It’s important to select the right online course platform if you wish to make the most sales. The best e-learning platform will help you attain your goals, from developing a course web and receiving payments to interacting with your tutees and uploading videos.
This post outlines over 17 best online course platforms and the top five. Due to social distancing, online learning is accelerating; therefore, online class platforms are rising.
The online course and e-learning market is estimated to have a value of $325 billion by 2025.
Are you prepared to get into the e-learning market and sell courses?
You need the best online class platform to tap into the e-learning market. TherfireYou should choose a platform that delivers a personalized, expert learning experience to your students.
Online course platforms are browser-based platforms that help you:
- Create online course websites or merge your courses with an existing website.
- Set up a sales landing page.
- Price your courses and receive payments in installments or one-time.
- Upload videos (include quizzes and assignments).
- Create interactive content and communicate with your tutees.
- Create membership communities.
- Host a live webinar.
Even though there are pros and cons of online learning, the best online class platforms ensure that students and tutors benefit the most from the online experience.
Top Choices for the Best Online Class Platforms
Below are the leading online class platforms to use this year.
- Thinkific
- Podia
- Learnworlds
- Kajabi
- Teachable
- WizIQ
- LearnDash
- Ruzuku
- Academy of Mine
1. Thinkific
This online course platform provides an excellent student experience. It provides simple integrations with Stripe and checkout providers, making it easier to receive payments. Thinkific is my top choice for online selling classes.
Thinkific is the best platform to sell your online courses because it offers a high-quality course experience. The pricing is in line with other cost-effective alternatives in this post.
Here are some things you’ll love about Thinkific:
- The sale page looks amazing and is highly optimized.
- You can customize the course websites and give them a unique appearance.
- The student dashboard is customizable and looks great. You can include text, videos, and other downloadable file types on one page.
- Wistia video hosting is free of charge and provides excellent value.
- You can upload your whole course once or unfold it over time.
Although Thinkific plans begin at only $49 per month, big brands such as Fiverr use it to sell online courses.
Thinkific’s most popular pro plan provides a one-month free trial.
This plan enables you to create limitless courses and features bundles and memberships, marketing tools, certificates, landing pages, and advanced pricing alternatives.
Here is a sneak peek into the experience of creating Thinikfic online courses:
- First, you must create and personalize your course using Thinkfic’s drag-and-drop editor.
- Upload your content and pick one of their site templates.
- Choose your payment method (you can receive payments in over 100 currencies).
Thinkific also has several customization alternatives. The onboarding team will help you realize your vision if you wish to build an entirely custom website.
Main Features:
- Through advanced customization, you can make the courses feel and look precisely how you want them to.
- Live cohorts and lessons enable you to deliver your course content live to students globally in real-time.
- Memberships and communities enable your tutees to collaborate.
- Thinkific themes allow you to create professional websites without coding or design experience quickly.
- Assessments and certificates grant your students a means to demonstrate their progress and understanding.
- You can monitor your students’ performance through progress tracking and identify areas where they may need help.
User Interface:
The capacity to configure the course landing page is one of the several conveniences that Thinkific provides.
With Thinkific’s in-built landing page editor, you can customize your page’s feel and look without coding.
Thinkific also provides a variety of course templates for users to pick the one that best matches their course style.
On Thinkific, you can create mini-courses, pre-sell courses, host webinars, etc.
Pricing:
- Free ($0/month): Try out Thinkific’s features and have a feel of its interface for free.
- Basic ($39/month): Limitless students and courses, custom domain, coupons, email integrations, and drip content(scheduled).
- Pro ($79/month): Basic features, bundles, memberships, priority support, live lessons through Zoom, assignments, advanced CSS and HTML editing, private courses, and certificates.
- Premier ($399/month): Pro features 50 course admins, a limitless growth package (ideal for large teams), and an onboarding package.
Pros:
- Easy free plan to start.
- Email and marketing automation features
- Personalizable course certificates.
- You can completely edit your course website code.
- Affiliate marketing reporting and help.
- Custom domains.
Cons:
- Integration with CRMs and social media platforms would be great.
- It has a moderate learning curve.
Product Updates:
- The functionality of integrated order bumps implies that on your Thinkific site, you can boost average order value by providing a tiny add-on product at checkout.
- Thinkific payments enable users to have quicker performance checkouts, lowering the dropoff rate. Thus, you can keep a significant portion of your earnings.
Thinkific is the best choice for entrepreneurs and course creators who want to create, market, and sell their course content.
2. Podia
This online course platform is a great place to sell digital work online. Podia can adapt depending on your needs, such as hosting webinars, setting up a community, digital downloads, and selling online courses.
