Choosing the right platform to launch your online course

So you wish to teach online and make a career out of it. You’re on the lookout for the best Learning Management Systems. What is your best option? Which one should you choose?

Let’s start with some self-assessment. What level are you at? 

• Amateur : You’ve never taught online or put up videos of your teaching. You’re only getting started and you wish to test the waters.

• Intermediate: You’ve already gotten feedback that you’re a good teacher from folks who’ve watched your videos. Now you need to check whether people are willing to pay to learn from you.

• Advanced: You have decided to make a career by teaching online. You already have a community of students who are eager to watch you videos and learn.

• Expert: You know your worth clearly. You now wish to offer immersive, result-oriented learning programs for your students, at a premium price point and under your own brand. Offering 15$ MOOCs are not your thing anymore.

Based on the above, here are our top recommendations for you.

Amateur : YouTube

Intermediate : Udemy

Advanced : Teachable

Expert : Pupilfirst

Let’s break down each of these suggestions:

Amateur: YouTube

When you’re just getting started, it’s wise to set aside thoughts of profit and begin by figuring out how good a teacher you are, and how well you can create content for audience.

Test the waters with YouTube. Figure out if your content is appealing and engaging. YouTube is the second largest search engine on the planet and it’s an excellent place to get started as a teacher. You automatically build a personal brand if your content is engaging and educational.

You can start off by building and launching a free course on Udemy too. However YouTube, hands down, has the highest number of people searching for educational content.

Pros : Free, Large potential audience

Cons: Crowded, No power tooling, Minimal scope for revenue generation.

Intermediate: Udemy

If you’re confident of your teaching prowess and want to start teaching part-time, Udemy is your best bet. We’ve tried all the other platforms and Udemy is the clear winner among them all. Udemy’s on-boarding process lets you upload content and build out a community by tapping into their large user-base. Udemy runs numerous promotional programs the moment your course is monetized.

While there is a tiered pricing option for courses, as a teacher you don’t have full pricing control on Udemy. In addition to that the courses still belong to Udemy. Your brand as a tutor exists within the Udemy universe.

Prices for Udemy are tiered, and instructors can choose from the tiered pricing options. They have a variety of free classes for students, as well as classes that cost over $900. Udemy takes royalty fees for using the platform. The prices aren’t standard, and they depend on the teachers. If a student enrolls in a course because of direct marketing, that instructor will keep 90 percent of the revenue. However, if Udemy is advertising for you and a student enrolls in your classroom via a Udemy ad, they will keep around 50 percent of the revenue.

Pros: Simple to use, Access to an existing student community

Cons: Lack of full pricing control, Revenue share business model, Lack of personal brand identity

Advanced: Teachable

Udemy and Teachable are very similar in terms of the features they offer. However, their relationship with you as a tutor varies vastly.

Teachable got started out of frustration with Udemy and improves upon it – in particular, with the way in which Udemy controls information about, and access to students. In response, the Teachable team has created a platform that enables you to offer online courses “on your website and control your branding, student data, and pricing all from one place.”

You can choose to pay a monthly fee to Teachable for the tool that they offer.

Pros: Own your brand and website, own student data, full control on pricing, No need to share revenue.

Cons: MOOCs don’t give students the best outcomes. Learn Why. 

Expert: Pupilfirst - Open Source LMS

If you wish to offer impactful learning and deliver outcomes for your students, you’ll soon start to notice that all of the above platforms fall flat. While all of these platforms allow you to reach massive scale by authoring text, images, and videos for your students to consume. However, learning does not occur by simply consuming information. MOOCs (Massive Online Open courses), which all of the above platforms enable, have been found to be a failure when it comes to actual learning outcomes[1].

In short, MOOCs don’t work.

If that’s the case, the question remains. What does?

Teacher-driven, task-based learning works

These type of courses differ from the normal online video courses in the following aspects:

• The personal interaction with the teacher remains a cornerstone of the teaching-learning process.

• Rather than mindlessly consuming content, students are encouraged to attempt short relevant tasks around the topic being learnt. Feedback is given by the teacher for each task attempted and students are encouraged to learn the theory around the tasks.

• Encourages peer learning & collaboration by building student communities that can solve its own problems. Students can team-up to go through a challenging course together.

• Teach through a combination of live classes and asynchronous interactions.

Pupilfirst is an open-source platform that lets you launch and run an immersive learning program that is result-oriented and personalised. This model has been widely adopted by others[2] and is the preferred choice among seasoned teachers and institutions online[3].

Some of the market leaders who are adopting the new model of learning are Lambda School, Write of Passage by David Perell, James Koppel Coaching. This allows them to price their courses well above the average (running into the thousands of dollars) and ensures effective outcomes for students.

With Pupilfirst, just like Teachable, you get to own your brand and website, have full control & access to student data and have complete control over pricing. No hint of royalty, or revenue share to be seen.

Pros: Offer a premium-priced, highly interactive learning experience where you stay involved.

Cons: Unlike other platforms, this is not a set-it-and-forget-it kind of learning platform. You're supposed to stay actively involved as a teacher and ensure that your students meet their learning outcomes.

For deep analysis and advice about choosing the right teaching platform, you can reach out to the author at gautham@pupilfirst.com or tweet him at @g3Mo.