Thinkific Review
Thinkific Review
What happened after the COVID-19 pandemic occurred? Suddenly, everybody had to stay at home. Even for work, you had to stay at home and do your job. Gradually, we realized that we need to change our lifestyle. We couldn't live like before this pandemic anymore. However, it wasn’t an easy change, you know! And, although we have got used to doing it, it is still difficult to get adapted to this new lifestyle. For example, it might be very distracting to stay at home and engage your business while kids are jumping around and your wife/husband expects you to spend time with her/him.
Or, we started to greatly miss the social connections happening in the office. And, it wasn’t only our job situation that went under huge changes. For example, we changed the way we used to go shopping. Back then, we had to dress up, take a taxi, get stuck for hours in traffic, hanging around for several hours to find what we like, and get back home very tired.
This doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Although people started to do online shopping a few years ago, it was only after the COVID-19 pandemic that people realized how easier and more efficient it is to stay at home, get relaxed and buy your stuff. So, as you can see, different aspects of our lives have been changed dramatically. Today, in this article, we are going to focus on one of these aspects.
Crisis For The Education Systems
When the COVID-19 happened, schools, universities, research institutes, and all the educational classes were closed due to limitations. For the first days, educational systems in different countries were ready for the situation and decided to keep all the students at home. However, everyone knew that the situation is going to be like this for many months.
So, they started using the potential of online classes. You didn’t need to go out for your classes. You had to just go to a website and enter into an educational platform. There were many different multimedia features incorporated in these platforms so that the process of learning/teaching doesn't have to be stopped anymore.
Another thing also happened and showed how great the potential of online courses is. Due to all those catastrophes related to the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses go bankrupt. Accordingly, many people lost their jobs after years of honest working for their company. So, millions of people who have had a specialty became unemployed. They must have done something about it. This is where again, online courses and classes helped them. You might be wondering how. We will talk about it in the next section.
As we said, millions of people got unemployed, and they were wondering what is happening to their life now. And, they didn’t get fired because they couldn’t do the job. So, it means every one of them could be getting involved in the industry of online educational systems.
Instead of using their specialty to do a project, they could have started teaching and passing their knowledge through online platforms. It was a great chance for every one of them to find an appropriate course because everybody jumped into online courses suddenly. As you can see, online courses saved millions of people's life. Also, it lets students and people who want to earn new skills could pursue their education and don’t get stuck.
What Are We Talking About In This Article?
Here, in this article, we first review the advantages of online courses. Then, we will introduce Thinkific as one of the most popular and biggest providers of online courses in the world. Then, we also introduce some of the alternatives for this platform.
So, are you planning to register to Thinkific, and you are not sure where to start? Or, are you someone with a specialty who is interested in conveying his/her knowledge? Do you know the tips and tricks you need to apply in your online course to get more students? Or, do you know how to find a professional teacher? Come with us, and we will discuss them all.
Benefits Of Online Courses
Here is a shortlist of all benefits associated with online courses. Online courses are the future of educational systems. Let see the advantages of online courses for instructors as well as students.
Getting International Courses
perhaps, you are living in a country where nobody can teach you the way you want it. For example, you have a plan to study Chinese, but there are not good instructors in your region to teach you professionally. Or, you must learn how to work with specific software. However, you don't see anybody being able to teach you correctly.
Thanks to online classes, you can avoid all these problems and receive the lessons you want from a teacher abroad. You just need an internet connection and a laptop. Then, you can be the best in your career by accessing the best educational material from a well-known teacher.
The same is true with instructors. For example, you have a specialty, but no one is interested in it in your country, or you cannot find any appropriate job opportunities. With online courses, you have the chance of having an international collaboration and expand the circle of your students.
Avoiding Traditional Problems Associated With Receiving Education
You pay for a class, right? But, you have to pay even more for what comes after. For example, you have to pay for public transportation to get there. This will add up to the carbon emission problems as you need to burn fuel to go to the class and come back home. With online courses, just lay down and enjoy learning your lessons. Also, some people are introverted and don’t enjoy being in crowded classes. Again, with online classes, you have your privacy, and nobody can bother you. Whenever you feel you don’t know something, you can easily ask.
Receiving High-Quality Educational Materials
Online courses give the instructors the possibility to teach using multimedia resources to maximize class efficiency. These multimedia resources include videos, images, podcasts, pdf notes, etc. Also, students can watch the class as much as they want if they have any problems with the topics.
