Benefits of Storyblok for the Education Industry

Learning & development is a never-ending process, both for personal and business purposes. People nowadays are more and more aware that knowledge is a tremendously crucial asset and even highly specialized experts in a given field are eager to constantly upgrade their qualifications and skills. Therefore, in the digital development age, they look for educational services and products that will live up to their precisely defined expectations. In order to stay competitive, education-related brands have to face two major challenges: encouragingly presenting their products and building true digital multifunctional hubs for their clients.

A multidimensional educational platform requires a system that will handle all its functionalities in an agile and modern way to keep up with the latest technology developments and we believe Storyblok is a great way to achieve that. In contrast to monolithic structures, we allow you and your clients to leverage the most advanced solutions and guarantee seamless data hosting and migration, omnichannel learning and training materials possibilities, scalability, and personalized, user-friendly UX. It’s also about offering innovative and interactive educational hubs as well as flexible implementation of supporting technologies.

In this article, we will explore how these obstacles can be overcome with the power of Storyblok and discover what exactly can be built with our help for an educational platform. Also, we will focus on some real-life examples of our partners and their clients who leveraged the exceptional possibilities of Storyblok and discover the results they have achieved.

Drive innovation through modern and interactive learning hubs delivery

Nowadays, educational processes and activities are, in many cases, online-driven. The industry’s clients will most likely build a long-term relationship with a brand when they can profit from a platform not only with knowledge bases but also with concrete tools that will help them leverage and practice gathered information. We constantly strive to live up to this challenge by implementing modern learning and coaching hubs, which is easy to achieve thanks to our API-first approach.

CoachHub & Storyblok

CoachHub, a company that specializes in people development solutions delivering, needed to build a coaching content library that enables employees to take ownership of their professional development. The academy was supposed to offer personalized content in the form of videos, readings, exercises, and other learning multimedia. When looking for a perfect CMS to host the numerous learning content and training materials, the company was convinced that there was a need for a modern and future-proof solution that would manage not only content management and delivery but also interactivity and transparency of published materials and trainings.

Thanks to opting for Storyblok, CoachHub was able to create the exceptional CoachHub academy - here’s how it was achieved:

• Coaching materials, trainings, and courses could be easily stored in Storyblok’s reusable content repository, which allows content creators to efficiently manage and reuse existing databases.
• Storyblok’s component approach was the perfect solution for new coaching content creation: The CoachHub team could flexibly build composable and nestable components that could be customized in any way to be compliant with learning material needs.
• Editable content blocks allowed CoachHub to customize and create the company's own new content templates in the form of informative banners, course referrals, and training compositions.

Scalability: Provision of modern online learning tools

In the digital age, why weigh the device and location so highly in learning activities and processes? With Storyblok’s omnichannel possibilities it’s for sure not needed. How does it work? Let’s dive into Education First’s project example to discover how the company managed to leverage Storyblok’s omnipresent capabilities.

Education First & Storyblok

Education First needed to build a new global website to host their multidimensional educational content on different channels in a modern and effective way. With the growing amount of publications, the EF’s team felt they were slow in deliveries, especially when it comes to being multi-present. The team attributed this problem to the overall current CMS’s poor API possibilities and unintuitive UX.

In EF’s case, it was especially important because the company provides a wide range of education-related services and information hubs for people of all ages, including students, also being an international language school based in 55 countries worldwide. How did Storyblok help the company reach their audience whenever they needed access to their services?

• With Storyblok, EF gained the flexibility of delivering their content through an API, which resulted in freedom in leveraging their data repositories on different devices.
• The APIs and plugins were able to pull content from the company’s databases and transfer it to a given device’s frontend, whereby consolidated data could appear there in a consistent and uninterrupted way, corresponding to main landing pages and functions.

Accelerated learning outcomes by perfectly personalized educational process

Increasing competition in online education services suggests not only being able to offer distinctive learning and informative platforms but also enabling visitors to experience the best possibly suited personalization. Here at Storyblok, we are there for you to take care of this aspect, as it’s needed to provide users with more endearing products and services as well as to build trusted and long-term relationships with clients.

What exactly should be taken into account when building personalized user-experience on an educational platform? Here’s what factors should be considered when building your educational project with Storyblok:

• Learning content itself: Graphics, audio, video, textual content
• The learning environment: The form of appearing content, how it appears, backgrounds, themes, font size, colors, etc.
• The interaction between a visitor/user, learning content, and facilitator: Feedback workflows, online discussions, adaptive learning approaches, tutorials, etc.

In order to discover what exact combination of the above mentioned factors can lead to the biggest success of your project, it’s important to know a given audience’s preferences and expectations. But, as users might present different approaches and demand towards a learning platform, here’s where we can help you leverage personalization capabilities to deliver the most relevant and adjusted content to your clients’ audience.

