What is the best course platform? This is a question I get asked all the time. And the reality is that there is no best course platform. There is only the best course platform for you and your course.
If I were to ask you what car is best I’m sure your answer would be very different from mine. That’s because there are a lot of different elements that influence the decision to buy a car. Things like whether you need to transport kids in the car. If you like to drive fast, is safety important to you, is the environmental impact important to you. It’s exactly the same when it comes to choosing a course platform.
You see, every course creator is different and every course is different. Which means that there isn’t one course platform that suits everyone. Every course platform offers different elements to suit different requirements.
It may also surprise you to hear that you might not even need a course platform. The online course market has changed significantly over the past few years. And the definition of what constitutes an online course has changed with it.
You could create a course using text messages sent to people’s phones. You could create an email challenge. You could create an entire course using a FaceBook group’s units and live’s. It no longer needs to be this structured thing that checks all the right boxes of what someone else defined an online course to be. As long as you can create course content in an organised way that allows users to progress in their understanding of a certain topic – you’ve got a course.
So how do you figure out which course platform is best for you and your course?
First, figure out what type of course you want to offer and what elements you’d like to include in it. Don’t rush out to buy a course platform before doing this. Otherwise, you’ll just end up shoe-horning your course into the platform you chose.
Once you’ve figured out what type of course you’d like to create and what elements you’ll be creating for the course. Then you can start looking for a course platform that meets these requirements.
Here are some elements to consider when choosing a course platform:
- How comfortable are you with tech?
- What is your budget?
- Do you already have a website?
- Do you want to host your course on your own website?
- Do you want to offer memberships/subscriptions?
- Do you want to create a community (away from Facebook)?
- Do you want to be able to send emails from the same platform?
- What payment providers do you want to use (ie Paypal, Stripe)?
- Do you want video hosting?
- Do you want predesigned templates to use instead of building from scratch?.
So take some time to figure out what type of course you want to create and how you want to share your content BEFORE looking at course platforms. Then find the one that checks all of your checkboxes. That’s the best platform