There are so many learning platforms for teachers who want to teach via the internet. The world of online teaching is truly growing. If you are a teacher using online teaching platforms this article will help you to determine which online teaching platform is best for your use. You want to make sure when choosing your choice of online teaching platforms that they fit in with your teaching style and they also offer great compensation when you teach with them.
I have personally used all of the online teaching platforms listed below, so I know they are effective. If you are a teacher, tutor, trainer, or anyone who needs to teach others online, try out the online teaching platforms below. Each platform is unique, but they all offer something valuable to both teachers and students.
Thinkific.
Best Overall Online Course Platform (Free or $49/mo)
Thinkific is the best overall platform to sell online courses.
It’s my #1 choice because the pricing is exactly in line with other affordable options on this list and it can deliver a high-end course experience.
- Course websites can be customized and you’d never guess they were Thinkific.
- Sales pages are highly optimized and look great.
- Student dashboards look nice and are customizable (you can add videos, text, and any downloadable file type to the same page).
- You can either send your entire course at once or drip it out over time.
- Free Wistia video hosting (a huge value).
That’s honestly all that you need for an optimized course website.
In fact, even though Thinkific plans start at just $49/month, huge brands like Fiverr use Thinkific to sell online courses.
I would have never guessed that this massive learning database was a Thinkific site until their team told me:
Their best (and most popular) Pro Plan offers a one-month free trial to get started.
First, this plan gives you the ability to create unlimited courses. It also features memberships and bundles, advanced pricing options, landing pages, certificates, and marketing tools.
Here’s a little preview of the experience creating a Thinkific course.
All that you do is create and customize your course with their drag and drop editor:
Next, you upload your content and choose one of their website templates:
Lastly, you set up payment methods (you can collect payments in over 100 currencies):
There are also a ton of customization options. If you want to build a completely custom site, their onboarding team takes your vision and helps you turn it into a reality.
Pros of Thinkific:
- Marketing automation and email features.
- Simple free plan to get started.
- Can fully edit the code of your course site.
- Customizable course certificates.
- Custom domains.
- Affiliate marketing help and reporting.
Here’s what people are saying about Thinkific:
- “You need to get on Thinkific. The team is creative, reliable, and offers unbeatable support. They always make sure all my bases are covered and, as a business owner, that’s invaluable.” – Lewis Howes
- “By teaching our audience how to scale and grow their business through online training, we’ve grown ours. We couldn’t have done it without Thinkific.” – John Lee Dumas, Entrepreneurs on Fire
- “I seriously can’t be more impressed with your customer support team. They are the perfect blend of efficient and personable. It’s like having my very own IT department.” – Kim Garnett
Thinkific Pricing:
- Basic ($49/month): Unlimited courses and students, drip (scheduled) content, custom domain, email integrations, and coupons.
- Pro ($99/month): Basic features, plus memberships and bundles, private courses, certificates, advanced HTML and CSS editing, assignments, live lessons via Zoom, and priority support.
- Premier ($499/month): Pro features, plus 50 course admins, onboarding package, and unlimited growth package (best for big teams).
Overall, I recommend the Thinkific platform as my #1 choice for course creators and entrepreneurs who are serious about creating, marketing, and selling their own course content.
You can get started today with a One-Month Free Trial of their Pro Plan with my link below.Try Thinkific
Udemy
This is a massive online teaching platform with over 2 million students worldwide and 13,000 courses. It lets instructors design robust classes including video lectures, PowerPoint files, screencast videos, documents, audio files, text, and mashup videos. The platform is completely free for instructors to create their courses which they may offer either for free or for a fee. If there is a fee involved, Udemy takes a percentage of that. This is a very professional-looking platform that has a lot to offer.
Udemy firmly believes in disrupting and democratizing educational ecosystem by allowing anyone and everyone to learn from its pool of more than 20000 Subject Matter Experts. To a very large extent, Udemy has been successful in its mission. This eLearning platform has many content creation tools such as PDF documents, PowerPoint, etc. text and video content can be collated to create and publish courses.
This online training platform can be used by instructors for free. However, Udemy makes big money by taking 50% per sale of your course. Udemy has more than 12 million students.
RCampus
One of several online learning platforms, RCampus can be used to create courses, student assignments, keep grades, hold class discussions, and post many types of educational content such as videos, links, images, etc. It can also be used as an ePortfolio management system in which both students and faculty can “build multiple, fully-functional presentation portfolios for demonstrating their skills and knowledge or for career development”.
Learnopia
This free online learning platform enables instructors to design and offer courses consisting of a combination of videos, audio files, PowerPoint presentations, and documents such as PDF files, as well as tests consisting of multiple choice questions. Instructors can choose to make their courses freely available or charge a fee for them. Learnopia takes a percentage of all for-fee courses.