This all-in-one platform has more than 50,0000 members and is perfect for memberships, webinars, and digital downloads.
Podia’s main types of courses include:
- Pre-selling courses by receiving payments before launch.
- Standalone courses comprising quizzes, PDFs, MP3x, audio and video files, images, etc.
- The capacity to add memberships and coupons.
- Drip courses distribute lessons in a segment-by-segment format.
- Cohort-based courses with future start dates.
Podia excels with its membership alternatives. You can expand your online community by connecting with Slack and Facebook groups, providing tiered plans, bundling products for particular groups, and interacting with other members.
This online course platform also functions as a webinar site to host on-demand or live webinars.
Another notable feature is Podia’s capacity to run your affiliate program. You can view all your affiliates in a single place, make payouts depending on your tailored commission structure, and view helpful reporting.
The platform has round-the-clock support, no transaction charges, and a straightforward 3-step procedure to set up your course website quickly.
Main Features:
- Instant payouts imply you can start selling courses immediately.
- Drip courses enable you to deliver course content over a period of time to keep your students occupied and coming back for more.
- Connect your content and audience with tools such as social media integrations, landing pages, and email marketing.
- An all-in-one platform implies you don’t need to juggle several tools to get your business up and running.
- No transaction charges mean you keep a significant portion of your profits.
- Schedule and sell in advance with the ability to make courses open for enrollment solely for a specific period.
User Experience:
This platform has a straightforward interface which makes it easy to create courses.
You get to choose your course type. This includes bundles, webinars, digital downloads, online courses, and coaching sessions.
Podia’s simple-to-understand menu allows you to create your course content seamlessly.
The menu system allows you to access the required features of every course creation stage, including the capacity to add video, text, and audio content.
You can also view your audience, sales, and affiliate stats and add coupons.
Pricing:
- Mover ($33/month): Unlimited plan with digital downloads and no transaction fees. Sell courses and send up to 5,000 emails per month.
- Shaker ($75/month): Mover features and the ability to add affiliates, set up membership communities, and send 15,000 emails every month.
- Earthquaker ($166/month): Access to Shaker features, personalized onboarding, a dedicated account manager, and 50,000 emails sent per month.
Pros:
- Podia’s user-friendly interface makes it easy for anyone to use.
- The simple design accommodates course developers and makes it simple to make and sell courses.
- The platform provides excellent value for money compared to other online course platforms.
- Digital downloads are an excellent way to sell supplementary content to your students.
- Since its launch, Podia constantly updates its platform to introduce new features.
Cons:
- There’s no means to include custom embed codes that would enable you to embed courses on your pages/websites.
- The platform can’t categorize products; therefore, students can’t filter out products on the storefront.
Product Updates:
- The newsletter section enables lead capture to start building your email list immediately.
- Enhanced reporting and community search feature makes it easier to search through your members and content; discovering and understanding data is now a breeze.
- Updates have been made on the Podia course viewer with a more polished design, so your courses appear more appealing.
If you need powerful membership functionality and the capacity to boost sales with the help of affiliates, Podia is the best course builder for you.
3. Learnworlds
This is one of the best interactive learning platforms. If you want to offer your students engaging courses with interactive videos, quizzes, certificates, and surveys, Learnworlds is an excellent option. Even though Learnworlds’ interface is not as user-friendly as Thinkific, the platform has powerful student community features.
Learnworlds is ideal for course developers looking for unique ways to interact with their tutees. This includes the use of interactive videos, gamification, and quizzes.
Even though Learnworlds’ learning experience is not as appealing as Thinkfic’s, it’s still peculiar since it provides students with more interactive online learning content.
Main Features:
- Learnworlds Mobile App Builder enables you to set up a mobile app for your courses; your students can take the classes wherever they go.
- The Learnworlds support team offers so much help when you require it. You can access how-to articles, walkthrough videos, and live chat options.
- The Synchronized Transcript feature allows you to track your students’ performance. It tells you where they are in the course and who’s doing what.
- Your students can connect and study together through the learning community feature. They can also ask questions and share ideas.
- Assessment for each need implies that you can structure tests, quizzes, and other things to evaluate the students’ understanding. You’ll determine precisely where your students stand.
- The branded digital certificates provide a means through which your students can demonstrate their progress and understanding. They’ll proudly display them.
User Experience:
Customization is an impressive feature of Learnworlds.
When you start creating a course, you’ll realize the templates available are simple to follow, and you can easily edit them to fit your brand.
