The Nerd Series

Best Online Course Platform Reviewed

Education August, 29, 2022

Are you looking for the best online course platforms to support your eLearning business? You've come to the right place!

We scoured the market for the best online platforms for learning creating marketing and selling online courses. Then to create this in-depth comparison post we tried each of them out for ourselves. If you want to maximize sales you must select the best online course platform. The best online course platforms can assist you in meeting your objectives from creating a course website and accepting payments to uploading videos and interacting with students.

Starting a coaching business that provides training through online course platforms has become increasingly popular as online learning has accelerated due to social distancing.


1 Udemy

Udemy is one of the best online course platforms with over 80000 courses and 40 million users. With Udemy you can expand your knowledge and improve your skill in any field from marketing to personality development and photography. The courses are available for all levels- beginner intermediate and advanced. The courses are available in English and German Russian Chinese etc. you can download the Udemy course and watch it anytime.

It also offers a good opportunity for the course creators to list their courses. Creators can list and teach courses in various niches to make a good amount of money. If you sell your course directly Udemy will take only a 3% commission and you’ll get 97% of the profits.

Udemy pricing

Udemy has over 600 FREE courses across different but they are no longer than 2 hours. The paid courses start from $9.99 and can go up to $199.99. Udemy offers deals and discounts on various courses for you to take advantage of.


2 Lingoda

Established in 2013 and headquartered in Berlin Germany Lingoda is a premier online language school. It offers a rich selection of language courses including English German Spanish and French. With its robust platform Lingoda facilitates real-time interaction between learners and native-speaking teachers. This ensures a high-quality immersive learning environment.

Lingoda is a dedicated e-learning platform striving to make language learning accessible and achievable. It provides a structured curriculum for each language. That makes it an ideal choice for individuals aiming to reach specific language proficiency milestones. The 24/7 class availability ensures that learners with varying schedules find a convenient time to pursue their language learning goals.

Courses

Lingoda Courses Lingoda’s course offerings are diverse and tailored to meet various language learning objectives:

  1. German
  2. English
  3. Spanish
  4. French
  5. Business English

Plans

Lingoda pricing plans are subscription-based charged every 4 weeks and cater to learners with different pace preferences. The plans are designed to provide a flexible and convenient language learning experience with 60-minute live classes conducted by native-level teachers available on Zoom 24/7. Here are the pricing plans offered by Lingoda:

  1. 5 Classes Plan: Priced at $15 per class totaling $75 for the 4-week period. This plan is ideal for learners wanting a steady but relaxed learning pace. Each class under this plan allows you to interact with native-level teachers and other learners in a group setting. This can ensure a collaborative learning environment.
  2. 12 Classes Plan: Originally priced at $12.5 per class now offered at $10.5 per class totaling $127.99 for the 4-week period. This plan offers a more intensive learning schedule while providing a discount for committed learners.
  3. 20 Classes Plan: Originally priced at $10.5 per class now offered at $8.5 per class totaling $167.99 for the 4-week period. This plan is suitable for learners looking to immerse themselves more deeply in the language learning experience.
  4. 40 Classes Plan: Originally priced at $10 per class now offered at $7.5 per class totaling $299.99 for the 4-week period. This plan is designed for the most dedicated learners aiming for extensive language interaction and practice.


3 Coursera

Coursera is a platform for online learning that allows you to take online education courses. These courses provide the opportunity to earn degrees from prestigious universities and corporations. Coursera's vision is to build a global platform that anyone anywhere can access. With the digital world expanding at such a rapid pace platforms such as Coursera make learning easier than ever. removing the need to go out and learn and instead providing the option to do so from home with the same benefits.

Coursera offers many free courses from prestigious universities. In other words you can get all of the lectures and reading materials from a real class at say Yale University for free. Coursera also partners with private companies to offer accessible education. You can take free classes for personal enrichment or pay for a certificate bachelor's or master's degree.

Related Article: Best Digital Marketing Courses

Coursera offers a range of subjects that are broken into 11 topic areas that including;

  1. Data Science
  2. Business
  3. Computer Science
  4. Personal Development
  5. Information Technology
  6. Language Learning
  7. Health
  8. Math and Logic
  9. Social Sciences
  10. Physical Science & Engineering
  11. Art and Humanities

Coursera Cost

Because it has so many different learning programs Coursera has a fairly diverse pricing range. Courses and Guided Projects start at $9.99 and online degrees start at $50000. Coursera Plus also offers monthly and annual subscription plans in addition to one-time payments.


4 EDX

EDX manages to stand out In a digital world filled with online education platforms offering the brains of the tech-savvy generation a digital feast of knowledge. A pioneer in its field EDX is a global non-profit created by founding partners Harvard and MIT striving to transform traditional education and eradicate barriers to learning.

