360 Academy — Online Learning Platform (LMS) for 3,500+ Students

The client

360 Academy started in January 2022 teaching Print on Demand and Dropshipping to Bangladeshi learners, built on close to a decade of hands-on operating experience in those markets. By the start of 2025 it had run 22 batches, trained more than 3,500 students, and expanded its catalogue into AI, video editing, UI/UX design and paid marketing. It had also comprehensively outgrown the tools it was running on.

What growth had broken

The academy was operating out of Facebook groups, Google Drive folders and a spreadsheet. Each new batch meant a new group, a new folder tree, and re-adding every student by hand. Enrolment payments arrived over bKash and were matched to students manually — a job that grew linearly with success and had no ceiling except somebody's evening.

Course content was the more serious exposure. Recordings shared as Drive links leak the moment one student forwards one URL, and for a business whose entire inventory is video, that is not a support issue — it is the product being given away. Meanwhile nobody could answer basic questions: who had actually watched the material, where students dropped off, which lessons quietly lost half the batch.

The teaching model added a real constraint. This is not a passive video catalogue; it runs live cohorts with mentors, so the platform had to handle scheduled sessions, batch-scoped access and ongoing mentor support alongside recorded content.

What we built

A purpose-built LMS covering enrolment, delivery, payment and progress in one system, designed around how Bangladeshi learners actually study — mostly on mid-range Android phones, often on mobile data.

• Secure video delivery. Adaptive HLS streaming behind signed, expiring URLs served from CDN edge, with multiple quality rungs so a lesson keeps playing on a weak mobile connection instead of buffering to a stop.
• Course and curriculum builder. Modules, lessons, durations, attached resources and drip scheduling, all managed by the academy team without a developer — the 150-lesson Dropshipping mega course and the 131-lesson Excel masterclass are both maintained in-house.
• Live batch management. Cohorts with start dates, enrolment caps, session scheduling and batch-scoped access, so a live course such as the IELTS 60 Days Challenge runs alongside self-paced catalogue courses in the same system.
• Local payment checkout. SSLCOMMERZ and bKash integration with automatic enrolment on confirmed payment, plus coupon and discount handling for the academy's regular promotional pricing. Manual reconciliation is gone.
• Progress and completion tracking. Per-lesson watch progress, resumable playback across devices, course completion state and certificates on finish.
• Instructor and mentor tooling. Multi-instructor support with per-course attribution, a student Q&A queue, and announcements scoped to a batch — the mentor support students consistently single out in reviews, given somewhere structured to happen.

Engineering decisions worth calling out

Video was treated as the core architectural problem rather than a feature. Signed short-lived URLs, per-session tokens and CDN-level access rules mean a copied link is worthless within minutes. For a business whose stock is its recordings, spending the engineering budget here rather than on interface polish was the decision that protected the revenue.

The player was tuned for the low end of the device and network range, not the high end. Aggressive transcoding rungs, resume-from-position by default and small initial segments matter far more to completion rates than anything on the marketing page, because a student who cannot finish a lesson on 3G does not renew.

Payment webhooks are idempotent and drive enrolment directly. bKash and gateway callbacks can retry, duplicate or arrive out of order, and the failure mode everyone remembers is the student who paid and did not get access — so enrolment is derived from confirmed payment events, not from a redirect the browser may never complete.

Where it stands

360 Academy runs its entire operation on the platform: 3,500+ students trained, 22 batches delivered, around 1,000 learners currently enrolled, and 3,100 reporting they reached the goal they signed up for. The catalogue now spans five live course tracks — Excel, video editing, IELTS, ChatGPT mastery and the dropshipping mega course — with new instructors onboarded by the academy team rather than by us, which is the outcome that matters most: the platform grows without needing its developers.