The platform also focuses on SEO, enabling you to optimize your classes for search engines to enable people to find them quickly.
Even though it took a while to devise a way to include media in particular lectures, the process became effortless once discovered.
Pricing:
- Starter ($24/month, paid yearly): A single admin, custom domain, $5 charge for each course sale, drip-feed courses, coupons, four payment gateways, page builder tool, and limitless courses.
- Pro Trainer ($79/month): Starter features, no transaction charges, live lessons through Zoom, custom checkout pages, memberships and subscriptions, five admin accounts, affiliate management, assignments, and Webex.
- Learning Center ($249 per month): Pro Trainer features, premium account manager, premium support, flexible invoicing, premium cloud servers, and branded corporate academy.
Pros:
- You can offer free courses.
- Downloadable attachments, gamification, e-books, and interactive videos.
- White-labeled content and a custom domain name.
- You can take out transcripts from your courses
- Certificates are offered upon course completion.
- Your students can jot down notes and highlight key points.
- Capacity to create discounts and coupons.
- Custom mobile application on iOS.
- A current analytics platform to maximize your sales.
- Social media network integrations.
- Capacity to create membership sites.
- 24/7 support.
- A strong knowledge base.
Cons:
- Even though you can change languages, this functionality doesn’t work every time.
- Inability to remove site-wide features if you want specific customizations.
Product Updates:
- The new templates provide many options, so you can quickly build a professional website without coding or design experience.
- Using the multi-purpose form builder, you can build custom forms (surveys or quizzes) for your courses.
4. Kajabi
This is one of the best platforms for professionals planning to scale their enterprises. Kajabi has several features to help you create an online course however you want and set up all the features you need. This platform can meet your needs, whether you’d like to host podcasts, send newsletters, or set up membership sites.
This top-quality course builder is designed for the information business, not small course creators.
Kajabi is best in email marketing automation, a vital component of pre-webinar, pre-sale, upsell emails, and drip courses.
Kajabi’s “Pipelines” feature allows you to develop completely automated marketing funnels and campaigns. These are ready-made lead generation frameworks with pre-written copy fine-tuned for conversions.
This platform also has robust course website themes, blogging functionality, a customizable checkout, and the capacity to sell digital goods.
Generally, Kajabi is the leading high-end course platform with the highest number of inbuilt tools. However, it is slightly more expensive than other platforms on this list.
Main Features:
- Unlimited video hosting — you can make as many courses as you want.
- Course insights give you a picture of how your students are performing.
- The platform is SEO-optimized; therefore, your course ranks highly in search engine results.
- You can easily publish to your website with only a few clicks without coding skills.
- The platform is highly secure and protects your data.
- Unlimited hosting for your lessons and marketing materials.
- The website builder allows you to set up a professional website in a few minutes without coding or design experience.
- A single-click marketing sequence simplifies course promotion.
User Experience:
Regarding the user experience of using Kajabi for the first time, the platform is pretty intuitive. You can follow the platform’s guidelines to create mini-courses, set up membership sites, build your community, and create evergreen training.
Nevertheless, one drawback is that the interface may be slightly overwhelming with all the available features and options.
New Kajabi users may take some time to familiarize themselves with the features.
The settings are also placed in different groups, enabling quick access to the right set of alternatives when you have to modify them.
Pricing:
The pricing depends on the number of courses and active members you have.
- Basic ($119/month): One admin, one website, 1,000 active members, 10,000 contacts, three pipelines, and three products.
- Growth ($159/month): One website, 10 admins, 15 pipelines, 15 products, 10,000 active members, and 25,000 contacts.
- Pro ($319/month): Three websites, 25 admins, 100 pipelines, 100 products, 20,000 active members, and 100,000 contacts.
Pros:
- Excellent Wistia video hosting.
- The best all-in-one software for a decent information business.
- Big names like Amy Porterfield use Kajabi.
- More inbuilt tools compared to other platforms.
- Main focus on marketing and sales tools.
- Integrated with PayPal and Stripe.
- Can provide monthly recurring subscriptions.
Cons:
- You could improve their landing page builder.
- The email sequences could be more varied.
Product Updates:
- Kajabi University has a new feel and look; therefore, it’s easy to use.
- The Carousel modules within the platform’s website builder allow you to create a spectacular website compatible with any gadget.
- Kajabi redesigned the payments UI makes managing your finances and accepting payments easy.
Kajabi’s marketing automation tools allow you to send expertly branded messages, partition users in your list, and send emails at particular times, depending on advanced triggers.
Kajabi is the ideal option for established businesses needing a more advanced platform.
