Today we all are living in technological driven world where online learning has become an important and totally worthwhile way of learning on-the-go. Now our future of higher education lies in the hand of the online learning system. Nowadays college and university students find themselves burdened with Jobs and family commitments and having an option of studying at their own time has become a critically important part of their life, as its very convenient and less expensive for most of the students moreover, You can work on any course just about anywhere you have computer access.

Because of the expanding trend of online learning platforms like Udemy, khan academy, now the question arises is that how can we make our own online learning platform, what are the core technologies involved in developing such systems, the answer to that is Application programming interface (APIs). APIs are sets of instructions or requirements that govern how one application can communicate with another.

The function of an API is usually fairly straightforward and simple, the process of choosing which type of API to build, understanding why that type of API is appropriate for your application, and then designing it to work effectively is the key to giving your API a fairly long life and making sure that it’s used by developers.

There are many types of APIs available. For example, you may have heard of Java APIs or interfaces within different classes that let objects interact with each other in the Java programming language. Along with program-centric APIs, we also have Web APIs like the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Remote Procedure Call (RPC), and the most popular at least in name, Representational State Transfer (REST).

There are more than one alternatives

If you’re looking for building your own platform for e-learning like Udemy, it’s important to decide which type of method you have in mind for the delivering lectures of courses that are offered, it can be audio, video or simple text. Video lectures are more in trend these days so now it’s important to know  how to make your own live streaming videos for course lectures, there are a lot of APIs that can offer to make an application that is user friendly and fast but for specific live video streaming Castasy is a good way of doing so as it’s a  cost efficient solution that has arrived in the form of a software  This new live streaming software comes with compatible versions for both iOS and Android devices and also comes in a desktop version. The software basically allows the user to have an application and website that could stream live videos with their own live streaming software. The user is capable of allowing access or denying access to any follower. Each video gets a separate URL and posting that specific URL in their browser, users can view the video at their desktops with the website version of that software. With different URLs users have the facility to view a number of videos available in the website version of the software The live streaming software also withholds a chat feature facilitating viewers to chat on videos as they are streamed so they can discuss relevant topics related to that video it’s a very good feature for e-academies as it helps the students to discuss different queries through chat.

Now if we talk about the most popular, known and very efficient API developer Citrix, Gotowebinar, and Udemy usually comes into the person’s mind now let’s look at them one by one and in detail.

What Citrix basically do is that these applications are streamed from a centralized specific location into an isolated environment where they are executed on different target devices. Application configuration, settings, and relevant files are copied to the client device. When you start the session virtualization, applications are delivered from hosting servers in the data center with the help of application streaming. The user is then connected to the server to which that specific application was delivered. The application is then executed on the server, and the server power is maximized. While the server receives mouse clicks and random keyboard strokes, it sends all the screen updates to the end user device.

GoToWebinar is a purpose-built for do-it-yourself Webinars, making it easy for multinational organizations to deliver their message to thousands of people at the same time, eliminating costly travel or expensive marketing promotions. Innovative in-session features and reports help businesses evaluate the success of their Webinars and to judge whether it was successful or not .it’s actually a Citrix production but it’s usually considered as a different API.

If we look at Udemy as an API we see that Depending on our intended use case, we may be interested in creating our own courses, basically our own platforms for e-learning, it helps us in developing that certain stage, we can consume premium courses, or develop our own through Udemy it’s an easy way to provide services online and earn a little bit of fortune.

API’s	pricing	benefits	Availability
Gotowebinar	For starters, it costs $89.00 and can provide services for up to 100 participants For Pro it costs $199.00/mo and can entertain up to 500 Participants For plus it costs $429.00 and can provide services for 2000 Participants	·      Reliable ·      Ease of use ·      Cost efficient ·      Saves time and money that is otherwise consumed on marketing	Easily available in the US and outside of US
Citrix	It ranges between 80$ to 500$	·      standardized, common setup. ·      compress the data ·      it’ll encrypt the data for security ·      the performance is faster ·      centralized management	Easily available all around the globe
Udemy	·        list prices of Udemy range between $20 – $200. ·       Larger discounts are offered. ·       We can run promotions if different courses in 10 to 15$	The ability to create your own courses The easiest opportunity to centralize your training materials Easy Management of users and courses	Available all around the world

 

It is not as hard as you may think

Every API technologies have a lot of benefits and mostly are available all around the globe if we want to build our own e-learning platform it’s easier to utilize these APIs rather than developing our own, as its cost efficient and gives us all the desirable features whether it’s online streaming of lectures or publicity of a certain seminar they provide us with every feature necessary to develop our own Udemy .