LMS (Online Courses)
Course delivery, enrolments and progress tracking for recorded teaching — built around how your students actually watch.
An LMS is only worth building when the teaching is genuinely asynchronous: recorded lessons, notes, assignments and a progress record. If your teaching is live on Zoom and your material goes out on WhatsApp, an LMS is a layer of bureaucracy over something already working, and the honest advice is to leave it alone.
Where it does pay, the hard problems are not the course pages. They are video hosting cost, access control that survives sharing, and the fact that most of your students are watching on a mobile phone on a metered connection. What gets built should be scoped around those three things first, because they determine both the monthly running cost and whether students finish the course.
What it fixes
- Lessons and notes distributed over WhatsApp, so a student who joins in week three has no way to catch up in order
- No record of who watched what, so there is nothing to show a parent or a corporate sponsor who asks about progress
- Course access shared freely — one paid login circulating through a batch of twenty
- Video hosting cost that nobody estimated, which arrives as a surprise bill once a few hundred students start streaming
- Assignments collected by email and marked without a record, so grades cannot be reconstructed later
- Enrolments and payments tracked separately from access, so a student whose payment lapsed keeps watching
What gets built
A starting point, not a fixed list. The build is scoped to your own process before anything is written.
Course structure
Courses, modules and lessons with video, notes, downloads and quizzes, released all at once or on a drip schedule by date or on completion of the previous module.
Enrolment and access control
Enrolment tied to payment status and an expiry, device or session limits to make login sharing inconvenient, and signed video links that expire rather than a URL that can be forwarded.
Progress tracking
Per-student completion by lesson, watch progress, quiz scores and last activity — the record that answers whether a student is actually studying or merely enrolled.
Assignments and marking
Submission with a deadline, teacher marking with comments, and a stored grade history per student rather than a thread of emails.
Mobile-first delivery
Built for a phone on a weak connection: adjustable video quality, resumable playback and notes readable without downloading a large file. This is the deciding factor in completion rates for most local audiences.
Certificates and reporting
Completion certificates on your own criteria, and cohort-level reports on enrolment, completion and drop-off point — which tells you where in the course people give up.
Who this is for
Trainers, institutes and professional bodies selling or delivering recorded courses to roughly 50 students and up, where course material is a product rather than a byproduct of a class. It also suits companies running internal training that must be evidenced. It is not for live-only teaching, and it is not for a trainer with one course and thirty students — a hosted platform's monthly subscription will cost less than a build, and you can move to your own system once the numbers justify it. Be honest about that threshold; the main reasons to own it are control over pricing, branding and student data, not features.
Questions
Where will the videos be hosted, and what does that cost?
This is the real cost question and it needs numbers, not a shrug. Video storage and bandwidth are charged by use, so the bill scales with how many students watch how much — a few hundred students on hour-long lessons is a meaningful monthly figure, separate from the build. The options run from a hosted video service with built-in protection, through cloud storage with signed links, to unlisted YouTube with weaker control and almost no cost. We work out your likely monthly spend on each before you choose, rather than after the first invoice.
Can you stop students downloading and sharing the videos?
You can make it inconvenient, not impossible. Signed expiring links, session limits and a visible per-student watermark deter casual sharing and make leaked copies traceable. Anyone willing to use screen recording software will still get a copy. Build for deterrence and traceability, and price the course knowing some leakage is unavoidable.
Can students pay for a course online?
Yes, with a payment gateway — which means a merchant application, documents and a per-transaction charge. For low-priced courses that charge matters, and for international students the options and the charges differ again. It is worth confirming your course price and expected volume before deciding that automated online payment is better than a manual bank transfer with a confirmation step.
Tell us how your institute runs.
We scope it first — what it takes, how long, what it costs. No obligation.