5. Teachable
Teachable is the best choice for those starting and who need a solid foundation to build their business. This platform enables you to concentrate on sharing your knowledge without being hindered by the technical aspect. Following this, Teachable is highly recommended for businesses in the startup stage.
This platform is an excellent choice if you need a simple and fast course builder.
It’s the most suitable online course platform for beginners starting in the course industry since it’s one of the most cost-effective and simple-to-use alternatives.
Users can choose the free pricing plan (with $1 + $0.10 for every transaction) or choose one of the three plans ranging from $29 to $299 monthly.
The pro plan ($99 per month) is highly recommended since it’s the first plan with no transaction charges.
Main Features:
- Create stunning, money-generating sales pages to help users sell courses. This online course platform makes it simple to design pages to convert a browser into a purchaser.
- Bring on authors to assist you in making content for your classes. Anyone can be an instructor using teachable and share their skills globally.
- You can use the Teachable domain to connect to yours or use their inbuilt domain to begin instantly.
- Teachable uses PCI level-1 compliant payment providers; hence, you can be certain that your data is ever secure. The platform handles every behind-the-scenes operation so you can concentrate on the crucial thing — tutoring your students.
- Schedule and host your online classes that fit your demanding lifestyle; the platform makes it simple to get the time to tutor.
- Speak to your students live, and host and schedule webinars directly from your Teachable account. The platform allows you to interact with your students in a unique manner.
User Experience:
Teachable has an impressive user experience.
You can easily pick your objective, including creating your course, building an audience, or choosing a topic.
This structured strategy makes it easier to follow along when creating a course.
Moreover, you can personalize the look and feel of your courses with a couple of clicks.
Teachable offers tutorials that show users how to utilize various theme features on the platform.
Pricing:
- Basic ($29/month): 5% transaction charges, drip content, two admin users, members-only community, and course builder.
- Pro ($99/month): Basic features, five admin users, no transaction charges, course certificates, and advanced reports.
- Business ($249/month): Pro features, twenty admins, advanced coding personalization, group coaching calls, and bulk student enrollments.
Pros:
- Simple setup.
- A single-click checkout.
- Unlimited coaching services, courses, students, and bandwidth.
- The pro plan offers live Zoom lessons.
- Optimized sale and storefront pages.
- Graded quizzes.
- International payment plans in more than 130 currencies.
- You can have five user accounts on the pro plan.
- Website theme customization.
- Customized course completion certificates.
Cons:
- Website navigation might seem challenging at first.
- Teachable doesn’t deal with support for individual issues in the same manner as overall platform cases.
Product Updates:
- You can directly include lead capture forms on product pages, enabling them to build your email list and boost conversions.
- Teachable added course templates are known as ‘Colossal’ and ‘Simple’ to help you create stunning courses without coding or web design skills.
- The platform added bundle functionality to help you set up a course package and provide it as a one-time subscription or purchase.
6. WizIQ
This platform provides educators and tutors with simple means to build virtual lecture rooms for live interactive eLearning classes. More than 400,000 teachers use this platform to educate over 4 million students in virtual classes all over 200 nations.
WizIQ offers the latest live training tools like video streaming, discussion boards, analytics, assessments, and mobile options.
Corporate leaders or instructors who aspire to connect with their global audience in real-time can try WizIQ’s 14-day free trial.
7. LearnDash
This WordPress plugin is the platform you need to sell courses using a WordPress website. Some big websites using this well-known WordPress LMS plugin include WP Elevation, Michigan University, Infusionsoft, and Yoast.
The LearnDash “Focus Mode” feature helps block distractions when students go through your course.
The platform’s full-featured course maker works well with the email drip campaigns. You can set up an impressive online course on your website and match the content with email drip schedules to send lectures based on a program.
LearnDash Gradebook* tech takes LMS to a greater level. The technology allocates overall grades to students based on homework and quizzes scores, making a weighted average for tutors to review.
Besides grading, course points allot points for actions, and certificates and badges award students for course tasks.
This platform is the ideal LMS plugin for tutors needing a grading system that competes with the college curriculum features.
You can start now with a complete 30-day money-back warranty and a $40 discount on LearnDash annual plans.
8. Ruzuku
This platform enables users to build a step-by-step online curriculum using their learning platform, text, and PDFs in a few minutes. Additionally, you can easily create course outlines, reorder and edit your steps, launch the course, and make sales instantly.
This online course platform integrates with tools such as Infusionsoft, MailChimp, and payment gateways such as PayPal and Stripes to receive payments; there’s no transaction charge.
