EduLegends: Building a Free Live Tutoring Platform with Laravel

The Challenge: Making High-Quality Tutoring Accessible

Traditional private tutoring is expensive and geographically limited, creating a significant barrier for many students in the UK. EduLegends set out to bridge this gap by delivering completely free, live, curriculum-aligned lessons for students aged 7–16 (KS1–KS5) across Maths, Science, and English. The platform needed to support three distinct user roles: students, volunteer tutors, and platform administrators—all while operating on a budget that couldn't afford complex video infrastructure.

The Solution: A Role-Based Laravel Monolith

I built EduLegends as a full-stack Laravel 12 application tailored specifically for high-volume, live-streamed lessons. By leveraging server-rendered Blade views and Tailwind CSS, I ensured a fast, accessible frontend for students and teachers across all devices, while the backend handled the heavy lifting of asynchronous video automation.

Key Features & Engineering Highlights

1. Fully Automated YouTube Live Integration

Instead of paying for expensive custom WebRTC or video-conferencing infrastructure, I engineered a seamless integration with the YouTube Data API v3. This allows teachers to:

• Automatically create YouTube Live broadcasts when a lesson is scheduled.
• Retrieve RTMP keys and stream URLs directly from the teacher dashboard (compatible with OBS).
• Automatically fetch and attach video recordings to the lesson page once the stream ends.
• This asynchronous system is powered by Laravel Jobs and a scheduled cron-driven runner, making it highly efficient for shared hosting environments.

2. Secure, Multi-Role Portals & Approval Workflow

The application features three distinct, separated portals to ensure a clean user experience:

• Admin Portal: Manage classes, categories, teachers, students, approve new teachers, and monitor platform usage.
• Teacher Portal: Create lessons, upload materials, manage attendance, and access live streaming credentials.
• Student Portal: Browse the curriculum, enroll in classes, join live YouTube lessons, and download materials.

To maintain educational quality, I implemented a Teacher Approval Gate: tutors must be manually approved by an admin before they can log in or schedule live lessons. Admins also have the ability to block accounts at any time, ensuring platform integrity.

3. Complex Hierarchical Domain Modeling

I designed a flexible curriculum data structure to handle the intricacies of the UK education system, modeled using 15 Eloquent models and 31 database migrations. The hierarchy flows seamlessly:

• CourseClass (KS1–KS5) → Category (e.g., Algebra) → Topic → Subtopic → Lesson.

Lessons are extended with granular relationships: they have custom LessonDocument attachments, strict Attendance logs tracking student join times, and pivot tables for managing student-teacher enrollments across different class stages.

Architecture & Engineering Standards

The application is structured cleanly using role-based middleware groups (Admin, Teacher, Student). Core business logic, such as the YouTube OAuth flow and broadcast management, is extracted into a dedicated YouTubeLiveService class, ensuring the controllers remain focused on HTTP interactions. With 51 PHP files, 57 Blade views, and 157 commits over a six-month development cycle (Nov 2025 – May 2026), this project demonstrates a mature, iterative development process focused on feature delivery and operational stability.

The Result

EduLegends is now a fully functional, free-to-use tutoring platform. It successfully combines complex backend automation (YouTube Live) with intuitive frontend interfaces for admins, teachers, and students—proving that a single developer can architect, build, and deploy a sophisticated EdTech MVP on shared hosting constraints.

---

Looking for a similar build for your educational startup? Check out my other engineering projects or reach out to me to discuss your platform's architecture.