Learning is on the rise because of so many reasons. It is providing learners an opportunity to acquire knowledge and polish their skills without leaving their homes for it. They would like to choose an online course to save the time and money of commuting to a school or would like to get courses from experts sitting miles away from their town, or the users may simply avoid physical classes to stay safe in pandemics like COVID-19.
With so many benefits of e-learning, most educational institutes have moved to online teaching methodologies. For the time being, they are using social media networks like WhatsApp or teleconferencing apps like Zoom and Google Meet. However, these are temporary solutions and work only for live lectures.
To create and sell online courses, one needs a standalone platform to make sure the videos are available for students to watch whenever they are free and comfortable. A dedicated e-learning website provides the mentors with the facility to compile a complete course along with quizzes and assignments, questions and answers, and a discussion board.
To publish your course online, you always have multiple options to select from. The marketplaces like Coursera, Udemy, and SkillShare allow hosting your courses. They have a standard layout, design, user experience, and rules, which you have to accept. However, if you build an e-learning website of your own with Magento 2 e-commerce development or any other platform, you would be able to exercise your powers in defining user experience and selling courses freely to the target users. With custom development, you can have a platform completely different from others to stay ahead of the competition and keep your business in control.
How to Build an Online Course Website of your Own?
Before you move on to setting up a dedicated website for your eLearning startup, you need to come up with course ideas that are unique and demanding. If you aim to offer courses in a competitive domain, you need to check the extra value you have to put in to make the students buy it.
Testify your Idea
Look into your community and reach out to some of the potential students for whom you are planning the course. They may have a slightly different perspective and they would suggest the addition of some basic or advanced topics they would like to learn. This will help you understand course demand and students’ expectations.
Create Content
Once you are sure that the course idea is going to attract hundreds of students, you can start creating and compiling content. In the making of videos, you may come across many more ideas as well. You can note them down and use them in the advanced or updated editions of the course if this one gets popular.
Launch a Limited Release
To let the students get an idea about the course content and your teaching style and methodology, you can release the beta version of your course. It is a limited release where you can get feedback as to how the students are interacting with the content. You can offer unlimited access to selected students to know the knowledge gap if any.
Build a Website for Selling Online Courses
You can work on building a website for selling online courses side by side while creating the course.
However, it is more productive to focus on the quality of content while crafting it rather than worrying about its host platform.
Get a Secure Hosting Plan
The eLearning marketplaces like Udemy provide you with a platform to publish your course. The hosting and software update or maintenance is carried out by their team. However, if you plan to have a platform of your own, the responsibility comes on your shoulder. Therefore, you have to start with a secure hosting server.
Look for a reliable, high-speed, and secure hosting service provider.
Protect your Website with SSL
Online users, students, or buyers, always like to share personal details with a website that can keep and process them securely. Any student who is signing up for your online course will like to know if you are providing a secure connection for sharing data or not. They want their data and financial details to be kept private and confidential. Therefore, you have to install SSL certificates to protect your students’ data.
Install your Preferred Commerce Platform
There are multiple platforms you can select from to set up a comprehensive website for selling online courses. However, Magento is recommended the most for being a pioneer, feature-rich, and standalone eCommerce platform. The flexibility of the Magento platform allows you to start low and expand the website as soon as the courses are getting popular.
On the other hand, if you choose WordPress or other CMS applications, it may require you to install its basic versions and then move on to its eCommerce solution with a bunch of themes and plug-ins. Install Magento or seek developers’ assistance to set up an eLearning website.
Choose a Theme or Template
Magento provides you with a strong foundation to set up a website for selling online courses, whereas it is the theme that allows you to customize the website. Try different layouts, keep on adding or removing features and options, etc. the beauty of managing your eLearning website lies in applying any specific functionality that you want the students to facilitate with. Asking for any additional feature in a marketplace may take months for their respective developers to approve and develop. But, you are free here to design the website the way it has to be.
Start with the Basics and Keep Improving
Any startup or online store does not perform well from the day first. It has to go through several trials to mold a shape that is acceptable for its concerned users. The website that you launch for the online course may also start with basic functionality as you may not know the advanced options a user may need. With time, you may get to know different areas that can be improved with a better user experience.
Final Words
Having a website of your own and publishing courses is half of the job. Once you are successful in setting up such a platform, proceed with its promotion on different channels. You should have a sales funnel for creatively bringing students to the landing pages and making them enroll in the courses.
