One of the first stages that a potential student faces is: “Where do I find the institution/tutor/school, etc?” And the internet is the first place they turn to in finding the answer to this question. The second question they would probably ask is: “How do I choose between all the variety of services and companies that are there at the market?” An online educational marketplace can help your potential users in answering these questions.
The average marketplace’s main idea is:
- You are a tutor and you are looking for pupils to teach
- Students are looking for a tutor to help them pass through exams, improve knowledge, learn new things.
The marketplace is a platform where these roles meet. Tutors have the possibility to create their own profiles and students can look for the tutor they need based on advanced customized search, read feedback from other students on this teacher and see his/her experience. Based on that students can chat with the teacher and hire them for the job.
The second stage to this would be the ability to provide the service online, like online streaming where two can have a call and talk to each other. The ability to give out online homework, track hours for each session, and open additional material are also nice features that would provide an end-to-end educational process within one platform.
And the third stage to this is enforcement of the control system where the platform takes care of the payments, tracks the attendance of users, and manages the possible conflicts between the two roles.
Which part of the system to concentrate on, is something for you to select. Nowadays modern Payment Systems Development can give you all the opportunities you need, and If you have enough budget you can go for all three of them. Localization plays an important role, because online educational markets can be good for one country, and can be unacceptable for others. It’s also important to understand the payment options that your system should support. While pay per hour is a general approach, there are also per course and per-student payments that some tutors suggest.
The marketplace idea is not obligatory targeted for teachers and students. It can be institutions or universities and students/professors. It can also be the courses authors and libraries/journals, writers and media, anything that involves two roles that need to be brought together.
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
- WEB educational marketplace
- Android educational app
- IOS educational app
Wrapping up
Even though we recommend starting with the web, mobile is a nice addition to have here. Most of the students try to discipline themselves into learning behind the desk. However, since mobile phone is the thing you always take with yourself, this is an additional way for you to keep your student and tutors involved and spend more time on your platform.