EDX offers a plethora of programs ensuring there's something for everyone. From the humanities and health sciences to coding engineering and business management the world of knowledge is just a click away.

If you're looking for an undergraduate or graduate degree EDX has that covered too. In partnership with accredited institutions it offers fully online degree programs at a fraction of the cost of traditional degrees.

Popular Courses on EDX-

  1. Computer Programming
  2. Software Engineering
  3. Blockchain
  4. Project Management
  5. Business administration
  6. Digital Marketing

5 Teachable

Teachable is a cloud-based course builder for creating multimedia teaching websites. Users of Free Professional High Volume and Enterprise accounts enjoy the unlimited course and student capabilities. All offer intuitive web-hosted publishing tools with template customization and rebranding options. Images audio and video can be imported from Dropbox and updated at high and low levels. A new Course Page Editor makes editing easier but the integrated Power Editor allows for more advanced HTML/CSS development.

Custom domains affiliate programs webhooks and white-labeling are available in advanced plans. Introduce responsive learning tools like blogs quizzes forums forms and surveys all automatically optimized across devices. eCommerce tools sell content access run coupon campaigns accept global payments and increase conversions with custom landing pages. A dashboard monitors student signups revenue and lecture completion rates. Contact lists can be managed and exported alongside revenue reporting and author payments.

Automatic backups and 24/7 monitoring reduce downtime for Teachable-hosted courses. SSL certificates and level-1 PCI compliance protect student and payment data. Instant updates keep features current. Creators retain ownership of course data ideal for lecturers and authors wary of giving up IP.

Teachable Cost

  1. Basic: $39/month (paid monthly) or $29/month (billed annually) plus 5% transaction fee for paid course sales.
  2. Professional: $119/month (monthly) or $99/month (billed annually)
  3. Business Plan: $299/month or $249/month (billed annually)

Teachable Best Features

Let's take a look at Teachable best features and how they can help you create and sell your online course:

  1. Easy to use: The main dashboard which you use to create and manage your course(s) is extremely user-friendly. It's a huge advantage of Teachable because it makes it extremely simple to perform any of the following tasks: upload course files check analytics monitor payouts issue refunds communicate with students and so on.
  2. Branding and image: You need a professional design whether you're a business or an individual. Teachable recognizes this and provides marketing tools to help you brand your course in your own unique way. Teachable provides a nice-looking theme for school and course landing pages.
  3. Easy & efficient uploading: When creating your course you're likely to have a large number of files to upload such as videos PDFs documents or spreadsheets. This should be as simple and straightforward as possible. Teachable does well in this category. Its drag-and-drop interface makes it simple to import files from any location.
  4. Monitoring & Analytics: Teachable makes this easy by providing quick access to student numbers revenue figures and a student's progress through your course. You can then use this student progress data to engage students who are struggling for example by asking for testimonials from your most dedicated students.
  5. Communication with students: You can communicate with students within Teachable so you don't need e-mail. The platform also integrates with popular e-mail software such as Mailchimp ConvertKit and Infusionsoft but to connect with other email clients you'll most likely need to use Zapier.
  6. Support: Teachable has a good set of pre-written customer support articles covering all the most likely questions you may have and then a ticket system for anything more specific. On the whole this seems to work well for people and we found queries dealt with quickly when we tested it but we have also heard others complaining about tickets not being answered quickly.

6 Pluralsight

Pluralsight was founded as a classroom training company in 2004 and shifted to online video training in 2007. It has a large course library with over 7500+ courses taught by one of its 1500+ expert instructors. Pluralsight is a technology skills platform that focuses on developing tomorrow's skills.

Pluralsight is an e-learning platform for IT Data Information & Cyber Security and more. Pluralsight's self-paced courses let you learn at your own pace and offer the latest technical training. Pluralsight operates on a subscription basis with various packages available. Although it does not have a large pool of free courses it does offer a 10-day free trial that gives you access to its core or expanded library and resources; giving you a true taste of the platform and determining whether it is something you want to invest in.

Pluralsight Courses

Below are the courses offered by Pluralsight:

  1. Architecture & Construction
  2. Business professional
  3. Creative Professional
  4. Data professional
  5. IT ops
  6. Manufacturing & design
  7. Information & cyber security
  8. Software development
  9. Web development

Pluralsight Cost

Pluralsight pricing plans are subscription-based with courses available for Novice Proficient and Expert learners. Its individual pricing plans include a couple of subscriptions that can be paid for monthly or annually.

