Pros and Cons of Different Course Building Platforms

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by James Woo on March 10, 2016 at 5:29am

Hi Brandon,

I've used or poked around 4 platforms - self hosted wordpress, Udemy, Teachable, & Zenler.

Most difficult to set up - self hosted wordpress, you control everything video hosting, making sure different parts work toegether

Easiest to get going - Udemy, just upload & go, they take care of everything. Big con - the student email address belong to them.

Poked around this two with a course uploaded. Between Teachable & Zenler, Zenler is much easier to use on the backend, more intuitive, easier to navigate.

Hope it helps.

Permalink Reply by Rachael Charles on April 20, 2016 at 1:48pm

I just learned about Teachery, Thinkific and Jigsaw Box. I'm sure there are about a zillion others now. Teachery is $49/month which is sort of pricey if you're just starting out.

Permalink Reply by Aaron Kerr on June 16, 2016 at 4:35am

Brandon,

I'm currently teaching my first online course. I have a lot of web design experience and have customized Wordpress a good bit, so I explored using plugins to make it work. I knew I could figure it out and tie the different pieces together to get a working system.

However, I quickly concluded it was more trouble than it was worth. I looked around at a few platforms and ultimately settled on Teachable. I found the system very intuitive to use. There is a completely free tier, where you only pay a percentage of course sales. And there are no use limits: courses, students, videos, etc...

I had one slight technical problem where a part of the admin panel wasn't working correctly. I opened a ticket, got an immediate response, and the issue was fixed by a developer within a matter of hours.

If I decide to continue moving forward with online courses, I'll probably keep an eye on other platforms just to see what is available. But so far, Teachable has been just what I needed.

Best of luck with your course!

Group LeaderPermalink Reply by Terry Hadaway on June 16, 2016 at 7:01am

LifterLMS is a free world-class WordPress plugin that I use with all of my clients. If you can handle the back end of your site, you can handle LifterLMS. It has too many functions to list here and it gives you complete control of your course platform, so you aren't subject to policy changes on a collaborative site. You can go to LifterLMS.com and learn more about it. I also explained my rationale in this blog post.

Hope this helps.

Permalink Reply by Aaron Kerr on June 16, 2016 at 7:53am

Terry,

Thanks for posting the link about LifterLMS. I wasn't familiar with it but will definitely check it out. Does it integrate with a video deliver system like Wistia, or do you need to manage that yourself? That was one benefit which drew me to Teachable; I could just drop in a video and they handled the back-end encoding and streaming.

Aaron

Group LeaderPermalink Reply by Terry Hadaway on August 3, 2016 at 11:24am

Aaron,

I use Vimeo which integrates seamlessly with LifterLMS. Youtube also integrates. If you have the embed code, you can place any video on the course page.

Terry

Permalink Reply by Sam Burton on August 2, 2016 at 2:23pm

This is a perfect discussion for me as I'm looking to create my first course over the fall and winter to be released in March. I have so much to learn. I will certainly check out the platforms mentioned. Udemy was my knee jerk first thought because I'm not savvy enough to work with Wordpress Plug ins. However, the comment about them owning the email addresses is not making me warm and fuzzy. I'll check out some of the others. Glad I stopped by.

Permalink Reply by Maren Anderson on October 25, 2016 at 11:44am

Hello-

Do any of you have an opinion of moodle?

I use it at the University I teach at, but I don't know if it fits the standard non-academic online teaching models.

https://moodle.org/

Thanks

maren