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Learning Management System

Part of the Full Stack Developer Roadmap

In short

You're using one right now. Courses, lessons, progress ticks and quizzes look simple, but tracking progress per user, per lesson, without slowing the page, is a real design problem.

A course platform with lessons, progress tracking and quizzes — directly relevant given the roadmap tool you're using right now follows a similar UX pattern.

The purple blob as a tuition teacher ticks a big register beside a stack of notebooks.

Think of it like this

The tuition teacher's register

Sir keeps one register: a row per student, a column per chapter, a tick when you finish. A glance shows you're 60% done. Your LMS is that register, with the database keeping the ticks.

Watch it happen

Marking a lesson done

Browser

API

Database

POST /lessons/31/done

1/5The student clicks 'Mark as done' at the end of a lesson.

The big ideas

What you need to know

Course, module, lesson

A clear hierarchy with an order column at each level, so you can reorder lessons without renaming them.

Progress is a join table

lesson_progress(user_id, lesson_id) with both as the primary key. Done is simply 'row exists'.

Quizzes checked on the server

Send questions without answers. The server grades the attempt and stores the score.

Video from storage

Store videos in object storage or a video service, and serve signed URLs to enrolled students only.

See it in code

Walk through the code

sql

1CREATE TABLE lesson_progress (2  user_id      bigint REFERENCES users(id),3  lesson_id    bigint REFERENCES lessons(id),4  completed_at timestamptz NOT NULL DEFAULT now(),5  PRIMARY KEY (user_id, lesson_id)6);7 8-- Mark done (safe to call twice)9INSERT INTO lesson_progress (user_id, lesson_id) VALUES ($1, $2)10ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING;11 12-- Course progress for the course page13SELECT round(100.0 * count(lp.lesson_id) / nullif(count(l.id), 0)) AS percent14FROM lessons l15LEFT JOIN lesson_progress lp ON lp.lesson_id = l.id AND lp.user_id = $116WHERE l.course_id = $2;