Part of my full-time job and consulting work is helping people find ways to share in-person courses online.
I’ve personally used the two text-based platforms and each have different merits. For this post, I’ll be specifically reviewing the Thinkific platform.
I found the Thinkific platform to be intuitive and easy to use. It’s set up logically for non-computer science types from both the instructor and student perspective.
As a course publisher, the options to include coupons and subscription payments as part of the publishing tools is a very beneficial feature. These features are an additional expense on some other platforms.
More importantly, I found the customer service to be top notch. Thinkific customer service is incredibly responsive to feedback and requests.
There are a number of support options for Thinkific: a Facebook group and a contact us via email and phone option. The phone option is unique for a platform and the response time for email inquiries is much faster than others.
For example, I needed to unpublish a course while I revamped the content. In this case, it made the most sense to go beyond the unpublish option and instead downgrade my subscription. I reached out to customer service about my options and the response was very helpful. I wanted to be clear that the content would remain even if I unpublished and downgraded (another feature that isn’t available on other platforms).
The customer service response explained that is exactly what would happen, “your actual course content will remain on the site, and you can upgrade again when you’re ready! To downgrade, you just need to go to your My Account page within your dashboard and choose the free Starter plan.”
Regarding course design, there are a lot more options on Thinkific than on other platforms. If you are comfortable with designing a page using CSS or Javascript you can. This means you can customize how your course looks in ways that other platforms don’t allow.
Finally and most importantly for most course publishers is how student payment is processed, received and paid out to the course instructor. Thinkific pays the course publisher within 24-48 hours, unlike other platforms that take up to 30 days to pay the publisher.
Ultimately, I will continue to recommend Thinkific for courses because it is easy to use and the support system is excellent.
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