APIs, CMS, CRM, Ecommerce, LTI, and LRS are a few types of integrations to be considered for education portal development in 2022. Because integrations provide your system with a stable ground to grow and enhance your customer experience with latest technologies. Ecommerce integrations like PayPal and Stripe would allow your learners to pay the course fee instantly. With in-app chat features, they can communicate with the educators any time and get their questions answered.
Hence, ensure that your LMS allows third-party integrations, or you would be left wondering about the extra opportunities that you could have leveraged (like the payment options we talked above).
To help you figure out the required integrations, we have listed down 8 integrations that will give your education system a boost.
1. CMS (Content Management System)
LMS provides learners with a quality training experience, and content is its cornerstone. Adding, updating, documenting, and sharing content gets easier with a content management system. It not only helps manage content from one place but also provides a convenient way to share it across. WordPress, Jumla, Wix, Magento, Shopify, Drupal are a few of the popular CMSs. You can integrate them to your LMS to organize, store, and manage all your content systematically.
With a CMS, you don’t have to scroll through thousands of papers and documents to find relevant content. For example, if you have an online e-learning platform, your learners and educators won’t have to go through multiple documents to find particular course information. CMS helps organize the content in a way that’s convenient and easy. Plus, it doesn’t require technical knowledge, which means content publishing and sharing can be done easily. For example, you can make changes to Christmas promotional offers before publishing them and also unpublish it and delete it whenever required.
Apart from this, CMS helps you ease your site maintenance. It also streamlines course scheduling and improves overall user experience.
2. CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
If you’re looking to enhance your customer experience, CRM is the go-to integration. Just like CMS streamlines content management, CRM connects you with your customers, partners, and other stakeholders seamlessly. It provides various features that help gather and analyze customer information—such as their past purchases, shopping pattern, wishlist, transaction methods, etc. A CRM solution in the education portal development helps you collect and manage all your users’ data at one place. It also helps you offer a personalized experience to your customers. For example, you can share articles based on what they read previously. You can also recommend courses that they may like and also display courses undertaken by other customers.
A few of the popular CRM software include Salesforce, SuiteCRM, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics, and Webhooks. All these offer a set of unique features that help you to communicate with your customers in an effective way. For example, they will notify of the course completion or when the learner fails the exam.
3. API/LTI Integrations
You might have heard about LTI integrations while undergoing education portal development. Like API, it acts as a catalyst that offers smooth functioning of internal processes, only that it’s specific for learning platforms. Integrating API/LTI allows you to extend your capabilities without developing a feature from scratch. For example, you can integrate Facebook Messenger API with your portal. It lets you use messenger features without developing a messenger app from scratch. You can connect it with your Facebook account and proceed with the messaging.
LTI integration simplifies efforts and enhances productivity. However, they can be vulnerable to ensure that you verify the LTIs before integrating. Look out for the API integration platforms like Dell Boomi, Celigo, and Zapier to streamline and automate your internal processes.
ERP, POS, and CRM integration are among the best examples of API integration. It lets businesses collect and auto-sync all the data from ERP and POS to CRM.
4. ECommerce Integrations
You need to keep your store up-to-date with the latest features and tools, just like the course content. Also, you can’t keep developing everything from scratch every time a new update or feature rolls out. That’s where eCommerce integration comes into the picture.
eCommerce integration helps you transfer information between your website and different components, including accounting, finance, inventory, marketing, and sales. The best example is payment integration. You can integrate PayPal and Stripe API if you want to monetize your LMS. Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce are third-party eCommerce platforms that you can integrate to maximize your profits. Google Analytics integration can help you get better insights into your business and customers. Similarly, there are various third-party tools that you might need to run your business. MailChimp integration for emails, DropBox for document management, SharePoint for Microsoft Dynamics, InventoryPlanner for inventory, etc.
5. Single Sign-On
When you respect your learners’ and educators’ time, they are going to thank you back by engaging with your brand – here, courses. To respect them, offer a single sign-on, i.e., let them access all the platforms with similar credentials. For example, they can use the store login credentials to access the backend, portal, app, and other related websites.
Single sign-on (SSO) improves store security while focusing on productivity. It reduces the time wastage and number of support calls. In addition, it reduces password theft. As users will use the same password for multiple platforms, they are likely to generate a strong password. They will not have to write down the password or store it in cloud storage. A single password is easy to remember, so there’s no password fatigue.
Overall, the major advantage is an improved customer experience and reduced requests for forgotten passwords. A few SSO options include Microsoft Azure, G Suite, and Okta.
While undergoing education portal development, ensure that you provide a single sign-on option. Let your learners and educators access the portal with their Google, Microsoft, or other social accounts.
6. Collaboration Tools
Collaboration tools empower learners and educators to interact via interactive sessions, discussions, group studies, community, etc. These tools let users work together and accomplish specific tasks. For example, they can collaborate on a shared document with Google Docs. Slack can be used for communication and in-house data sharing, Kenvy for data transfer, SodaPDF to create pdfs and share it with a team, Calendar for appointment reminders, Google Keep for notes, Adobe Connect for weekly course overview, and so on.
Integrating collaboration tools in education portal development will positively impact your team’s learning curve. They will be able to share their ideas and get suggestions in real-time. This widens their perspectives and helps them gain a better understanding of the topics.
7. Video Conferencing
The pandemic has made online learning an important part of the education sector. Schools, institutes, and businesses are shifting towards technology to improve their teaching approach. And video conferencing has made it easy for them to communicate and keep the learning process ongoing even if the learners and educators are not together physically. Zoom, GoogleMeet, Flipgrid, and GoToMeetings have brought everyone together despite the geographical differences. Now schools and universities can conduct online meetings, lectures, and virtual events easily. They can also schedule sessions, register attendees, track attendances, etc., from one place.
By integrating AR and VR tools, you can further make learning fun and interactive. These tools give your learners an immersive experience and a clear understanding of the subjects. So, don’t forget to integrate video conferencing tools in your education portal development. It will help you keep the interaction and learning ongoing consistently.
8. Social Media
From sharing achievements to information, queries, and updates, there are many reasons to integrate social media tools in your LMS. Social media integration gives your learners and educators an opportunity to connect with their peers outside the classroom. It helps them share their details with their fellow learners and increase their network connections. For example, they can share completion certificates on LinkedIn, which increases the profile reviews. Twitter is a good place for articles. So it can help them to access more information and even share their thoughts and doubts over there.
Social media integration provides a bridge between education and the real-life. It helps learners and educators connect their learnings with real-life experiences and better insights.
Summing Up
An LMS shouldn’t be complicated. An effective solution with all the necessary integrations will provide you various benefits
- Improved training ROI
- Reduced errors and data redundancies
- Enhanced customer experience
- Better insights
- Increased sales and revenue
- Brand building
and more.
So, integrate wisely. Check the integrations that are required and will provide maximum profits. If you need any help listing the tools for your education portal development, we can be your guide. We help businesses with custom portal development tailored to their business needs. We can also help you with one that is rich in features and offers all the functionalities you may require.
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