Ruzuku is also famous for its worthwhile community. When joining this platform, you’re not purchasing a tutoring tool; instead, you are joining a team to aid your students in learning.
Lastly, Ruzuku provides unlimited courses to unlimited students on every paid plan.
It offers a 30-day cash-back warrant and a 14-day free trial.
9. Academy of Mine
This high-end online course platform is founded on tailored client success and customization philosophy.
It’s an LMS that operates optimally in various business niches. A standard plan feature is an entirely free development hour to build and launch your classes with personalized integrations.
They aim to set you up and help you launch and sell your course using their analytics dashboards and marketing tools.
Customization is at the center of the platform’s strategy. The platform can even help healthcare firms looking to build a complete continuing education credits (CECs) curriculum.
This platform can also help insurance firms that need continued training due to regular changes in specific legal codes at the state level and want to set up online courses to managing the facility.
Although typical users may find these enterprise offerings overkill, they’re essential to small and medium-sized enterprises requiring robust training systems for their customers and employees.
If Academy of Mine seems to like the online course platform that meets your needs, you can start with the 30-day free trial.
What’s an Online Course Platform?
This is a type of Learning Management System (LMS) that provides access to a digital class. This virtual course is the same as an offline class in several ways: a tutor offers an interactive educational experience via PDF files, audio, text, image, and video.
Students follow the Learning Management System software, perform exercises, take notes, and write exams to evaluate their knowledge.
Platforms such as Ruzuku, Podia, Kajabi, Thinkfic, and Teachable have powerful features for online course creators. These features include a completely responsive site experience, a sales funnel, course completion certificates, marketing features, simple content uploading, and the capacity to edit the course’s feel and look.
They offer you all you require to sell online courses. Some enable you to set up your course free of charge.
Educational institutions planning to replace their on-premises lectures with online learning should understand the latest LMS.
Course developers choose a platform to use, then charge the students a fee to gain access to their courses.
The Top Online Learning Platforms
Since social distancing is becoming the norm, several colleges are relocating to online lectures. There are several means to tutor yourself from home.
Usually referred to as massive open online courses (MOOCs), they differ slightly from paid platforms. Rather than hosting files on your own, the courses are in marketplaces where students pay for them through a subscription or directly.
Course creators benefit by leveraging these sites to reach new audiences. The drawback is that they won’t make as much cash for each sale, and the market has aggressive competition.
Using any of the above providers to sell courses is highly recommended.
Below are some top online learning platforms for those wishing to join a platform to learn something new.
1. Shaw Academy
This platform grants its students access to accredited, professional online courses. After signing up, students can access all the long-form courses.
Shaw Academy provides courses in three groups: entrepreneurs, professionals, and hobbyists.
For instance, in the “For Professionals” group, Shaw Academy provides a worldwide-acknowledged Digital Marketing Course, which includes 32 videos and takes an average of 16 weeks to finish.
Pricing:
Shaw Academy offers free courses for the first four weeks, after which you must buy a monthly plan. The plans are between $4.99 and $60 per month.
Pros:
- Shaw Academy’s courses are worldwide-acknowledged and provide certifications to help your career.
The platform’s Microsoft Excel, Photoshop, web development, project management, and digital marketing courses are detailed enough for working professionals.
- Entrepreneurs can access practical courses on photography, wedding, viral marketing, and social media marketing.
- Shaw Academy’s courses are flexible, so you can finish them whenever possible.
- They provide excellent customer support.
- You can download their courses to watch offline.
- They offer a four-week free trial.
Cons:
- Even though Shaw Academy provides many great courses, you might not find a suitable course based on your career field.
- The platform also lacks the same hobby class volume as platforms such as Skillshare.
Final Verdict:
Shaw Academy is ideal for professionals needing accrediting, flexible courses with a free trial period of up to four weeks.
2. Udemy
This is among the leading online learning marketplaces with more than 24 million students, over 80,000 courses, and 35,000 tutors. The first thing to do to create a course is to sign up to be a premium educator.
Once the account’s approved, it’s easy to begin developing your courses. When making video content, remember that the material should contain five lectures with a minimum length of 30 minutes.
Another advantage to adding courses on this platform is that you can effortlessly promote your class. You can use Udemy’s marketing features to be added to sitewide web discounts, be included in the platform’s marketing emails, or join Udemy’s affiliate program with tiered commission rates.
Pricing:
You can use it free of charge. Udemy imposes a 3% rev share for sales via instructor coupons, 75% for transactions done via paid search marketing efforts, and 50% for students who found the course via organic search (SEO).