Offering Flexibility
thanks to online classes, you can easily manage your time. For example, there was a time limitation associated with normal classes. Instructors didn’t like to stay at school or institute and teach until 9 pm. But, instructors are willing to teach at night when they are at home and relaxed. They don’t need to be worried that it is getting dark or they cannot take the train home. This is also good for students as they can engage in business activities during the day and then get educated at night.
Online Course Providers
So, we understood that online courses are valuable in every aspect you think of. Where can we find them? Where should we even start? Well, you can find many different online course providers in the market trying to offer the highest quality possible.
If you are a student, you have to find companies offering classes related to your wanted field. Or, you have to see what companies are hiring professional instructors to teach and get some visibility. Depending on your field of interest and the budget you have, you can choose one and start learning/teaching.
Thinkific, One Of The Base Online Course Providers
Thinkific is one of the biggest online course providers. It has been in the market for several years. It offers a great variety of topics for both students and instructors. So, let's get deep and know Thinkific better. Here is some basic information about it.
- Thinkific is a platform designed for instructors, entrepreneurs, or everyone with some skills and lets them create their online courses.
- Thinkific goal is to provide professionals with appropriate and high-tech tools to make the experience of teaching enjoyable and much more efficient.
- Here are some interesting numbers about Thinkific. Now, they have 270 employees. They are active in more than 15 countries. There is one good news for women, too as nearly half of the leaders are female.
- The support team is pretty active since they have helped people with their quires. There are more than 200k questions answered by the support team.
Thinkific Features
There are five features in Thinkific for instructors to teach more efficiently and get reach and receive more students as they become more famous. These features are building your courses, designing yourself, marketing & selling, supporting your students, and taking care of security. Let's review each feature.
Building Your Courses
– As an instructor, you have to have a clear-cut plan. Your students should know where to start and when to finish. Thanks to Thinkific, you can easily create a nice curriculum. The good news is that you don’t need to code anything. Everything is done in a drag & drop style so that you don’t find yourself occupied with technical issues.
Designing Yourself
– Your content is very important for your course. There is no question about that. However, your courses' appearance must be professional. However, this is also taken care of by Thinkific. There are lots of designed themes available on Thinkific. Also, you can customize every element of your courses including fonts, photos, colours, etc.
Marketing & Selling
- You can advertise your courses and receive more attention for students to join your classes.
- There are two ways to promote your courses. One way is to offer membership sites and subscription courses. Also, you can boost course sales with coupons and promotional features.
- You can let your students benefit from other content you have if they share your courses for the sake of advertisement.
- It is possible for you to use Google Adwords and analyze your business. You have to find the answers to questions like what courses are the most popular, or what designs do people enjoy better, or where your students usually come from.
- In addition, getting paid happens very fast.
- You don’t need to be worried about different currencies as you can charge students in more than 100 currencies.
- It is possible for you to accept different credit cards.
- Not to mention that payments are 100% secure.
Supporting Your Students
you can connect to your students through the platform and check their homework or other things. You can encourage them all to engage and be active more.
Taking Care Of Security
there are four elements related to security. First, your cloud hosting is secured and you will get daily backups so that your data is stored well. Second, uptime is 99.9% with 24/7 monitoring. So, there are always people there to help you with any accidental problems. Third, you will get instant access to updates so your courses are going to be protected from hackers. Finally, build-in security and SSL are all available on Thinkific.
Pricing
There are four plans including free, basic, pro, and premiers costing 0, 49, 99, and 499 dollars per month. unlimited courses & students, coupons, email students, drip content, affiliate reporting, custom domain, email integrations, Zapier triggers, manual student enrollment & exports, and Thinkific App stores are featured provided in the free plan. What about the basic plan? 2 Site admin accounts, 5 Course admins/authors, Advanced Customization, and Live Lessons with Zoom are some of the features in the basic plan. Finally, in the pro plan which is the most popular plan, you will have features like 5 Site admin accounts, 15 Group Analysts, 50 Course admins/authors, and an Onboarding package.
Thinkific Pros
People are excited about Thinkific because of the following reasons:
- There are only a handful of online course platforms that offer free package. Thinkific is one of them. So, if you haven’t made up your mind yet, you can go and give it a try.
- Students and schools are given diverse ways of payment for their easement.
- Your online courses can be easily enriched thanks to Thinkific resources.
- Thinkific is not just an online course provider. Things like hosting features, course marketing, student engagement, and payment handling capabilities are all included.
- The premium package is a bit expensive. However, it is worth it as you can create thousands of online courses attracting an unlimited number of students.
- Transaction fees are usually paid by the students not the instructors.
- Customization is ever-present.
- Complex tweaking is possible for people who want to get deeper into the underlying theme HTML and CSS.
