So you want to provide training online... what are your options?

When I look around at online training platform options now, I can roughly categorise them as follows:

• Self-hosted
• Hosted
• Free video sites e.g. YouTube
• Individual course sellers
• Subscription Based sites

Self-hosted means doing it yourself. Either storing the video files on your own server or on a CDN (Content Delivery Network) like Amazon S3 (you could also use something like DropBox as your CDN). There are tools to help you with this.

By Hosted I mean that some other site holds your files, this will be dedicated either to videos, or courses.

Hosted on Free sites simply requires you to upload your videos to YouTube or some similar site and link to them from your blog or web site.

Individual Course Sellers requires you to upload your course to a site that will sell your course individually, and pay you a commission for each course sale. Hosted Individual Course solutions often allow you to make your courses free as well, even though the hosting service makes no money off them, they have another student and can market additional courses to anyone who subscribes to your free course.

Subscription Based sites, you upload your course, and are one of many courses that the student has access to through their monthly subscription fee. You are paid a percentage of the subscription fees, calculated typically from how many views your videos have as a percentage to every other course in the system.

I'll investigate the pros and cons of each in future posts, but for now... a summary of the the option I chose.

When I went live with my first courses. I chose a Hosted Individual Course Seller. It meant that I could easily manage the course through their front end. Had an easy upload solution. Had a consistent interface to communicate to the students with. Hosted solutions make it easy to get to market quickly.

I'll write a future post on how I got started and what I explored later.