Alpha Academy: A Custom Laravel LMS with Zoom Classes and Paynow

Alpha Academy: a language school serving learners across southern Africa

Alpha Academy is a language and cultural-exchange institute headquartered at 39 Jason Moyo Street in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, with a second office in Avondale, Lusaka, Zambia. Through its teaching arm, the Alpha Language Centre, it prepares students for German A1 and A2 exams, teaches ChiShona and IsiNdebele foundations, and supports au pair placements, apprenticeships (Ausbildung) and university admissions in Germany. It is the only officially recognized member of the International Au Pair Association (IAPA) in Zimbabwe, representing au pairs, students and apprentices from across the SADC region—Zambia, Malawi, Botswana and Namibia as well as Zimbabwe. The public-facing school is at alphaacademy.africa.

Geography is the reason the school needed software. A student in Lusaka preparing for a German A2 exam cannot walk into the Bulawayo office, and instructors cannot chase enrollments and fees across borders by hand. Director Nigel Chivandire wanted an online strategy that matched how the school already taught—weekly content, a live class each week, and a certificate at the end—without a growing pile of manual administration behind it.

The problem: WhatsApp groups, pasted Zoom links and offline records

Before the project, online teaching at the school was held together by messaging apps and spreadsheets, with operations fragmented across three disconnected channels:

• WhatsApp groups carried all course communication, so announcements, homework and questions were mixed together and impossible to search later.
• Zoom links for online classes were shared manually before each session, which meant missed links, wrong time zones and no attendance record.
• Enrollments and payments lived in offline records, so staff had to reconcile who had paid, who was enrolled and who had finished a module by hand.

The brief that came out of those pain points had three parts. The learning management system had to combine course management, payments and live classes in one place. It had to integrate Paynow Zimbabwe so students could pay in local and international currencies without an offline step. And it had to stay easy to use for staff who were not highly technical—a constraint that shaped the interface as much as the architecture.

The stack we built it on

Sigi built the platform as a server-rendered Laravel 10 application on MySQL, with Bootstrap 5 for the interface and REST APIs for the two external services—Zoom and Paynow—that the school depends on. Three roles share one codebase: students, instructors and administrators, each with its own dashboard and permission set. The public course catalog and sign-up flow run on the same application at alphalanguagecentre.com, so a prospective student moves from browsing a course to paying and joining a class without leaving the site.

A third design decision was to model each course as a scheduled cohort rather than a static catalog entry. Every course on the live platform carries an intake month, a duration and a module number—A1 May 2026 Module 1, A2 January 2026 Module 3, ChiShona Foundations—because that is how the school actually sells and timetables its teaching. Cohorts drive everything downstream: which Zoom meetings get created, when weekly content unlocks, and when certificates become available.

How the platform is built and run

The LMS is engineered so course delivery, payments and live classes stay in sync across three roles, on a stack a small school can run itself:

• One server-rendered Laravel 10 codebase serves all three roles — students, instructors and administrators — each with its own dashboard and permission set, and the public catalog and sign-up run on the same application.
• Courses are modeled as scheduled cohorts, each with an intake month, duration and module number, and cohorts drive what happens downstream: which Zoom meetings get created, when weekly content unlocks, and when certificates become available.
• Paynow Zimbabwe handles card, mobile money and bank payments, and a confirmed payment enrolls the student and changes enrollment status automatically instead of an offline reconciliation step.
• Zoom API integration creates the meeting for each scheduled class and publishes the join link to enrolled students, so instructors never paste links by hand.
• Built on Laravel’s authentication, queue and mail layers with MySQL as the store, sending email notifications for enrollment, payment, class reminders and certificate issuance from the platform rather than from staff phones.
• Client-operable by design: the engagement was run to keep every decision understandable for a non-technical school, refining the Zoom and Paynow flows until the school’s own staff could administer the platform.

What we implemented: student portal, instructor dashboard and admin

Sigi designed, built and shipped the platform end to end. Here is what we implemented across its three roles.

