Looking to create your first online course? Here’s everything you need to know.

Online courses are becoming increasingly popular due to their convenience and flexibility. As an online educator you can sell courses that explore a subject in depth, help you to build a community, earn an income, or grow your business. When deciding where to create an online course, you need to choose a platform where you can easily design your courses and promote them. Security, scalability, and analytics are also very important considerations.

What is an Online Course?

An online course allows students to receive education via the internet. Some courses offered by educational institutions allow students to earn degrees or certificates. Online courses may also be informal and offer training in specific skills. They can provide a way for established businesses to offer learning and development to employees.

Many online courses consist of pre-recorded videos. They also include various other elements to make them more interactive and engaging. These may be live webinars, quizzes, discussion groups, and worksheets.

Where to Create an Online Course

There are various different options if you’re asking “Where can I create an online course?” Once you have a good idea of the needs for your particular online courses, you can start looking at different platforms.

1. Cincopa

Cincopa is a good option for entrepreneurs and educators who want a growth-friendly solution that scales with them. With Cincopa you can combine multiple videos into gallery sets and build a systematic structure for your online courses.

You can use many types of media in your courses such as images, video, and audio. On-video tools such as calls-to-action (CTAs), subtitles, annotations, quizzes, and contact forms increase engagement and broaden your reach.

Your courses will be secure as Cincopa uses advanced security measures like encryption and user permissions. You will also be able to analyze the performance of your courses to see where you need to make improvements. Cincopa integrates with the software you already use so you can streamline your workflows.

2. Kajabi

Kajabi is an online course creation software that’s great for marketing your course. You can choose from 11 website templates, and add your own branding. You can create landing pages, marketing funnels, and email campaigns. It has many built-in marketing features such as marketing blueprints that will help you create your marketing funnel.

You can collect email addresses on a landing page and customize templates for different emails such as reminding customers about a special offer or sending them a thank-you note after a purchase. The native email provider helps you to keep track of the opening rate of your emails. Kajabi also integrates with your favorite apps and helps you to automate your workflows.

3. Teachable

Teachable allows you to create your own course outline or use an AI online course creator to create one for you. By hosting an online school on your own website, you can control the look and feel of the front end and direct customers to the Teachable checkout page. Add multiple content types to courses, such as video, audio, images, documents, text, and quizzes.

If you’ve recorded several audio and video lessons, you can upload them in one go to save time. You can also bulk-select lectures to change settings without having to go into each one.

4. Thinkific

With Thinkific, you can sell unlimited courses and it offers unlimited video and content hosting on all the paid plans. This platform is well-suited to corporate trainers and entrepreneurs. You have great control over your course content and can use many customizable add-ons.

The online course builder allows you to add downloadable content, quizzes, surveys, and voice-over PowerPoint. Thinkific integrates with PayPal and Stripe so you can accept payments. You can segment users to keep teams organized. It has a free plan that allows you to create a website and a single course.

What to keep in mind when looking for an online course builder

When creating an online course, you must take into account factors like scalability, security, and analytics into account.

• You need to be able to scale your online courses as your business grows. This can be a problem with a platform like Kajabi that doesn’t offer unlimited plans.
• A platform should be mobile-responsive and offer access to course content anywhere at any time.
• You should be able to restrict access to content so only authorized viewers are able to access it.
• Without access to in-depth analytics you can’t make informed decisions about how to improve your course content.

Best Tips for Creating an Engaging Online Course

When you create an online course, you can use the following tips to make it more engaging.

Interactive elements: Quizzes, polls, etc. can help students to focus on what’s important. Presenting the same information in various ways can also make learning more interactive. Think about adding notes, links, or voice explanations directly to images.

Progress reports: Reports provide you with a way to track individual students and see how they are progressing.

Additional help with video messages: Sending students useful video messages can add a personal touch and increase engagement.

Video chaptering: Break up your video content into chapters so students don’t need to scroll through a whole video to find what they need.

Conclusion

Whatever platform you choose, you need to commit to consistently improving your online courses. This will ensure that your audience grows steadily over time. Try out Cincopa for 30 days for your online courses.