- The voice tool incorporated into the courses helps your powerpoint presentations be more professional.
Thinkific Cons
- You don’t have a ready audience. It is up to you to advertise and find them. Thinkific doesn’t have its default email marketing tool.
- Customer support is usually based on email, not live chat. So, sometimes, it is not as fast as you wish it was.
Alternatives To Thinkific
Thinkific is not a lot in the market. Many other online course providers are trying to dominate the market. So, what are some of the most popular alternatives to Thinkific? Let's introduce some of them and then compare them with Thinkific.
The first is LearnWorlds. This platform lets you create your online courses on your website. Compared with Thinkific, it is a bit slower and more expensive. However, the support is faster and more efficient. Interactive videos, e-books, extracting transcripts of your courses, receiving certificates of completion, optimizing sales, and a strong knowledge base are some of the pros of this platform. The price is much less than Thinkific with 24, 79, and 249 dollars for starter, pro trainer, and learning center, respectively.
The next one is Kajabi with is a bit slower to reach ROI but more expensive than Thinkific. However, it is better at meeting requirements. It is known as the best high-end online course platform. Its email marketing automation is better than all other companies. Automation guarantees functional pre-sale, pre-webinar, drip course, and upsell emails. It is integrated with Stripe and PayPal. Big names in the market use Kajabi for their great business.
Teachable, Lessonly, Tovuti LMS, Blackboard Learn, and SAP Litmos are some of the other alternatives to Thinkific.
Tips For Instructors
Instructors must behave differently in online courses. This includes everything from providing exciting and appropriate educational materials to know how to market yourself. Even with the best online course platform, you cannot deliver your lessons as you have planned for them when you don’t know what to focus on. Here are some tips and tricks for everyone who wants to start the business:
Record Your Lectures
Disconnection is always an ever-present issue. So, you have to think about it. Well, one option is to record your lecture and send them to your students when they are complaining about the speed of the internet or not happy with too many disconnections. In this way, you will avoid all those future messages asking repetitive questions.
Turn On Your Camera
I know! When you turn on the camera, it will reduce the internet speed. So, you prefer to teach using your voice and not the camera. Although it could be financially and practically a good idea. However, you will engage your students better if you turn on your camera and ask them to do the same. It might be a bit more expensive. But in a long run, you are going to benefit from it as it gives you more visibility.
Keep Videos Short
It is always good to entertain your students with multimedia content such as videos. However, don’t overuse them because the students get bored fast. Also, they might say our teacher sits somewhere and plays some stupid videos instead of teaching.
Test Out Slides
Please, be aware that many students logged into your class with their smartphones. So, your content must be smartphone-friendly too. Don’t forget to check your slides, fonts, colours, etc. on smartphones before the class. Don’t let students think you don’t care about them.
Use Existing Resources
It is always great to spend time and come up with original content. However, you should not waste all the existing resources you have. For example, you can easily introduce a tutorial video on YouTube and ask them to click on the link and watch the video.
Provide Interactive Activities
People, especially students, don’t like chatty instructors. You should think of ways of getting them engaged. This is very hard to do on online courses because you don’t have that face-to-face connection. For example, you can make your PowerPoint slides interactive so that students contribute to the class. Or, give them the chance to present something interesting in the class.
Conclusion
These days, humans don’t like to waste their time anywhere. Days are coming and going very fast and we need to adapt quickly. Although we need more than any time in our history, for the last two years, we have faced a new challenge which is called the COVID-19 pandemic. Yes, it stopped many people from getting righteous information. However, we humans have been able to overcome all challenges. We have taken online learning more seriously and are beefing from that too.
Thinkific is one of the biggest online course platforms. It offers many topics from very diverse disciplines for everyone. It is one of the most popular places who are willing to share their knowledge and get paid for it. Also, they can grow their brand and accept more students. So, in a way, it works like an e-commerce platform where you can teach and get paid more.
It is a great destination for people looking for exciting and professionally recorded educational content. Also, there are many free courses available on Thinkific. Here, we introduced this website and reviewed some of its features for you. If you are looking for an alternative to Thinkific, don’t worry. We will come back with more content very soon. Take care.
I trust you enjoyed this Thinkific Review. Please stay tuned for more articles to come. Take care!
JeannetteZ
Your Opinion Is Important To Me
Ideas? Questions? Comments? I would love to hear from you. Please leave me your questions, experiences, remarks, and/or suggestions about this Thinkific Review in the comments section below. You can also reach me by email at Jeannette@WorkFromAnywhereInTheWorld.com.
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