learners to navigate through diverse lessons. Also using a “Meditate Now” button from the library can be used for combining pages and accessing all audio or video files.
Otherwise, you can combine nodejs, npm, and yarn with React to run the Strapi server with migrated data and REST and GraphQL interfaces.
cd learn meditation-frontend
npm install node-fetch –save
npm install –save reactstrap react react-dom
npm install classnames –sav
npm install apollo-boost @apollo/react-hooks graphql
npm install –save react-audio-player
npm install react-player
npm install @fortawesome/react-fontawesome
npm install @fortawesome/free-regular-svg-icon
npm install @fortawesome/fontawesome-svg-core
Making Interactive & Function Components
After inspecting the code, it’s time to pass the data from the broad component to the Square component, you must change the “render()” function from the button tag. The next step is to ensure that the Square component remembers the clickable and fills the space. Setting constructors “this. state” stores the current value.
Further, the render method needs to be changed for React to show the current value on the dashboard. For instance, in a game board, we can tell the computer to show X value only when the user clicks on any box. The below code explains how to render the value and get ‘X’ on the clicked box.
class Square extends React.Component {
constructor(props) {
super(props);
this.state = {
value: null,
};
}
render() {
return (
<button
className=”square”
onClick={() => this.setState({value: ‘X’})}
>
{this.state.value}
</button>
);
}
}
Function components are another method to write components that only have the “render” method. In order to return what should be rendered, function components use “props” as input. Function components are preferable due to less complication and no need for writing classes to express. Likewise, the below-mentioned function can return that should be rendered:
function Square(props) {
return (
<button className=”square” onClick={props.onClick}>
{props.value}
</button>
);
}
Content-Type For Courses
For structuring the content, you can add types and populate them with fields in Strapi. Following these steps will help you more –
- Click on ” Create First Content-Type”.
- Give a name and select a field for collection types, such as course_title, long_description, short_description, course_image, and course_video.
- Adding courses using Strapi WYSIWYG editor lets you add new courses.
Your Strapi codebase would look like the mentioned below, where you will find the list of endpoints and courses creates:
// api/strapi-courses/config/routes.json
{
“routes”: [
{
“method”: “GET”,
“path”: “/strapi-courses”,
“handler”: “strapi-courses.find”,
“config”: {
“policies”: []
}
},
{
“method”: “GET”,
“path”: “/strapi-courses/count”,
“handler”: “strapi-courses.count”,
“config”: {
“policies”: []
}
},
{
“method”: “GET”,
“path”: “/strapi-courses/:id”,
“handler”: “strapi-courses.findOne”,
“config”: {
“policies”: []
}
},
{
“method”: “POST”,
“path”: “/strapi-courses”,
“handler”: “strapi-courses.create”,
“config”: {
“policies”: []
}
},
{
“method”: “PUT”,
“path”: “/strapi-courses/:id”,
“handler”: “strapi-courses.update”,
“config”: {
“policies”: []
}
},
{
“method”: “DELETE”,
“path”: “/strapi-courses/:id”,
“handler”: “strapi-courses.delete”,
“config”: {
“policies”: []
}
}
]
}
Uploading Media
Strapi comes with a package: “strapi-plugin-upload“, which works on the Strapi admin server. You can integrate third-party providers, such as AWS-S3, Google cloud storage & more. The next step is to add values, access them from the .env file, and update the optional fields accordingly.
Context
In React, the data is passed through a component tree, which is sometimes cumbersome. Using contexts, you can pass data without the need to pass through props manually, which is required by many components. Context renders a way to share values between components.
However, context is used when the data needs to be accessed by many components at different nesting levels.
To make it simpler, the Avatar component solves the issue of intermediate components knowing about the users or avatarSize props.
Another factor that makes the code cleaner is the inversion of control. Inversions reduce the number of props needed to pass through software or the web giving more control to the root components. Context makes it simpler to manage the current locale, theme, or data cache.
API
React.createContext
React.createContext is meant to create a Context object. This API in React renders a component subscribed to a Context object that reads the closest matching Providers to read the current context value.
MyContext.Provider
Every context object comes with a Provider that consumes components to subscribe to context changes. The provider accepts and passes to the descendants of the Provider.
Class.contextType
This API lets you consume the closest current Context value type. The “context type” property can be used on “React.createContext()” and any other lifecycle methods, inclusive of the render function.
Context.Consumer
Its property lets the component subscribe & receive context changes and return to the React node. The value argument is passed to the function that will be equal to the prop value of nearest Provider else it will be equal to the defaultValue passed to createContext().
Context.displayName
ReactDevTools uses it to determine what needs to be displayed for the context.
Dynamic and Agile
With the help of Virtual DOM, React integrated websites are super fast in managing and processing huge amounts of data. Strapi, on the other hand, uses Node.js and GraphQL libraries to deliver the content.
GraphQL and React
Source: Strapi.io
GraphQL lets its clients declaratively describe data requirements with a JSON-like format. GraphQL is a data fetching language and a database-agnostic that deals with all kinds of databases. GraphQL lets the client easily fetch the data with efficiency and change the datasets.
GraphQL is inflexible when it comes to handling and implementing layers of validation, policies, or authentication. Each layer requires a robust backend server, such as React. Combining these two technologies you can expect better and faster data with efficiency.
React and Strapi’s GraphQL can solve the management of structuring content, making it easy and understandable. Additionally, they together can impact the performance of the whole project ensuring user engagement or content editor comfort.
Conclusion
Building a new-age learning management system requires the right use of technologies and an expert dedicated software developers team. No doubt that React is extremely agile, especially for the component-based architecture where Strapi lets you generate faster back-end UI through multimedia assets and GraphQL.
Integrating a robust CMS, Strapi with React, both can turn out to be powerful, dynamic, and improve overall performance. Content coded becomes easy and understandable hence, maintaining it becomes a lot easier preventing duplicate content across all pages, thanks to the reusable components. However, integration of the two will not make a complete elearning management solution, an experienced developer would know the need for other languages, such as Next.js or Vue.js, or JavaScript. You then need to work on other languages, designing, testing, and more to ensure that the product fits the needs of the clients.
