Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I am keen to go because this is one of those demos that might have the potential to make
a significant difference in your future.
If you are at the point where you’re thinking about developing online courses as a part
of your business model, which so many people are, then I have a treat for you because I’m
going to show you Thinkific, which is the tool that I now deliver all of my online courses
with.
Why is Thinkific important?
Because it’s a managed service that eliminates so many of the challenges that you face, especially
as a first time course developer.
So today on Dotto Tech: Thinkific.- I’m going to make a few disclaimers as we
jump into this demo.
First of all, Thinkific is a Vancouver based company.
They are local to me so immediately I kind of like them right out of the gate, even before
I started using them.
But then I started to use their software and I was looking for a new solution to deliver
my new course.
I chose Thinkific and I’ve been thrilled with the result.
As a result, I’ve also become an affiliate with them so if you click on my affiliate
link, I make money if you happen to purchase the course.
So I want to make sure that we’re all upfront about that before we even start.
Having said all of that, this is a product that I like.
This is a product that I’m using and I think that’s the proof is in the pudding.
I wouldn’t be using a product myself if it didn’t work well because the downside
would be way too great, especially delivering courses.
I’ve delivered a lot of courses in my brief online career and used a lot of different
techniques for delivering my courses.
Some have worked spectacularly well, others have been challenges.
Now typically speaking when you go to develop and deliver a course, there are a few things
that you might not have thought of that you have to consider.
First and foremost, there’s the marketing of the course.
You have to find a way to create sales pages and landing pages.
You have to find a way to have an e-commerce solution so people can purchase the course
if you’re selling the course.
So you need that integration to happen so you can properly be paid and so your students
can be identified and put into the course.
Now typically speaking, we use something called a membership site for that.
It’s software that we plug into WordPress and we manage.
It’s not particularly user-friendly.
If you’re good at it, it does work quite well but it does require a fair bit of maintenance,
which is one thing that bothered me in the past.
So that’s your payment gateway and your membership software.
Then you’ve got the actual course delivery modules themselves.
Typically speaking, you build the courses in another set of WordPress modules where
you’ve got parent pages and child pages and you’ve got a proper way to navigate
people through and drift them through the content so you can guide them through a guided
process through the course.
Again, not incredibly difficult to do but there’s a learning curve.
And sometimes things break and it can be really frustrating when that happens.
Plus, you’ve a WordPress install going.
When WordPress updates, sometimes things break.
There can be issues with that as you go along.
Then you’ve got the whole backend system, managing your users, making sure that they
have access to the course content at the appropriate amount of time that they’re sent emails.
If there is an accreditation involved, you have to find a way to actually test them,
make sure that they have learned the content that you have created, etc.
There are people that you’re going to refund your money so you’re going to have to find
some sort of way to manage that side of the membership as well and account for people
who have asked for refunds or not completed the course, etc.
All of those things are part and parcel of developing an online course, all outside of
the main purpose of the course, the main work in the course which is delivering and developing
the content itself.
So you’ve got this whole management and marketing area along with the content creation.
So where does Thinkific fit in this whole thing?
It actually covers of pretty much everything that I’ve just mentioned, which makes it
a fairly massive application if you stop and think about it.
It is software as a service.
You can sign up and test it out and get a feel for it for free.
Now I’m not going to show you each part of that or this video would be an hour long,
but I’m just going to show you some highlights.
I’m going to start not at the beginning but in the course content creation space because
talking about the sales pages, marketing and e-commerce gets very granular and very specific
and some people might not be interested in selling courses.
They might be interested in giving away training or having training for their staff so the
e-commerce side might not be as vital at this particular point.
So once you’ve signed up for Thinkific and you’ve got and you’ve enrolled, what they’ll
do is you’ll give your site a name and basically then you’ve got a hosted, it’s almost
like WordPress install but it’s not totally like WordPress, you’ve got basically a composition
engine that allows you to build all the content for your course.
And let’s just jump in and take a look at the course that I’m working on right now,
which is my Screencasting Made Easy course.
I’ve got about 90% of the content all locked and loaded and complete.
The course is just over halfway through.
My students have been taking it and it’s been working flawlessly so far.
So most of these modules, they’ve already taken.
Now the way I’ve got my course designed is it’s broken down into modules and into
lessons within the modules and Thinkific supports that.
You can have multiple courses running at same time and in this navigation bar down in the
left-hand side is basically your assets bin.
This is what each module and each lesson looks like.
They’re broken down almost kind of by data type as opposed to anything else.
At the introduction, I’ve got a little introduction to screencasting set up where I’ve got the
basic chapter title set up.
And then I’ve got my welcome screen, which they see when they start the course, which
gives them the schedule of our live events, a few notices of things to do and welcomes
them to the course.
Then we get into the course content itself.
I’m going to click on the next one down and this is actual videos that I’ve uploaded.
Any course that you deliver online today is going to have a heavy video component.
One of the really nice things about Thinkific is included in the price of your membership
is hosting services for video.
They’re using a top-end video provider to host the video.
So number one, your video is protected because it’s not say just on YouTube where anybody
can find the video if they know where to look.
Instead, it’s gated in a dedicated video management tool that streams through at high
quality, very reliable.
But also you’re saving anywhere between $40 and maybe $70 or $80 dollars a month on
your video hosting because it’s all included in the cost of Thinkific, which is significant
because typically speaking you’re probably going to be looking around a hundred dollars
a month for software like this.