  1. Standard: A monthly subscription costs $29 while a yearly subscription costs $299. You will have access to the Core course library (over 2500 courses) as well as paths and skill assessments. A free 10-day trial period is included.
  2. Premium: A monthly subscription costs $45 and a yearly subscription costs $449. You will have access to a 7000+ course library exams projects and hands-on learning. A free 10-day trial period is included.

7 Udacity

Udacity is an online educational organization that embarked in June 2011. Its founders Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun are former Stanford instructors. They conceived the idea of offering a free online course on Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. And it attracted 160000 students from different nations. After over a decade the platform has 16.9 million users to whom it offers nano degrees.

Udacity has collaborated with industry leaders to co-create the course material. The educational platform offers talent transformation through which it strives to prepare career-ready talent. The initial courses they provided back in 2012 were titled Building a Search Engine and Programming of Robotics.

The educational program has categorized its courses into three sub-categories titled For Enterprises For Government and For Individuals which have further sub-categories. Here we will cover the featured and uniquely created programs at Udacity:

Programs only at Udacity

  1. Digital Marketing
  2. Deep Learning
  3. Artificial Intelligence
  4. Intro to Self-Driving Cars
  5. Robotics Software Engineer
  6. Machine Learning Engineer
  7. Flying Car & Autonomous Flying Engineer

Pricing

While the platform offers different courses at different prices range the packages at Udacity start at $399 each month. You can select your courses based on several filters such as topic skill level and duration; price is also a part of it.


8 Emeritus

Emeritus is an educational platform that started in 2015. It offers learning solutions to individuals businesses and government organizations. The platform has collaborated with over 50 leading universities from Latin America Europe the United States China India and South East Asia.

You can enroll in Emeritus for a plethora of

  1. Short courses
  2. Professional certificates
  3. Degree programs
  4. Senior executive programs.

By now it has offered learning solutions in more than 80 nations with 250000 learners. The learning platform boasts a blend of leading technology direct instructions from the senior department and curriculum innovation.

Emeritus is a team of over 2300 professionals practicing from many global locations. They are Dubai Delhi Mumbai Singapore Mexico City Boston New York Shanghai Palo Alto and London.

Courses

Here are the courses it offers:

  1. Coding
  2. Machine Learning/ Artificial Intelligence
  3. Data Science and Analytics
  4. Digital Transformation
  5. Digital Marketing
  6. Product Design and Innovation
  7. Finance
  8. Strategy and Innovation
  9. Sales and Marketing
  10. Technology
  11. Leadership

Pricing

Though no minimum fee could be learned Emeritus its pricing is found to vary from a thousand dollars to over seven thousand. The platform can also interest you with its financing offers such as:

  1. Easy payment option via installments
  2. Special offers for group enrollments
  3. Funding options.

9 Brilliant

Do you want to improve your problem-solving critical thinking logical reasoning or STEM abilities?

Then Brilliant might be the platform for you.

Brilliant is an online learning platform that aims to fundamentally alter how people learn and perceive STEM subjects. It offers over 60 fully interactive courses via a variety of subscription options.

Sue Khim founded Brilliant in 2012 and it has grown to 10 million users in the last ten years. Its course creators include teachers researchers and professionals from MIT Microsoft and Google. Its courses are built around hands-on learning making the experience engaging and enjoyable. Brilliant.org is a website that assists people in learning or recalling math or scientific concepts. Brilliant can be used by a variety of users. Individuals who want to improve their professional skills students teachers with their students parents for their children and anyone else can use the platform. When you sign up you must select a category. Based on this the algorithm recommends the best options for your objectives.

Brilliant Courses

All of the courses on Brilliant.org can be divided into the following categories:

  1. Math (e.g. Algebra Fundamentals Geometry Fundamentals Number Theory Linear Algebra with Applications etc)
  2. Science (Waves and Light Physics of the every day Computational Biology Solar Energy etc.)
  3. Computer Science (Algorithm Fundamentals Programming with Python Artificial Neural Networks Cryptocurrency etc).

Moreover the company offers learning paths a series of courses united by the topic. Here are some examples:

  1. Math Foundations
  2. Computer Science Foundations
  3. Probability Statistics and Finance
  4. Data Science Foundations
  5. Applied Computer Science
  6. Logic Foundations

Brilliant Cost

The company provides two subscription options: free and premium. The first lets you try each course for a short time and the second lets you fully dive into guided courses with quizzes and tests.

Here is how much Brilliant.org costs:

  1. Free plan
  2. Premium plan (month) – $24.99 per month
  3. Premium plan (year) – $149 ($12.49 per month)
  4. Premium plan (group plan 3+ people) – $299.88 per year

The subscription on Brilliant.org can also be bought as a gift or can be purchased for a group of people. There is also a 7-day free trial to test all the courses that are of interest to you.