Student portal: enroll, pay through Paynow, join the weekly Zoom class

• Online sign-up and course selection from a catalog that shows intake date, duration, price (currently USD 30–100 per module) and current enrollment count for each cohort.
• Paynow checkout at enrollment, with card, mobile money and bank transfer options; a confirmed payment enrolls the student automatically and triggers a confirmation email.
• Weekly content release—lesson materials unlock one week at a time so students work through the module before the live session.
• One-click access to the live Zoom class from inside the course, plus recordings for anyone who missed the meeting.
• Quizzes per module and a progress view so learners can track milestones toward their exam date.
• Automatic certificate generation on completion, with the certificate stored against the student’s record.

Instructor dashboard: course creation, Zoom scheduling and attendance

• Course and module builder for uploading lesson content, setting release dates and attaching quizzes.
• Zoom API integration that creates the meeting for each scheduled class and publishes the join link to enrolled students—no manual sharing.
• Real-time class scheduling with attendance tracking, so an instructor can see who joined each live session.
• Per-student progress and quiz results, so instructors can see where each learner stands ahead of the exam.

Admin panel: enrollments, payments and reporting

• Enrollment management with automated status changes driven by Paynow payment confirmations.
• Payment records reconciled to students and cohorts, replacing the offline ledger.
• Centralized reporting across courses, revenue, attendance and completions for administrators and instructors.
• Email notifications for enrollment, payment, class reminders and certificate issuance, sent from the platform rather than from staff phones.

Delivery: explaining the integrations to a non-technical client

The client was explicit that he was not a technical buyer, so Sigi ran the engagement to keep every decision understandable — guiding the school through each step and refining the Zoom class flow and the Paynow integration until they worked to its satisfaction rather than handing over a finished black box. That same ease of use was written into the brief, and it is the reason the platform is administered by the school’s own staff today.

That way of working is standard for Sigi’s custom software development engagements with small institutions: the aim is a system the client can operate, not one they have to call about every week.

The team and expertise behind the build

The LMS was delivered end to end by one cross-functional Sigi team — product strategists, UI/UX designers, full-stack engineers and QA — working as a single unit rather than handing the build between vendors. Sigi hires only specialists: every engineer is an expert in their own field, and we invest in the team as they deliver, supporting certifications and continuous learning so expert, motivated engineers stay on every build. It is the model we have run since 2016: deep, cross-industry expertise owning the whole stack, from the Laravel 10 backend and the student, instructor and admin dashboards to the Zoom and Paynow integrations. Wiring live video and a local payment gateway into a system a non-technical school runs on its own is exactly the kind of integration-led engineering our team is built for — the same capability behind our web application development and custom software work.

Results: one platform, Paynow collection and 60% less admin

The platform replaced every manual tool with one system: online payment collection through Paynow, real-time class scheduling with attendance tracking, and quick adoption by non-technical staff. It now lists German A1 and A2 modules, exam-preparation courses and the ChiShona and IsiNdebele foundation courses. Its homepage counter shows more than 500 individual users, and individual cohorts show enrollments in the dozens—55 students on A1 May 2026 Module 1 and 62 on A1 August 2026 Module 1 at the time of writing.

“I’m not very technical, but they explained things clearly and made it easy to make the right decisions. Their team was patient, responsive, and always willing to adjust things until everything worked perfectly including Zoom classes and the Paynow integration.”

Explore the school at alphaacademy.africa or browse the live course catalog on the Alpha Language Centre learning platform.

Related education platform work and next steps

The cohort-and-payments pattern behind this LMS carries over to any training business that sells scheduled courses. For another education build with a public-sector twist, read the Government of Jamaica school-meal system case study; for a comparable single-tenant business system delivered to a non-technical owner, see the Bilawal Electronics ERP. Classrooms also feature in the Muzziball companion app case study, where Sigi designed the mobile app for a sensory ball used in kindergartens, schools and care homes. Sigi’s education industry page and web application development service cover the wider practice.

Planning a learning management system with live classes, local payments or certification? Contact Sigi to talk through the scope.