There are hundreds of online courses on the internet, and it’s hard to figure out what works and what doesn’t – in the sense that the end-user gets their value for money with a competent online course.
For course instructors, the worry is how do I get my study material out there and achieve success with it?
Teachable is one of those places to host your online course with a limited budget and user-friendly features making it an excellent option for beginners. What’s more, you get all the online support you need to get you started with access to course tutorials and many other benefits.
This article provides a detailed review of all the Teachable hosting platform features for your online course material.
Who needs Teachable?
Teachable is suitable for individuals that desire to develop and sell online courses on their websites – preferably with WordPress. Once you set up your course material, you can start selling it using the available features, including a sleek dashboard to control your marketing and communication with potential students.
In a nutshell, Teachable is built to minimize all the tech complications and focus on developing and marketing your online courses instead.
Teachable Features
Ease of use
The dashboard is the main feature used to develop and display your online courses. Once you log in, upload all your files, ensure all the analytics run effectively, communicate with students, check the payments, handle complaints and cancellations, and issue refunds (where necessary).
The Curriculum Editor is a great feature that organizes courses accordingly, subject wise, in sequence with all the relevant unit themes and topics.
The interface has a fresh, organized look where you do not need to scroll through tons of tabs to locate content. The drag and drop is a great tool to move content around quickly.
Uploading Files and Videos
Whether you want to upload content, videos, or files in PDF format, this should be easy to do with the drag and drop feature to pull files from the source onto the teachable platform.
You can also upload your content from all your cloud storage files, Dropbox files, or Google docs files. Teachable has an efficient bulk upload capacity, saving you hours of upload time with your coursework by merely using the drag and drop tools.
Filing Efficiency
Teachable does not require manual linking or embedding as it automatically uploads nearly all file types, including videos and images ready for use.
The Video uploading tool is optimized to handle high-quality sound from multiple devices, including laptops, tablets, and iPads.
Course Monitoring and Analytics
Teachable keeps track of all the online activities on your website, providing you with all the engagement going on with the students. Details on how the course is selling, student enrollment data, analytics on progress with sales, and demand should hint on how to slow re-market moving course materials.
Teachable Course Analytics: reveals insightful info on student numbers, engagement insights, revenue figures, and tracking of progress – showing you how far along your students have gone with your course.
The analytics provides useful data to help you engage with students, answer their questions, help those struggling with specific units/subjects, and congratulate them.
By monitoring analytics, you can optimize areas of focus to market aggressively and attract more students to enroll for your online course on your website.
Communication
Online courses encourage autonomous learning, but there has to be constant communication to understand every student’s needs and give feedback where necessary to help them stay on track.
Teachable offers instructors’ email software to give guidance and answer all queries from students within the platform by integrating with software, like Mailchimp, Infusionsoft, and Zapier (for other email clients besides students).
Email marketing works tremendously to sell online courses. It allows instructors to communicate directly with all the target customers to maximize the organic reach of the published courses.
Pricing
Teachable offers both free and paid plans. However, to access all the main features on the hosting platform, you need to sign up for the paid plans, clustered in four categories.
Pricing Options
Free Plan
It offers standard features and charges $1 and a percentage of any sales made on your website (10%). With the free plan, Teachable gives you limited access to the features and marketing support for your online courses. This plan is all about testing the waters to see if your course outline is marketable or not.
Basic Plan
It offers all the crucial Teachable features such as customized domains, inbuilt email marketing, coupons, affiliate programs, and a preview of course content.
You pay $39 per month, and an additional 5% of the total sales achieved.
Professional Plan
This is a favorite plan for most course developers because of its additional functions and the speedy release of payments for sales made each month. With the free and basic programs, instructors receive their dues after a 30-day or 60-day hold with PayPal.
With the professional plan, customer care support comes a little faster than the other plans with many enhanced features. It’s genuinely efficient, though a little pricey @ $ 99 per month, and there are no additional costs on sales.
Business
Teachable business is designed for larger institutions running numerous courses with a top priority on client support and permission to upload bulk files and enroll students without any limit. It’s a premium plan going for $299 per month with no extra charge on sales.
Branding
Your online course must exude confidence in terms of professional appearance and usability with the students.
Teachable offers creative marketing tools to help you customize and brand your website with attractive scholarly themes for your website landing pages once you upload the desired logo, images, and content, select color schemes suitable for your brand colors.
Teachable offers customized features for your landing page and homepage using Power Editor (for those who can work with HTML or CSS coding). It is not quite a user-friendly feature for regular instructors with basic IT knowledge.
Sales and Marketing
Teachable offers numerous marketing tools for selling your online courses, such as coupons and subscription plans.
The Teachable Blog has tons of valuable marketing guidelines posted weekly to help instructors market and attract and acquire new students.
You also get advice from established and successful instructors on the Teachable platform that motivates and encourage new instructors by providing ideas and tips on how to market their courses.
Conclusion
Teachable is a great place to start if you are venturing into developing online courses. You don’t need to waste time learning complex technology stuff like coding and web development or paying web developers to get your course set up.