Learning platforms, training systems, assessment tools and credentialing. The hard parts are rarely the lessons: they are accessibility, offline access, honest progress tracking and the student-data rules that apply the moment a minor logs in.
Courses, paths and cohort delivery
Streaming, recording and virtual classrooms
Quizzes, proctoring and adaptive testing
Credentials, CEUs and verifiable records
Mandatory training with auditable completion
Matching, scheduling and feedback loops
Learner, instructor and administrator views
Moderated forums and help channels
Screen readers, captions and keyboard paths, often a legal requirement here
FERPA and COPPA obligations when learners are students or minors
Downloadable lessons that sync progress on reconnect
Completion state that survives a crash mid-lesson
Interoperating with course content and institutional systems
Adaptive bitrate so a lesson plays on school wifi
Question banking, randomisation and proctoring options
Completion evidence that stands up to a regulator
Ranges, not quotes. Scope, integrations and compliance work move these, so the number we give you after a discovery call is the one that means something.
A course-delivery MVP runs $40,000-$85,000. A full platform with mobile apps, video, certification and instructor tooling runs $85,000-$160,000. Institutional work with SSO, proctoring and district-scale multi-tenancy runs $160,000-$250,000+. Video infrastructure and accessibility conformance are the two line items people underestimate.
In practice yes, and often legally. Public institutions and federally funded programmes in the US are bound by Section 508 and ADA expectations, and WCAG 2.1 AA is the usual conformance target. Accessibility is far cheaper designed in than retrofitted, because it constrains colour, component structure and navigation from the first screen. We treat the target as a requirement at discovery, not a QA finding.
FERPA governs student education records at institutions receiving US Department of Education funding; COPPA governs collecting personal information from children under 13. Whether they apply depends on who your learners are and how you are funded, which is a question for your counsel rather than for us. What we do is build to the answer: data minimisation, parental consent flows, retention limits and access controls.
Yes: SCORM 1.2 and 2004 for packaged course content, xAPI where richer activity tracking is needed, and LTI 1.3 to launch your tool from an institution's LMS such as Canvas or Moodle. If your buyers are institutions, LTI is usually what makes you purchasable.
Three to five months for a course MVP, five to nine for a full platform, nine to fourteen for institutional work. The accessibility audit and any proctoring or SSO integration are the phases most likely to extend, so we schedule them explicitly rather than folding them into general QA.
Tell us what you are trying to ship and we will tell you what it takes — scope, timeline and the parts that usually go wrong.