Teachable & Co belong to the past. Here’s what’s next.
Whether you’re a serial course creator or entertaining, the thought of launching your first online course — cohort-based courses will likely disrupt the way you teach.
Platforms like Teachable, Podia, and Kajabi belong to the past. Say goodbye to course design that ignores social and active learning.
Your (future) customers don’t acquire new skills by consuming pre-recorded content. Learning is at least a three-step process: acquisition, encoding, and retrieval.
That’s why learning by doing is much more powerful than learning by watching. These platforms will help you create and sell learner-centric courses that help your customers master the skill you teach.
1) Teachfloor
Teachfloor combines all the tools you need to build a cohort base course. The platform equips you with a curriculum builder, Zoom and Stripe integrations, e-mail automation, a course landing page, calendar scheduling, on-demand videos, and peer-review opportunities.
Teachfloor offers a vast course creator academy with 24/7 support in 50+ countries. With more than 3,000 clients, Teachfloor belongs to the more seasoned platforms.
After a 14-day free trial, pricing starts at $49 a month (billed annually).
2) Maven
Maven is a very new cohort-based course platform started by the founders of Udemy, altMBA, and Socratic.
In a podcast interview, Maven co-founder Gagan Biyani shared how they aim to revolutionize education and replace universities with a more individualized approach to education.
Pricing is not displayed on their website. If you want to create a cohort-based course on their platform, you must apply to their course accelerator. In an intense 3-week program, you build and get feedback from a cohort of top-notch instructors and coaches.
3) Virtually
Virtually provides all tools you need to run your online learning program in a single place.
Features include analytics, life conferencing, payment processing, calendar management, auto-attendance tracking, assignments and grading, student records, and content libraries. Plus, Virtually has integrations with Zoom, Slack, Stripe, Google Sheets, Airtable, Circle, Zapier, and Google Calendar.
According to their website, creators such as Ali Abdaal and Tiago Forte built their courses with Virtually.
If you join the beta, pricing is $50 a month for your first 250 students and $0.25/month for each additional learner.
4) Graphy
Similar to Teachfloor, Graphy is an all-in-one platform to help you set up your live courses, grow your community, and monetize your knowledge without any barriers.
Yet, Graphy doesn’t include features or integrations for asynchronous communication. Instead, they built a tool similar to Zoom that can be used for online live teaching.
The platform doesn’t charge upfront. They make money only when you make money with a flat 5% platform fee only on successful enrolments in your courses.
5) Classcamp
Classcamp is a mobile-first, interactive learning platform for creators. Unlike the other platforms, your brand will serve as the center for the learning experience.
Features include the option for pre-recorded or live lessons, fan assignments, submissions, and reaction videos.
The platform launches in September, but you can already sign up on their website.
Excluded Platforms
While researching this article, I stumbled upon a few sites that were recommended as cohort-based-course platforms. Yet, upon further review, I found these sites to be misleading.
Airschool
Airschool is a course creation tool. As a creator, you start a landing page and launch with them, then share the link with your community. Initially, I found their claim to “Sell Courses, Make Money!” a bit sketchy, but the team reached out and clarified all my doubts. The tool is free to use but charges 9.90% of the product’s price if it’s priced higher than $30.
Airtribe
Airtribe aims to help the world’s top instructors start cohort-based courses which are live, engaging, and community-driven. While the claim sounds promising, the platform is very early-stage, and it’s not clear how Airtribe intends to achieve its goal.
Disco
Founded in 2020, Disco helps creators build live learning experiences. It comes with integrations to Stripe, Mailchimp, and Zoom. From their website, the exact features and the pricing are not listed yet. Similar to Maven, you can apply to get creator access to build your own course.
Eduflow
Eduflow is a well-established collaborative learning platform. I didn’t include their solution in the list, as they targeted higher education and corporate training. For example, they don’t have payment provider integrations, and you’d have to go with the $400/mo subscription to add your personal branding to the course.
TopHat
Founded in 2009, TopHat provides an all-in-one teaching platform purpose-built to motivate, engage and connect with students. TopHat offers interesting features (e.g., interactive textbooks, simulations, testing as a tool) but is targeted at higher education institutions.
Conclusion
Most educational video content is available free — learners watch content on YouTube 500 million times every day. But while the means for learning online are abundant, community-based experiences are scarce.
The list of online creators who successfully scaled their business by running cohort-based courses is long:
- Tiago Forte with Building your Second Brain
- Li Jin with The Creator Economy
- David Perell with Write of Passage
- Ali Abdaal with Part-Time YouTuber Academy
- Will you be next?
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