Monday 4 September 2023

Learnworlds review – build your online academy

No matter who you are, you have something to teach people. You can be an educator, the proverbial solopreneurial musician, a company and you’re looking for ways to create and sell your courses.

You don’t need to understand teaching in its straits sense, you can also include coaching and consulting. If you look at this the global market, a recent study estimates it to reach $457.8B by 2026

If you planning on monetising your experience, skills, and knowledge, you need a website that’s able to do or let you do

  • Create your courses
  • Market and sell your courses
  • Provide training for your employees, partners, or customers
  • School website
  • Review student progress with quizzes or graded exams

Fortunately, nowadays you don’t need to code such a website yourself. There are tools that help you create your online academy. Learnworlds is such a service that will help you with

  • Teaching
  • Employee onboarding
  • Professional or compliance training

It even goes so far as to give you all the tools you need to launch an online school. It comes with the (almost) obligatory drag drag-and-drop website builder, video hosting, payment gateways, and a built-in community with social networking features.

If you need that sounds like Kajabi, you’re not wrong. The main difference to Kajabi is that Learnworlds is far more cost-effective. Read on to find out what features it boasts that Kajabi doesn’t have.

Pros and cons of Learnworlds

Learnworlds is a hosted solution, so you don’t need to install software or take care of technical stuff and security. It has a drag-and-drop website builder for you to create landing pages or your entire website. It also comes with a bunch of integrations, built-in analytics, video hosting, and payment gateways. It also has a feature that is interesting for your marketing: It’ll make your affiliate marketing easy and you don’t need a separate service.

With all these features, it shouldn’t surprise you that LearnWorlds has positioned itself as more of a premium course platform. So, while it offers a free 30-day trial that doesn’t require a credit card, you won’t find a forever free plan. That said, it still has reasonable pricing.

Pros

  • Easy to use
  • You can mix and match layouts of page sections
  • Customisation includes custom code
  • Fair pricing
  • Creating your courses is easy as pie, and directly integrates into your site
  • Course learning tools include quizzes, assignments, test, certifications

Cons

  • No 24/7 chat support

Who is Learnworlds for?

If you’re looking for ways to monetise your, experience, knowledge, or skills Learnworlds’ll help you create courses and interact with your students. In more detail, you could be a

  • Content creator
  • School
  • Marketer
  • Educator
  • Professional coach
  • Training manager
  • Compliance trainer

Learnworlds will help you create and deliver your courses whether you’re an individual creator or an enterprise and everything in-between. You can create unlimited courses using PDF, ebook, audio, or videos.

To assess how well your students have understood your training, you can use its testing engine. You can test and assess them with assignments and quizzes. With its built-in social network, you can encourage your students to connect and interact with each other and share tips or discuss your lessons.

How easy is Learnworlds to use?

With that many features, it’s a good thing that Learnworlds onboards you with a 4-step checklist. The checklist is like a virtual manual and will take you through all the basics you need for creating courses and setting up your landing pages. LearnWorlds has a research team that constantly studies the learner’s journey and applies their learnings in designing the interface.

The welcome screen onboards you with a 4 step checklist

If you skip the onboarding checklist, you might feel a little bit overwhelmed since Learnworlds has so many features. You’ll find the essential tools in the top navigation and there’s also a left side menu.

The dashboard gives you access to all of the features and an overview of what’s happening in your school

As you work your way through the checklist, you’ll see that the interface is well-thought-out. Every task is accompanied by visual and textual instructions.

Learnworlds course wizard

It’s really easy to create a new course. Learnworlds’ course wizard guides you through the basic steps. Once, you’ve completed them, you’re course landing page is ready for you to add your course content.

You can add an interactive video player, ebook, audio files, and more. It’s just as easy to customise your website with its site builder. By now, after creating your first course, you should be accustomed to how Learnworlds’ drag-and-drop editor works.

Learnworlds’ drag-and-drop editor

With Learnworlds’ tools, you don’t need to have any coding skills to build your school site. But it also gives designers and developers enough flexibility to get their site to look the way they want. You can control the layout, visual elements, and overall look and feel.

Learnworlds design and templates

During the signup process, you were asked to choose your school’s theme. But you’re not limited to that theme. You can choose to give each section of a page its own layout. If that’s not enough, you can add custom code and really make it your own.

Each section can have its own layout

Interestingly, Learnworld has a feature called “Site Flavors”. This is useful when you want to create multiple versions of your school with just a few clicks. This can be useful when you need to

  • Redesign your school
  • Promote your school’s special events
  • Have courses in completely unrelated topics such as marketing and wellness coaching

How to manage your ecommerce store in Learnworlds?

For an online school, the main product is your training. You get something like inventory management for your courses under the tab Courses in the left side menu. It’s a walk in the park to create new courses and manage them.

But what could be more interesting for you is the option that you can white label your school, albeit only on the higher plans. It means you can white label your courses, your entire school and you won’t find any of LearnWorlds’ corporate identity such as its logo on your school site. This can be interesting if you want to resell your material or have your school branded with your company’s corporate identity.

Learnworlds integrations

Even with a myriad of features, it still happens that a service like LearnWorlds doesn’t do everything you need. Then you’d want to extend its functionality. For that LearnWorlds has a wide range of plugins. To name just a few

  • Zapier
  • Google Adwords
  • Mixpanel
  • Zendesk
Integrations fall into different categories such as affiliates and analytics

What marketing and SEO tools does Learnworlds have?

Learnworlds helps you promote your courses with coupons and launch promotions. Other marketing tools include memberships, subscriptions, and bundles. Of course, it includes, analytics – found in the tab Reports Center in the left side menu.

An important tool in your marketing toolbox is affiliate marketing. You can make students who really like your training into evangelists and reward them when they recommend your school.

SEO

In the settings of your course pages along with all the external pages that make up your site as well as your blog posts, you can add a page title and description.

Blogging

Having a blog can help you drive inbound traffic. Hence, you want to promote your courses with constant content. You need to enable the blogging tool to add the blog to the site builder.

It’s easy to write blog posts. You can control whom to show a post to (think logged-in users or not) or on what devices. You can add also entrance animation and what happens after a click. This is interesting if you want the reader to take action and sign up for a course.

Payment options

You can give your students to choose from

  • Stripe
  • Paypal
  • Shopify
  • PagSeguro

For subscriptions, you have to use Stripe. You can also create payment plans if your students prefer that. That’d also with Stripe and only available with the Pro Trainer plan or higher.

Learnworlds security

Learnworlds is running on top of Microsoft Azure. So, you get the basic security provided by Microsoft Azure. Besides that, Learnworlds uses SSL for all schools created on its platform.

On the plans Learning Center and higher, you get to personalise your videos and add watermarks to your PDFs.

Learnworlds customer support

All plans include email support. If you’ve subscribed to the entry-level account, the email support is only 24/5, while the others have 24/7 support. The highest plan includes 24/7 phone support. A pity is that there’s no live chat support.

If you don’t mind finding the answers yourself, you can look up the searchable help centre.

Learnworlds pricing

Learnworlds doesn’t limit how many courses you can create that it will host for you. Instead, its plans are based on its features. The more you want the higher the plan.

The entry-level plan is more than fair with $29 per month. However, you need to pay for each course sale a transaction fee of $5. The other plans don’t tack on a transaction fee.

Is Learnworlds the right tool for you?

Sometimes, it’s very easy for one tool to do a certain task. Take Wild Apricot for example. It makes it very easy for you to set up a membership site and theoretically you can also use it for creating and selling your training.

What makes Learnworlds different is that it’s a powerful course creation service. It gives you all the tools to create your website – or if you want your online academy. It’s really easy to add courses along with the sales page and content pages. You can also regularly write a blog, and offer affiliate marketing. This makes it a good overall tool if you want to start getting paid for your knowledge.

If community engagement is important for you, then consider test-driving Learnworlds. With its 30 days free trial (without credit card), you can test it risk-free.



Original post here: Learnworlds review – build your online academy

No comments:

Post a Comment