At Storyblok, companies can leverage powerful personalization integrations that are fully compatible with the CMS. One such solution is our partnership with Optimizely - a DXP (Digital Experience Platform) that allows orchestrating, A/B testing, and multidimensional content experimenting in order to achieve a hyper-personalized digital journey. Developers, content creators, and marketers have a chance to evaluate the possibilities and alternatives to handle possible custom scenarios while providing powerful experiences to users.

We also collaborate with other great personalization technology providers such as Nosto or Ninetailed - visit our personalization technology partner listing to find out more.

Agilely deliver education services in any language

Since a lot of educational brands scale and go global, we constantly strive to help you live up to numerous localization and internationalization challenges connected to delivering content in an audience's language. Let’s get back to the CoachHub’s example and see how it was achieved with Storyblok:

CoachHub, in their CouchHub Academy, offers their coaching materials in 8 languages, which requires an **agile, future-proof and efficient localization solution. **Before the new project creation, all the translation operations were handled by CoachHub’s content managers manually. With the huge amount of content offered by the company in so many languages, this process was ineffective and time consuming. The company decided to implement Storyblok for the following reasons:

• Thanks to Storyblok’s wide integration capabilities, it was possible for CoachHub to leverage our functional localization integration Lokalise - a translation management system built for agile teams who want to automate their localization process.
• Thanks to the integration, it was possible to connect CouchHub’s network of translators with the Lokalise’s agile memory database, which automates translation processes, remembers previous translations and makes it possible to reuse them, as well as corrects possible errors right away. This all cut down tremendously on translation time and allows for more translations to be managed.
• The localization workflow was streamlined and simplified - whenever content was created in CoachHub’s default language (English), those entries got imported to Lokalise and then to Storyblok.

Find out more about amazing Storyblok’s integration with our localization partners here.

Visually appealing educational content

One should not forget about the fact that half of the success when it comes to managing an educational platform is making the visitor authentically willing to spend their time on a website. Visually well-maintained and transparent content is crucial to keep the visitor eager to choose an educational solution as well as invest his time to explore and leverage it. Besides keeping the content appealing, it’s also about presenting it in innovative and modern ways. To make it possible, ProWritingAid decided to implement their new, powerful platform with Storyblok.

ProWritingAid & Storyblok:

ProWritingAid is an AI-powered writing assistant platform that offers grammar and style checking, combined with coaching and learning hubs. When it comes to the content publishing, their existing markdown-setup was unintuitive and caused content creation blockers: Some marketers were unfamiliar with the complicated markdown workflows, which created an additional learning curve and made them independent from the company’s developers. This is how ProWritingAid solved this problem with Storyblok:

• The Visual Editor was a big help with the website’s layout composing, as it enabled marketers to transpose, customize, and organize content publishing thanks to the real-time preview and drag-and-drop functionality.
• Marketers could enjoy smooth and user-friendly content creation workflows thanks to Storyblok’s composable blocks, which can be freely modified and put together in a flexible way.
• Storyblok’s powerful internal DAM made it possible to host and manage different content types such as pictures, videos, and interactive tutorials.

We highly recommend you dive into external DAM integrations that are fully compatible with Storyblok - you can leverage your project using such great technologies as Cloudinary or Scaleflex. Learn more here.

How else can Storyblok help you power your clients’ educational brands’ platforms?

Storyblok’s powerful headless capabilities such as an API-first approach and technology stack interchangeability let educational projects be a step ahead of the competition by implementing futuristic education and learning solutions.

• Alexa functionalities: Leveraging AI-assisted speaking technologies can be used by educational brands to deepen user engagement. As examples we can list a platform’s voice navigation, language and pronunciation practice, voice-assistant support during trainings, etc.
• AR/ VR learning experiences: Creating learning possibilities in digital environments can be a great way to bring an educational journey to a new level. In this context, we can think of gamifying the learning experiences, interactive materials and multimedia immersive experiences creation, as well as virtual platforms walkthroughs.
• Mobile apps: With Storyblok, it’s also possible to leverage its API capabilities by custom apps creation, which can perfectly complement a project’s existing educational customer journey. As examples we can list remote login plugins, payment detail information and execution, personalized profile areas, customized education progress tracking, apps dedicated to hold interactions between course participants, and many more.

Is Storyblok the future of your education-focus project?

Looking at what we have learned together with our partners, in our opinion, education is going headless. Especially with Storyblok, education entities can leverage a wide range of its exceptional features:

• Enriching platforms with innovative and modern learning hubs that are possible to be freely customized, agilely managed, and efficiently maintained thanks to Storyblok’s scalability and easy content delivery integration leveraging APIs capabilities
• International strategy implementation thanks to our internalization and localization possibilities
• Storyblok’s modern and user-friendly content management and editing capabilities, possible thanks to our unique Visual Editor

Interested in creating your project with Storyblok? Feel free to contact our Sales Team or reach the Storyblok Partner Team directly.