EdTech Learning Platform

01The challenge:

Course videos behind shared links, certificates typed by hand

LearnSphere sells continuing-education hours to licensed HVAC, electrical and plumbing contractors. Its courses were unlisted video links and a form-based quiz, sold through a checkout page that emailed the links after payment. Anyone with a link could pass it on, and several were circulating in trade groups online.

Certificates were typed into a document template by one staff member and emailed within three business days. In renewal season that queue ran past two hundred, and contractors facing a license deadline called the office to ask where theirs was.

02What we built:

Private video, tracked progress and certificates on the final pass

Courses run in a Next.js and React app, with course, enrollment and progress records in MongoDB. Video sits in a private AWS S3 bucket and plays through signed URLs that expire within hours, so a shared link stops working. The player saves the learner's position every few seconds and resumes on any device.

Quizzes sit between lessons, and a passing score opens the next module. Clearing the final exam generates a PDF certificate with the license number, course hours and a verification code, stores it in S3 and emails it. Stripe handles single courses, bundles and seats a company buys for a whole crew.

03What changed:

50,000 learners in six months, with no one typing certificates

LearnSphere reached 50,000 active users within six months of launch. Certificates now arrive about ninety seconds after the final exam, and 71% of enrolled learners finish their course, compared with 44% on the old video links.

The staff member who used to type certificates now runs the course catalog, adding lessons and quizzes from an admin screen. LearnSphere's in-house developer took over the codebase after a four-week overlap, with deploy scripts and a setup guide for S3 and Stripe.