Best Online Teaching Platforms for 2024

Are you a tutor looking for an online platform where you can host your courses and impart knowledge?

In this article, we will be talking about the best online teaching platforms for your coaching business. In the end, you should be able to decide which platform is best for you based on its features.

What is an Online Teaching Platform?

An online teaching platform is a technology that allows anyone with the help of the internet to render courses online. 

An online platform for teaching should be able to accommodate as many students, host course videos and other kinds of materials. It should also have features that enable tutors to grade students based on their performance.

Features of an Online Teaching Platform

Content Delivery

What is teaching without content? An online learning platform should be able to allow tutors to upload videos, audio, PDFs, text, slides and any other type of content. Without content, learning cannot take place online.

This content should be hosted on a cloud-based server so that students can access the course contents from anywhere in the world.

Some of the best online teaching platforms host their content locally through CDN services like CloudFlare to increase content latency.

Assessment tools

Tutors want to get feedback from their students to see if they have learned. One of the ways of doing this is through quizzes. Every online teaching platform should have tools that help the tutors to carry out assessments.

Communication tools

In a real-life teaching session, students always have questions to ask. This is also applicable to online teaching. Also, tutors may need to communicate with students to further explain a new concept that is absent from the course content or announce an assignment deadline. 

An online teaching platform must have tools to make communication easy.

Reporting and Analytics

Reports and Analytics helps tutors to know the percentage of students who are completing the courses. It also gives tutors an overview of students’ performance in a particular course. With information like this, tutors will know if a course needs improvement.

Certification

Although this is not a compulsory feature, most online teaching platforms offer certificates to students upon finishing a course. These certificates can also be verified online through the platforms.

3 Best Online Teaching Platforms

WordPress X LearnDash

WordPress is an open-source content management system that lets other developers build third-party products that work in tandem with WordPress. LearnDash is a third-party learning management system that can be installed on WordPress, thereby turning a WordPress website into an online teaching platform.

If you want to self-host your online teaching platform, then WordPress and LearnDash are the two tools you need to achieve this.

LearnDash comes with basic to advanced features of a learning management system. To use LearnDash and WordPress, you will need to first purchase a hosting plan and a domain name, install WordPress for free and purchase the LearnDash plugin which sells for $199 per year.

The advantage of using LearnDash over other online teaching platforms in this list is that once you have set up the system, you do not have to pay a monthly subscription plan, you are in charge of your content, and you can also install features that are not available on other systems.

Teachable

Teachable is an all-in-one online platform where creators can host courses, and coaching programmes and sell digital courses. Teachable makes it easy to sell your courses and products because all you need to get started is to create your course, sign up on Teachable and upload your courses.

You do not need to pay for hosting or do any installation.

The best part about Teachable is that you can start selling your courses on the platform on its free plan. Once you are convinced, you can upgrade your plan.

Although there’s a free plan, it will cost you more to use the Teachable free plan because of the charges that are passed on to your students. Teachable charges $1 + 10% of the course price on transaction charges while the basic plan charges only %5 on transaction charges.

If you would like to integrate with other tools like email marketing, CRM, and other automation software, Teachable has an API feature that integrates with almost every platform.

Udemy

Udemy is not new in the online teaching space. It is more popular than the previously mentioned options, however, Udemy works differently. Statistics from around the web show that Udemy has over 80 million customers worldwide with courses in more than 100 languages.

Udemy provides the learning management system, you provide the course content. Udemy also handles marketing for your courses.

Sounds good right? If you are comfortable allowing an online teaching platform like Udemy to take a huge chunk of your money, then you are good to go. The platform charges 50% if a student finds and pays for your course via the Udemy marketplace. Also, if the student paid for the course through the Udemy Android or Apple App Store, an extra 30% is deducted from app store charges. At the end, you are left with 20%.

If the sale occurred on the Udemy website through the referral code given to every tutor, you get 97% of the course fee while Udemy keeps 3%.

Perhaps you want to increase your course price, you can only add up to $5 extra per time.

Which Platform is Best?

Now that you have seen how each platform works, you should be able to decide which is best for your needs.

Are you having a hard time deciding? Here are some suggestions;

The most affordable online teaching platform, in the long run, is WordPress and LearnDash. For $200, you can get a hosting plan and a free domain name on Hostinger. The LearnDash plugin costs $200 for most of the features in an LMS system. That’s a total of $400.

If you don’t mind paying a bit more for limited features, you can go for Teachable. A Teachable plan starts from $39 monthly if you are paying annually. Also, keep in mind that 5% of the course fee will be deducted as transaction charges.

Both Teachable and LearnDash, you are required to market your course. This is where Udemy shines. If you are looking for a platform where you can upload your courses and they also handle marketing for you, then Udemy is the best fit.