And new providers seem to pop up frequently.
The list below is how I evaluate them.
- How easy is it to create the course?
- How easy is it to migrate my existing courses?
- How fair are the payment terms?
- Can I update my course?
- Can I communicate with the students?
- Does the site look professional?
- Are the other courses selling?
- How well does the GUI work as a student?
- Do you allow free courses to be released?
- Can I opt out of some of your promotions and new features?
There are other factors I use but the above are the most important at the moment, since they are the criteria that I have used to reject existing vendors.
How easy is it to create the course?
This relates to the user experience for creating the course.
If I have to type in a lot of information for each lecture I add, then it is going to take a lot of time.
Simple things help:
- Automatically creating thumbnails, rather than having me upload them.
- Just a title and description - no tags, or categories, etc. etc.
- Multi-page GUI for a single entity will kill me
How easy is it to migrate my existing courses?
- I already have courses.
- I can code.
- If you have an API then I can write a conversion routine and probably have my course up and running in about an hour.
- If you have an API and a good GUI then your platform might become the 'master' platform from which I migrate to the other platforms. This would mean that you would get all the updates first and become the main platform I promote.
- Do you support automated import from other platforms? (Currently I haven't seen a single platform that does this)
How fair are the payment terms?
I'm using your service because I don't want to have to deal with the hassle of hosting, support, payments.
And I expect you to take a percentage of the sales cost because of that.
But it has to be fair.
And it has to be commensurate with other providers. Remember you are in competition with them.
If your terms say you'll promote the course. Then you better promote it, otherwise you're not living up to your end of the deal, and don't deserve so much commission.
Can I update my course?
I update my course because the technology it teaches, changes. Your GUI needs to allow me to update it.
Hopefully you have an API I can use to automate updates.
By the way - an API isn't mandatory for me, since I'll happily reverse engineer the HTTP calls and create my own API on top of your GUI, but I know this is brittle and I'd rather have my life made easy for me.
If you don't support updates, then the answer is a no-no.
Can I communicate with the students?
Learning isn't a 'shout from the mountain' process. It requires interaction. I need to be able to interact with the people on the course, and communicate via bulk processes.
Yes, some of the communication might try and upsell to new courses (particularly if this is a free course), but it will also be to provide information.
I'm happy for you not to share the emails, but you need to provide a working communication platform.
Does the site look professional?
My sites are shoddy at times. But they tend to push the boundary of what I think the minimal level of shoddiness is.
An online training platform has to look good, and feel good.
If your layout is bad. If the images haven't scaled well. If the GUI has obvious bugs. I'll walk away quickly.
First impressions count. If I'm put off, prospective students will be too.
Are the other courses selling?
If you list how many students are on courses then I'll look and see how other instructors are doing.
If they're not selling well, then I'm not signing up.
How well does the GUI work as a student?
I try and sign up as a student to see how the experience works from the other side of the fence.
If it isn't cross platform. If it doesn't work on mobile and tablets. If it is clunky and slow.
I won't put people through that.
Do you allow free courses to be released?
This costs you money. Not me. So I expect the payment terms to reflect this.
But free courses are a great way to experiment with the platform and try out the features without committing.
If you have free courses, and a communication feature. Then I can use these as an up-sell mechanism and you'll probably find all my courses on your site.
Can I opt out of some of your promotions and new features?
I evaluate your features at a particular time.
I expect you to improve over time.
But if you fundamentally change the engagement model then I need the ability to opt out, or I and my course will walk to the competition.
e.g. Udemy recently offered Certificates of completion. A new feature that they thought would be a vote winner. Not for me. But they allowed me to opt out.
These are just the things I look for at the start.
Not I haven't covered, length of videos, or streaming quality etc. etc. There are absolute basics that I expect you to get right, and they are so obvious and fundamental that I lump them into the user experience bucket.
I look forward to new course vendors coming out. And when they do, I'll probably add to my list.
What do you look for?