Pros
It’s one of the top online learning platforms used by professionals. The first benefit is that you can access a vast user base. The platform’s 40 million users are prospective students who’ll buy your course. However, it does not imply you’ll begin making sales immediately.
You must develop a solid sales and marketing strategy, just as a brand new e-commerce firm, realtor, or author. It’s all about publicizing your brand.
- You can participate in Udemy’s marketing promotions: The platform frequently runs promotions to assist you in reaching a bigger audience. However, these are opt-in marketing promotions; therefore, you can decide whether to take part or not.
- Udemy offers a significant revenue share for lecture fees: Tutors set prices for their courses and get a 100% of the tuition fee for new members and 50% for old users. This is a significant commission on sales and a huge advantage of using Udemy.
- Udemy has reliable support and technology: The platform provides round-the-clock customer support and has an extensive library of valuable articles.
Cons:
- It’s challenging for new users to outrank other tutors on specific topics.
- Stiff competition among courses: Tutors are at the mercy of the appearance and placement on the platform’s website, which is controlled by Udemy’s proprietary algorithms.
- Udemy’s return policies are lenient: Refunds are warranted to all students within 30 days. Due to this, students might take a course, finish it in 30 days, and receive a guaranteed refund.
- Other marketplaces such as Skillshare, Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, and iSpring can compete with this platform in organic search, which can be a drawback for tutors.
Final Verdict:
Udemy is one of the world’s most popular professional online course marketplaces. It has a large audience base to tap into, a solid revenue share model, market offerings, and 24/7 customer support, which are significant features of online course platforms.
Even though there’s intense competition with other online course platforms, Udemy will probably maintain its top place in the industry.
3. LinkedIn Learning
Formerly called Lynda, LinkedIn Learning online class marketplace is designed for business professionals. It has more than 1,000 business courses on digital marketing, web development, and project management. This platform is ideal for working professionals who want to keep their skills up-to-date.
The platform also provides certifications that users can include in their LinkedIn profiles, displaying their expertise and enhancing their online resumes.
Pricing:
Monthly charges tied to premium LinkedIn memberships, which are $29.99 per month, or $24 per month if you pay yearly.
The platform offers a one-month free trial.
4. Skillshare
Skillshare is a huge marketplace that focuses on creative education. Its topics include cooking, fine art, music production, and graphic design.
The platform also offers classes on technical subjects such as e-commerce, data analytics, and data science. It has over 5 million users and has paid instructors more than $5 million.
Every class is 20-60 minutes, divided into shorter lectures, projects, and community discussion forums to connect with other students.
The open discussions are highly beneficial for Skillshare’s creative topics since students get a chance to share their progress and receive responses from others. Additionally, Skillshare can assist premium users with course planning and production and help create online courses at their studio based in New York.
Pricing:
Skillshare is free for making premium course experiences. They pay tutors $10 for paid membership referrals and monthly royalties for every minute of content viewed.
Pros:
- Lectures on personal branding, painting, photography, developing email lists, web design, and creative subjects are the most common.
- Skillshare has a large entrepreneurs and creators user base: This platform is ideal for instructors providing content that suits a creative audience.
- Reliable class quality: Skillshares boasts of high-quality professional courses. The platform outlines your course depending on their audience’s needs and can help with production.
Cons:
- Skillshare only provides email support: Even though the platform has useful support articles, email is the only alternative to reach out to them.
- Revenues run via a royalty model: Every month, 30%-50% of the platform’s premium subscription earnings are allotted to a royalty pool for instructors.
The remaining funds are allocated to promoting and marketing classes, running daily operations, and supporting the platform. The royalty model works for established instructors since the more minutes viewed, the higher the earnings share you get.
Following this, it’s challenging for new instructors to get much compensation—additionally, students who watch at 2x speed tally half the minutes toward the royalty pool.
Final Verdict:
This rising platform has over 4 million students. Since Skillshare has a vast user base of entrepreneurs and creators, it’s an excellent choice for tutors in the creative field.
Skillshare offers high-quality classes, and they ensure that your classes best suit their audience’s needs for maximum impact.
Nevertheless, you might make more sales with a marketplace based on the royalty earnings system and the absence of live support. Skillshare’s online courses are highly recommended for creative course creators who wish to reach new audiences.
After signing up on the platform, you’ll receive free classes for two months.
5. Coursera
This professional online class marketplace provides virtual lectures from a few leading universities and companies like Stanford, Duke, and Michigan University.
Educators teach the platform’s courses at top universities worldwide, which take around four to six weeks to finish. These courses include community discourse forums, peer-reviewed assignments, and video lectures.
