As the world is moving to the internet, so are our tools for learning and acquiring knowledge in different disciplines. Right now on the web, there is a plethora of online platforms that offer both educators and students options to teach and learn different topics remotely, without the necessity to be physically co-located in a classroom.

In this chapter, we will build a simple online classroom application, by extending the MERN stack skeleton application. This classroom application will support multiple user roles, the addition of course content and lessons, student enrollments, progress tracking, and course enrollment statistics. While building out this application, we will uncover more capabilities of this stack, such as how to implement role-based access to resources and actions, how to combine multiple schemas, and how to run different query operations in order to gather stats. By the end of this chapter, you will be familiar with the techniques that are needed to easily integrate new full-stack features in any MERN-based application. 

We will build out the online classroom application by covering the following topics in this chapter:

• Introducing MERN Classroom
• Adding an educator role to users
• Adding courses to the classroom
• Updating courses with lessons
• Publishing courses
• Enrolling in courses
• Tracking progress and enrollment stats