Tips for developing Learning Management System – LMS Websites in Nigeria

LMS Websites have been on the raise, as well as the transition of business products and services, online, most especially from the hit of Covid 19.

“The global learning management system market was valued at USD 6.92 billion in 2017 and is expected to reach a value of USD 23.21 billion by 2023 at a CAGR of 22.35% over the forecast period of 2018-2023. North America holds the highest market share.” Source: globenewswire

Another report states that “The global LMS market size is expected to grow from USD 9.2 billion in 2018 to USD 22.4 billion by 2023, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 19.6% during the forecast period during the forecast period.” Source: businesswire

While the exact number of websites keeps changing every second, there are well over 1 billion sites on the world wide web (1,106,671,903 according to Netcraft’s June 2023 Web Server Survey compared to 1,146,976,964 in June 2022). Source: siteefy

From the chart below, gotten from siteefy, you can see that there was a decline, despite an increase in 2017, in the number of active websites from 2013 – 2018. While from 2019, which could be majorly attributed to the impact of Covid 19, there has been a steady increase, with a dip in 2022.

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The use of Ecommerce has been steadily growing from 2015, with a distinct upward jog in total global retail sales from 2019-2020, giving a strong boost to a steady 8% growth in retail ecommerce sales worldwide forecast through 2024. This shows us an increase in online retail sales as a result of the paradigm shift that COVID disruptions have brought to business, as shwon in the chart below gotten from trade.gov:

Now back to our main topic on the tips for developing LMS Websites.

What LMS Platform would you prefer using?

You can decide to use established LMS platforms that offer you services, while you pay them, accordingly. This can be a bit confusing because there are a lot of them out there. CLICK HERE to see a list

On the other hand, if you want to handle the process yourself, which is what I will focus on, continue reading.

Venturing into having your own LMS website, where your training videos are hosted, you will need to decide which programming language or website platform should be used to develop the website. If you are not a techy person, then you definitely need a website developer.

Nonetheless, this article will guide you on the things that are required when developing your LMS websites.

LMS Features

The LMS should have the following, basic, features:

Domain Name

When choosing a domain name, you need to consider your brand and you may also look into what people search for, via search engines, when in need of your kind of services. Your domain name shouldn’t be too long. It should be easy to pronounce and quick to type. Also you can use a domain name extension that is targeted to your country, if your customer base is local. Eg. using .com.ng or .ng extensions, where ng represents Nigeria. This will help indicate to search engines that your preferred audience is in Nigeria.

Hosting

When choosing a hosting company for your LMS websites, you need to consider the capability of the hosting services being able to handle the functions of an LMS. Preference should be with Cloud or VPS hosting, for starters.

The hosting capability gauge are (depending on the hosting company):

• Size of storage
• Available Bandwidth
• File Usage
• CPU Usage
• Physical Memory Usage

Though our company is based in Nigeria, we offer services, internationally, and I usually recommend the use of foreign based hosting companies because they are ranked higher in the features they offer and customer service.

There are a variety of top notch Hosting companies available but due to affordability we usually recommend

• Namecheap
• Hostgator

Course Videos

I have encountered companies that want to upload videos that last for an hour or more, just for a lesson. As a best practice, videos should be 5 to 20mins long.

E.g. A video on with the topic Designing, can have subsections like:

• What is Designing
• Why is Designing important?
• Process of designing, etc.

So if the video is 30mins or more, it can be subdivided into 5/10mins. Making it smaller, easier to upload and less demanding on the server, as well as, comply with the current attention span of people.

Another thing to consider with regards to course videos is where you would like to host the vidoes.

There are 3 affordable options to add training videos:

• Your server
• Vimeo Platform
• Spotlightr Platform

Your server

Upload the videos directly on your server can save you cost but has its disadvantages are as follows:

• You may run out of storage space on your web hosting because of the video files
• You may hit the bandwidth limit on your web hosting because users downloading & watching large video files takes up an enormous amount of bandwidth
• Your videos can take a longer time to load, which leaves the user waiting for the video to render before they can watch it

Vimeo Platform

The lowest plan costs $12/month, when billed for a year and $20 on a monthly basis, with a limit of 60 videos. Please, CLICK HERE to view

Spotlightr Platform

The lowest plan costs $7/month, with a limit of 50gb space. Their second plan offers unlimited videos, with a limit of 200gb space, at $16/month. Please, CLICK HERE to view

Both Vimeo and Spotlightr offer you a feature to restrict videos to play only on your website

SEO

You should ensure that your website, most especially your homepage and course pages are Search Engine Optimized so that your website is easily found in search results, using local seo strategy.

I hope this article will be of good use in developing LMS Websites. Please, if you have any question or comment, do not hesitate to drop it via the comment box below.