The Best Online Teaching Platforms to Earn Money in 2022
Teaching online is an excellent way to enjoy the benefits of everything you love about teaching. Instead of teaching from a physical classroom, you can beat the comfort of your home and still teach students and make money.
Online teaching comes with several advantages, including convenience and flexibility to choose your schedules, lesson plans, and communication methods to make some extra income. But all of this would be possible only if you succeed in choosing the best online teaching platform as it makes the foundation of online teaching.
Therefore, we have compiled a list of the best online classroom platforms for teachers to simplify their job.
Being the massive online teaching platform for online courses, Udemy doesn’t need any introduction. With over 185k courses on different topics at affordable rates, Udemy is the first choice for the best online teaching platforms for personalized online courses.
Udemy is an online course marketplace that connects course creators and students to meet students’ learning needs and preferences and, at the same time, helps creators to make money by selling courses. The platform offers a variety of courses for free, with only specialized courses requiring payment.
Pros
Affordable: Hosts a wide range of affordable courses starting at $11.99.
Free courses: Not just paid courses, Udemy hosts over 600 free online courses on a selection of various topics.
30-day refund policy: If learners don’t like a course after enrolling, Udemy gives back your money.
Lifetime access: The platform grants lifetime access to all courses you have purchased.
Course completion certificates: While all online courses on Udemy aren’t university accredited; some paid courses offer you a certificate upon successful completion of courses.
Udemy for Business: Udemy offers exclusive services with different plans for businesses, along worth a free trial.
Cons
Non-accredited certificate: If you want official certification, Udemy might disappoint you.
Doesn’t support course creation: Udemy doesn’t allow course creators to create content that can impact the course quality.
Price change: The course price fluctuates a lot as Demy adopts dynamic pricing over time.
Varying quality: As anyone can create online courses on Udemy, the content quality gets compromised.
Thinkific is one of the best online teaching platforms that allows educators to create and distribute online learning resources. Designed for different industries and requirements in mind, Thinkific works on a freemium model with basic free subscriptions, including tools to distribute online lessons.
Being a learning management system, Thinkific allows entrepreneurs and course creators to offer hosting for web pages, video hosting, student enrolment automation, payment processing, and more.
You can host courses that contain video content, text content, or even downloadable files like PDfs; Thinkific provides all features for course creators. Creators can manage the course curriculum with learning content editing tools like drag and drop on the backend.
Pros
Free plan: Thinkific is one of the course platforms that comes with a free plan.
Course Builder: To customize online courses so that they match your branding.
Sales page creation: Thinkific comes with a built-in drag and drop builder to create the sales page according to your needs.
Supports unlimited courses and students: While unlimited students and courses aren’t there on the free plan, premium plans come with this feature.
Different payment methods: Supports both one-time and monthly payment options.
Great customer services: Offers both phone and email support.
Cons
No marketing features: Thinkific doesn’t have its own email marketing platform or features. Instead offers Mail chimp, Aweber, and Keep integrations.
No marketplace feature: Thinkific lacks marketplace features that allow you to sell online courses.
No sales funnel building: Thinkific offers a native SamCart integration but doesn’t have a sales funnel builder platform. Other tools require a Zapier integration.
Teachable is one of the online instruction platforms, a widely used LMS designed to perform designing, distributing, managing, and tracking educational courses. Providing out-of-the-box services for online course services, the innovative platform includes the infrastructure and tools you need, all in one place.
Whether you are an independent course creator, blogger, or stay-at-home online tutor who wants to create online courses, teachable would be the best pick for you.
Pros
Email marketing integration: Teachable has integrated email marketing automation features to facilitate direct communication of teachers with learners.
Easy and secure payment processing: Built-in payment processing system that handles secure transactions for you.
Subscriptions: The platform supports recurring subscriptions every month for students to receive ongoing access to online courses.
Course completion certificate: The platform provides a course completion certificate.
Cons
Limited customization options: Website and online courses lack customization
Transaction fee: Even the basic plan of Teachable has a 5% transaction fee.
Lacks multi-lingual support: The platform doesn’t offer support for multiple languages.
Another example of a virtual teaching platform is Podia which supports different ways of online learning. The platform supports selling your online courses monetizing eBooks, audiobooks, etc. Educators can also engage students with webinars and subscriptions and earn from them as well.
Podia serves as a framework for teachers and provides you with all tools and features to create and sell your online course or run a membership site.
Podia has two price plans: $39 and $79; both plans offer unlimited courses and use a custom domain, quizzes, and built-in marketing tools.
Pros
Built-in email marketing tools: Podia offers tools that you message learners whenever when enrolling and completing a course.
Different payment options: Monthly payment packages for premium online courses.
Excellent customer support: The platform offers a responsive, quick, and 24/7 live chat.
Custom domain: To customize to match the look and feel of your website.
Cons
Not many courses and website customization options: Podia doesn’t offer many customization options like some other platforms do.
No telephone support: Offers just email support.
No course marketplace: Podia lacks course marketplace feature.
If you are looking for the best online teaching platform to build your own online tutoring marketplace, Pinlearn is the right choice. With the ability to sell both online courses and conduct live classes, Pinlearn helps you clone popular eLearning marketplaces like Udemy and Coursera.
Being an open-source code, Pinlearn gives you 100% access to source code and allows customizing the software to suit the unique requirements of your business. Not just tutor management features, the software also offers learner management features and administrative features.
Pros
100% open source: Pinlearn allows teachers to create an online teaching marketplace with complete control over your platform’s look, feel, and functioning.
Allows hosting courses and live classes: The platform supports both online courses and live classes, both private and group sessions.
Affordable and cost-efficient: Starting at $399 for basic and $999 for premium plans, Pinlearn has no hidden or recurring fee.
Cons
No hosting: Being a white label solution, you need to choose your hosting solution.
Conclusion
Embracing the digital education revolution and making the leap to virtual classroom sessions can be nerve-wracking for first-time educators. Whilst online classrooms are limited in some ways, implementing the right technology can make learning experiences more accessible, interactive, and engaging than ever before for students. As ever, the secret sauce is choosing the best teaching platform and creating the best engaging learning experience.