Pricing:
You can join Coursera free of charge, and you have to be logged in to view pricing details on each course. Coursera has three tiers of class offerings:
- Main courses operate on subscriptions for $29 to $99 monthly: They take four to six weeks to finish, and students receive electronic course certificates on completion.
- Online degree programs: Those searching for an advanced education can participate in university-acknowledged online degree programs, which take one to three years to finish and cost between $15 and $25,000.
- The specialization courses cost $39-$79 monthly, and they are for learning specific career skills. These online classes tackle real business challenges with rigorous coursework and hands-on projects.
6. Treehouse
This new marketplace believes in education democratization. Treehouse focuses on making education available to students of all genders, socio-economic backgrounds, sexual orientations, and races.
The platform features more than 300 technical courses on development and coding, more than 50,000 students, and over 27,545 minutes of video (and counting).
It partners with big brands like Google Developers, Amazon Alexa, IBM Watson, and Microsoft.
Pricing:
The platform provides a seven-day free trial, after which you can choose from three different plans with prices ranging from $25 to $199 per month.
- Basic: Online community access, participative practice sessions, and on-demand courses.
- Pro: Access to bonuses, downloadable content, and beta features.
- Techdegree: Personalized feedback, a custom curriculum, and real-time support for those who want to make an actual portfolio and acquire job-ready skills.
General Assembly and ALISON are other leading platforms that offer courses.
How to Create and Sell Online Courses
First, you should determine your main goal and work backward. You should factor in things like how your students’ lives will improve after completing your course.
Begin your course by outlining the knowledge the students will acquire.
To figure out what your students desire to learn, attend forums related to your subjects, and observe the top subjects people are talking about. Quora is the perfect platform for this.
After understanding how to solve your students’ problems, set up a well-defined learning path that’ll lead them to predetermined goals. In every stage of the course journey, make their results clear.
By creating learning paths with specific goals, your students will remain more active and engaged with the content you provide.
Below are the best ten ways of creating and selling online courses:
1. Determine the Cost of Creating Your Online Courses
The cost of developing a learning platform relies on several factors like content development depth, marketing, analytics, and research expenses. Studies approximate that a professional online course costs $5,850-$15,600 to develop.
Nevertheless, that’s a relatively steep estimate, including market research, professional video development, webinar software or email automation, promoting the course, and paying subject matter experts (SME) to teach the course.
It may be cheaper if you intend to develop a course independently. For instance, if you have a quality microphone, webcam, video editing software, and screen sharing tools, you can create a course using less than $200.
Time is your most substantial investment. Remember that costs increase with the effort you put in. The higher your effort into market research, making an outline, analyzing your audience, and shooting professional media with an interactive tutor, the higher the cost.
2. Use the Best Equipment and Software
Producing a course is not as easy as creating a webinar. First, you must generate the course.
You need equipment and software to create premium content. Keep in mind that you are replacing in-lecture room experience with virtual courses; therefore, it has to appear professional.
Nevertheless, you don’t require the most costly high-level equipment to start — but you’ll need some essential items.
1. Screen Recording Program
If you’re creating a course on a computer program or a software piece, you’ll need to display the screen to highlight what you’re doing. There are several screen recording software, but Screencast-o-Matic is one of the best options.
2. Microphones
They are vital. It’s easier to detect bad audio than shaky video, so you need a good microphone to ensure your course sounds great.
Get the best microphone you can afford. You can use a headset, Lavalier microphones, or a standard receiver, but a USB microphone is the best option.
Remember to get microphone accessories to enhance the quality of your audio. Acoustic panels, shock mounts, foam balls, and pop filters are essential if you are recording in a small room.
3. USB Webcam
In most instances, online courses need an instructor’s video or live webinars for a personal lecture room feel.
Recording equipment can be anything as basic as a webcam or your iPhone or something sophisticated like professional DSLR camcorders. It all depends on your budget.
4. Headphones
Good noise-canceling headphones will help when editing. They are also helpful when conducting interviews or recording somebody.
5. Accessories and Lighting
Standard three-point lighting is essential to make sure your tutor shines. You can buy some iPhone accessories or a complete studio light set.
No matter what you buy, you’ll need to look into lighting techniques to ensure you appear professional.
6. Video and Audio Editing Software
After you finish shooting the course, a huge transformation comes with editing. Adobe Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut Pro are excellent editing software Adobe After Effects is perfect for sprucing up animations.
3. Create Beneficial Content
You must clearly define your ideal students and what they want to learn.
Determine if your students want to learn new skills and get online certificates or if they need help to expand their businesses. By acknowledging your student’s pain points, you’ll be able to come up with a vision for your class.