So if you can reduce the number of other tools you use such as a payment gateway like PayPal—you
won’t need to spend $20 on PayPal because they’ve got payment built in; you won’t
need to spend $40 on your hosting because that’s built in--that all adds up to make
it a far more appealing purchase as well.
So that’s just a little aside on some of the extra features.
Basically you go through and now as far as composing your course, you add elements and
bring all of your content together.
Now you might have it all written out in advance.
You might work within the editor here to actually create you content.
That doesn’t matter at this point here.
What matters is this is the type of content that is supported.
This is how it’s structured.
So let’s just have a quick boo the content itself.
If I click here to add content, this is how I add other lessons or other modules here
within this one learning container.
So we’ve got the ability to add video and when you click on video, you just click and
you browse and upload the video file or you can direct it at another video and you can
set it up to have the that video downloadable or to have it automatically play.
You have the ability to have both free trials and paid versions of the course.
So you might want to, as part of your marketing giveaway, say the first lesson’s for free
in which case you can incorporate a video as a part of that.
So you can make all of those designations right here.
Now most of these choices are fairly simple but they’re actually very elegant in how
they’re implemented.
So for example if we wanted to add a quiz—let me just cancel this; okay, we go to the next
module, there we go—if we wanted to add a quiz, you can see here that we add questions
just by clicking here on Add a Question and then you put in questions.
You can choose whether they’re multiple choice or what the correct answer is.
You can choose all of that right within here as you set up your quizzes.
So you flesh out the content here until you’re happy with all of the content you have in
place.
Beyond quizzes, we also have the ability to add Multimedia, which are animations or videos;
Text, which is just basically a webpage that you create bold face links within.
You can do a fair bit of formatting within that page.
You can create a survey.
You can have a PDF document incorporated.
You can have a discussion form where you have your class discuss.
Now we don’t use the discuss discussion form for our course.
Instead, we direct everybody to Facebook and we have all of our conversations happening
in Facebook, but that’s your choice.
You can have an audio file so you could create should say a podcast or just a lecture.
You also have the ability to download different assets to the people, allowing them to download,
your students to download assets.
You can incorporate presentations like slideshows and slide shares and you can also create exams
all within the modules.
So as you can see it’s a fairly full-featured LMS or Learning Management System built in.
But everything is accessible.
It’s not like it’s going to take you all that long to learn to use.
I have used their help maybe two or three times as I’ve developed this course, which
is already almost complete and most of that is relating to account management, not necessarily
to course content.
Now let’s move outside of the editor and let’s talk about what the course looks like
to students.
Fortunately at any point, you can preview the course just by clicking over here in Preview
as a student.
I’ve already launched that page here so this is what it looks like to the students.
So when they first sign up, depending on the number of courses they have access to, they’ll
be brought into a student dashboard.
You can see that this particular student has not completed any.
It tracks our progress through the course, which is just awesome.
When we go into the course itself, it loads your course and then down the side where we’ve
got all of our building modules are now the actual content modules.
You can see my welcome screen that we’d see in the HTML version of, now we see it
here.
We want to go and watch that video, especially since I call this, “Watch this video first.”
The video remembers where you were when last you watched it and it picks it up from that
point.
You can see that it’s nice, big, it’s streaming through and easy to access.
Going to my first lesson and here I have graphics.
I have YouTube videos embedded here in this particular part of the course but you can
see that we can flesh out the content really nicely.
Each of the modules is delivered in the exact same way.
One of the other real benefits of this tool is the fact that we can go in and we can manage
all of our different students.
We’ve got a good management module for managing the students, knowing where they are in the
process, emailing to them, giving them notification and also managing people who ask for refunds
or drop out of the course, being able to control the students from that perspective.
We’ve got a full management module as well.
So if you take a step back and look at what a tool like Thinkific brings to the table
for you and I if you’re developing an online course, first and foremost it’s going to
help us with the sales process, allowing us to create landing pages, sales pages and marketing
pages for the course itself, sometimes using the course content itself as a part of that
process, say giving away the first lesson for free, allowing people to see and to determine
if they want, which I think is a great strategy and one that I’m actually going to think
about.
Second, it allows us to create courses using every type of content we can imagine, from
video, to audio, to graphics, to text, to downloadable documents, allowing quizzes and
exams, and accreditation coming out of it.
You can create certificates coming out of it and proof of completion.
That is huge for different types of course content that you’re creating.
Third, you don’t have to manage the environment at all.
It’s all a managed service for you so you don’t have to worry about updating the software,
installing it in WordPress, creating integration between all of your different elements.
Now to be fair, we did integrate this with our CRM, with InfusionSoft and integrating
with most CRMs is pretty straightforward with the application.
You’re going to want to make sure that it does integrate with yours if you already have
your CRM in place.
But that’s just one integration.
We didn’t have to do everything else.
It was all there in place already.
We have a good editor for creating, importing our content, managing the flow, knowing where
are students are at any point within the process and then bringing them out the other side
with a completed course.
For me, the amount of management time in this course which we are now just about halfway
through has been far less than other courses that I’ve managed in my own WordPress install.
So I’m giving it a thumbs up from that perspective.
I’m happy with the progress so far.
I’m looking forward to getting more courses and starting to use the marketing aspects,
the sales aspect of the tool as well as I kind of get my feet under the course.
So if you are thinking of developing online courses, I’ve got to say, spend a little
time.
Have a look at Thinkific.
It’s going to be worth your time, I promise you.
I hope you found today’s video to be useful.
Now remember there are three ways for you to stay in touch with us here on Dotto Tech.
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Until next time, I’m Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle.