8 Online Teaching Platforms That Will Make You Want to Teach Online
The future of learning is in artificial intelligence. Imagine you have a virtual mentor that interacts with you in a completely personalised way. It understands your needs and offers you exactly what you need until you master whatever you want to learn. It is totally engaging, motivating and individualized. Although there are already some intelligent systems that track the mental processes of a learner while solving a problem and diagnose the learner’s understanding of the topic, AI is obviously not mainstream yet. Until it becomes so, let’s see what we have at hand that makes teaching and learning more and more convenient. In this post I will give you a list of some of the most popular online teaching platforms that make learning more accessible and easier than ever.
I must note that online teaching is increasingly becoming an option of income for an increasing number of people worldwide because it has some great advantages over traditional teaching in terms of flexibility in working hours, opportunity to reach more students, easy communication tools and re-usable online materials. I must also say that human interaction and social side of learning are, in my opinion, very critical in online learning, and some of these platforms below seem to highlight that in their philosophy of learning & teaching. Here is a list of online teaching platforms that you may have missed and may want to try today!
www.thinkific.com: One of the first ones I have known, Thinkific is a very easy-to-use online course platform. You can bring all your content together, add quizzes and surveys, issue certificates of completion, track learner progress and integrate third-party tools through Zapier. One of best things about Thinkific is their continual product development. They collect feedback from users and improve the platform adding new features all the time.
www.openlearning.com: You can create your course content and teach it through this easy-to-use platform. Social engagement among learners is highly emphasized and their motto is “Experience online teaching. The Social Way.” You can teach anything from pastry making to quantum physics.
www.teachable.com: Formerly Fedora, Teachable is a platform where you can create and sell online courses. It helps you create your course materials using different media, customise and brand your course (e.g logo, color, style etc) and launch it. The rest is taken care by the platform which also gives you some data such as learner analytics and course revenue.
www.learnworlds.com: What makes this one interesting is that it offers you an interactive video tool, e-book creator and an opportunity of networking for learners. It also makes use of gamification to better motivate them. I personally find it quite powerful in terms of content authoring, marketing options and interactive tools for social learning. Once the course is set up, course owners can also personalise the domain (e.g http://learninghub.growwithtech.net). I would consider this type of a platform for corporate training as well.
www.coursecraft.net: This one is a little bit different than others in the sense that it turns blogs into e-courses. It is almost completely text and image-based. It might be an alternative to traditional online courses for those who consider offering non-academic courses perhaps.
www.vedantu.com: Vedantu is an online tutoring website founded in India. It seems to be used mainly in that region but it is potentially a platform where anybody can teach anything through live video conferences with a whiteboard for visual aid. The popular topics are Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, English, Hindi, Sanskrit, French, German, Social Studies and Computer Science.
www.engoo.com: This one is solely for teaching English online. It seems quite appealing to those who might consider working from home and earn extra income. It is a Japanese-established online English tutorial service based in the Philippines which aims to connect learners and teachers from different parts of the world.
www.podia.com: Podia is a relatively new platform among others and it looks quite beautiful by design. You can handle your courses, digital downloads, customers, e-mail subscribers, payments and data in one place, which is exactly what an online course creator would need. What makes it a bit different from others is that you can create downloads to either sell or give away as lead magnets. This would help you grow an audience more easily and acquire new customers for your online courses.
Perhaps you have never thought of teaching online before, but I assure you that you will be amazed once you discover the world of online teaching and the opportunities it offers.
If you are a course creator already, you may like Gamma.app, an AI-powered platform to create beautiful and engaging slide decks for your courses.
For more articles on edtech and e-learning, please visit www.growwithtech.net
Before you go, if you’re thinking about teaching online or are already an online instructor, be sure to check out this blog post. It covers marketing tools that you can use to grow your online teaching business.
Author’s note: This list originally started with 8 platforms and it is constantly revised and growing with newly added platforms. Add in the comments if you know a great one too!
