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I could write a novel about this because I've been creating courses since 2015 but I'm going to keep it short. I've tried a lot of platforms and teachable.com
by nickjj 8y ago
I could write a novel about this because I've been creating courses since 2015 but I'm going to keep it short.
I've tried a lot of platforms and teachable.com is by far the best solution as of today if you don't have a requirement where you expect people to upload code and then run automated tests against it.
I currently use thinkific.com for my courses because over a year ago I made that decision and switching between platforms is too painful for your users (they would need to make a new account, lose their progress and potentially lose invoice data, etc.). I will move off Thinkific in the future, but that's not going to happen until I finish building my own platform (which I'm currently doing at the moment as a side project mainly because as a developer, I'm still at my happiest when I'm writing code).
With that said, I also use Teachable for another project and the UI is a million times ahead of where Thinkific is for both instructors and students. Every time I use Teachable I'm upset that I chose to use Thinkific initially.
At the bare minimum you'll have to assemble your course, pick a theme for the front end, and build up your course's description page.
Expect to pay $100 / month for most platforms.
- avaika 8y agoWhy are you writing your own solution? Is it just for fun? I was under impression that there are tons of opensource available platforms to host courses.
- nickjj 8y agoBefore I made a decision to go with Thinkific I asked some of my students to try out Moodle's demo site and the feedback I got from them was very negative. The general census was it was too complicated and confusing to navigate their UI and their video player is really really bad. For a video course, a good video player is very important. edX is a little better, but it's still not what I want from a course platform and the amount of effort it would take to trim it down would be more effort than writing my own platform. I also looked at a bunch of WP plugins that are advertised as "course platform in a box" and none of them looked appealing. The UI for all of them were very poor and these plugins are massive beasts. I don't want to spend my time hacking through someone elses WP plugin to customize it. After looking at so many platforms and solutions I eventually came to the conclusion that no matter what platform I choose i'm never going to be truly happy. If I went with Teachable from day 1, I think I would have been 80% happy and may not have even decided to build my own platform, but at the end of the day, the heart wants what the heart wants. I want to build my own platform and I can do it. Being at ease mentally (even if it means working harder) is more important to me than anything.