Make captivating video courses. Use quizzes, videos, PDFs, and interactive worksheets to interact with your students on deeper levels. Additionally, ensure you condense the course material into short sentences since nobody wants to read through long texts.
4. Modify Your Website
Center on your niche and offer high-quality content focusing on your unique value proposition (UVP). Unless you’d like to be the world’s next EdX, you need to specialize and ensure you’re the best at an outstandingly focused niche.
Provide exclusive hook statements and differentiate your course’s UVP. Determine what makes your course stand out from others.
For instance, if you’re focusing on a graphic design niche, you shouldn’t name your course “Beginners’ Graphic Design” because that’s a broad title. A name like “Ebook Publishers’ Adobe InDesign” focuses more on the market.
Don’t major in too many different fields. Ensure your online course has a single focal point without going off-topic. You should only diversify to other subjects after you experience significant success with your initial course.
5. Market the Business Properly
Creating a course is just a first step. After that, you must promote it.
A dedicated website is essential. You must have a professional website presence to assist individuals in finding and seeing you as a pro in a specific field. Your website must have a functional blog with optimized search engine content for your niche.
Develop a social media following. Create a Facebook Business page to interact with your community and share updates on Instagram and Twitter.
Having a consistent post schedule and offering interactive social media content helps build a community around your brand.
6. Take Complete Control over the Brand
You must be in control of your brand. You need to be able to incorporate a logo, set policies and pricing, and ensure the whole experience is consistent with your business.
You must be the face of your brand and be able to display your personality in the design of the class.
7. Provide an Extraordinary Learning Experience
Ensure the platform delivers an impressive learning experience. You need to add several types of content like documents, texts, audio, etc. You should also look for features like the capacity to make quizzes, forums, drip courses, and issue completion certificates.
8. Integrate with Various Tools
The platform you choose must integrate with tools such as analytics solutions and email marketing services, among others.
Look for popular integrations with WordPress, Google Analytics, and MailChimp tools. For instance, if you launched a blog and are selling classes using a WordPress website, you must select a platform that easily integrates into your existing website.
You can search the WordPress plugin directory to determine the right plugins if you plan to build an online course website using WordPress.
9. Set Sales in Line with Your Budget
The platform must fit the budget you have and provide flexible pricing alternatives. You have to spend cash to generate revenue through online classes. You’ll get a clear picture of your potential ROI if you look into pricing details first.
Furthermore, you also need to check if there are platforms with hidden transaction charges on your course sales.
Most paid plans eliminate heavy transaction charges when choosing an online course platform and creating online courses.
10. Get Customer Support When Necessary
The platform must provide exceptional training and customer support. Many services provide free training and resources, a helpful tutor community, and a reliable account manager to ensure success.
Don’t hesitate to ask for assistance if you ever get stuck.
The Most Sought-After Online Courses
If you plan to sell online courses from your website or use other platforms, it’s important to understand the most sought-after courses this year.
It’s challenging to think of perfect ideas to engage students. The Online Class Report issued a list of the top 80 on-demand classes.
The list comprises some of the top-rated and most popular online courses:
- Udemy: SEO Beginners: How I Get 1,000 Visitors a Day with SEO
- Udemy: The Complete Web Developer Course 2.0
- Treehouse: JavaScript Basics
- Coursera: An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python
- EdX: The Science of Everyday Thinking
From this list, it’s evident that students want an impactful and informative education. You don’t have to be at the top of the list to succeed.
However, you must create high-quality courses and teach your students subjects they enjoy.
Wrap Up and Top Choices
When choosing an online course platform, research first: consider the pricing, marketing features, and the learning experience.
The leading online class platforms allow you to upload content easily, generate class sales, and provide your students with a great learning experience.
All the platforms highlighted above provide online teaching features and tools for course creation.
In the end, you are the critical factor.
Your course success and the capacity to sell classes online depends on the quality of your content and how you market yourself.
A platform is only a platform!
Although it’s an engaging, branded, and interactive media piece with your experience and insight, it still requires development, market research, planning, and proper marketing.
Below are my top choices:
- Thinkific: Leading online course platform.
- Teachable: Most appropriate for beginners.
- Learnworlds: Most suitable for interactive learning.
- Kajabi: Most suitable for high-end information enterprises.
Thinkific is the leading online course platform with the most reasonable price and high-quality features.
With unlimited topics to teach and many students eager to acquire knowledge from you, what’s stopping you from starting now?
If you’re prepared to start creating and selling online courses, Thinkific is the way to go.