Peer 2 Peer University
P2PU is a grassroots open education project that offers free university-level courses. It is run by volunteers. Instructors can create courses and offer curriculum in the form of slideshows, videos, documents, and discussion boards. Enrollment in courses is limited to provide the best experience for the learner, making it one of the best online learning platforms.
Teachers Pay Teachers
Rather than a place to teach students, this is a website where instructors can either sell or share freely their teaching materials. Teachers may post videos, learning kits, lesson plans, study guides, clip art, and much more that they can choose to give away or charge for. If there is a charge involved, teachers earn royalties on the money earned.
Thinkific
Thinkific is a mostly free online teaching platform that allows you to create and distribute online learning materials. Designed with a variety of different industries and needs in mind, the platform works on a freemium model, with the basic free subscription including the vast majority of the tools you need to offer and distribute online lessons. With support for online sales of lessons, student assessments and more, the Thinkific platform offers a robust set of features for students and teachers alike.
Teachable
No doubt, Udemy is a great online training platform. But there is little autonomy for instructors. For instance, Udemy doesn’t let instructors control branding and pricing of courses. Also, instructors know little about students. Teachable capitalized on all such limitations.
Today, Teachable has more than 3 million students, 7500 instructors, and 20000 courses. The numbers are getting bigger and better. Instructors should pay a monthly fee to access this platform.
To attract prospects, this eLearning platform gives a free eBook which clearly explains aspects such as course creation, video creation, slides presentation etc.
To learn more about Teachable, visit this link.
WizIQ
WizIQ is yet another established name in the eLearning industry. For all intents and purposes, this online teaching software has been the go-to tool for instructors to deliver live and on-demand webinars. It is equipped with enough provisions such as slides, desktop sharing tools, audio, video etc. WizIQ is very common among academic course content creators.
It’s effortlessly easy to create courses and publish them on WizIQ online marketplace. By the way, WizIQ is known to provide a host of plug-ins for popular learning management software such as Moodle, Sakai etc.
To learn more about its features, trial and paid plans, visit the site here.
Ruzuku
Ruzuku is another valuable addition to this list of 10 best eLearning platforms. Instructors aren’t required to have much knowledge of technology to use this platform. As a matter of fact, Ruzuku invests great efforts to make it easy for Subject Matter Experts to create and publish courses. It has a ton of cool features such as PayPal payment gateway, MailChimp integrations, everyday backups, etc.
Educadium
Educadium is on an ambitious mission to assist entrepreneurs and organizations of all sizes to create, manage and profit from online teaching and training through its EasyCampus platform. It has a plethora of features ranging from course designing to course publishing. You should check its trial version to get an idea of this online training platform. Subsequently, choose your subscription package.
Hop on to the website here.
LearnWorlds
Are you looking for a platform which can complement course content with immense social learning and high interaction? Are you looking for a white label solution? Stop your search right now and take a look at the impressive features of LearnWorlds. The platform’s premium positioning has worked wonders all these years. There are many impressive features such as tools to build sales pages, simulators, intelligent sales engine, advanced analytics, etc. They certainly deserve premium positioning.
LearnWorlds is a very good option. But be sure to do the math—the platform charges $5 per sale and monthly subscriptions start from $24 per month.
Academy Of Mine
As the name suggests, Academy of Mine lets you start your own online academy. If you are looking for a drag-and-drop solution that can save you a lot of time, Academy of Mine scores brownie points. This online teaching software is power—packed with an amazing administrative interface. The learning curve is somewhat steep. That said, if you climb up the curve, you can leverage all its powerful features.
CourseCraft
Looking to turn your blog into a profitable business? Try CourseCraft. Its editor is flexible, simple and powerful enough to create different types of courses. It’s integrated with Stripe and PayPal payment processors. Creating quizzes, lessons and forums is just a matter of few precious minutes. Instructors can run discounts and offers. Students can collaborate with friends and instructors and create a big knowledge ecosystem. It has great custom branding features.
Skillshare
Top teachers on Skillshare make as high as $40000 annually. Almost every course lesson entails two key components—video and class project. Courses are made up of a series of small videos whose duration is typically anywhere between 10 and 25 minutes. You can make money through Skillshare’s Partner Program. Of course, you have to fulfill certain prerequisites like enrolling at-least 25 learners per class etc.
Skillshare’s subscription model is different from that of Udemy. Udemy sells subscriptions of individual courses while Skillshare sells subscriptions to all its complete content.
Conclusion
You’re proud of the fact that kids love you and parents rave about your classes. But once you know what other experts in your area are earning for doing the same type of work (and outdoing you), it’s hard not to get nervous about your future income.