esm7i Thinkific may be the most popular platform for online courses, but does it offer the best course content?
We signed up with Thinkific to test it out. We then put this post together to share all that we learned.
We’ll explore all the key features of Thinkific, show you how it functions with a close-up look at its user interface, and give our honest opinion on all its advantages and disadvantages.
What is Thinkific
Thinkific is a learning management system and online course creator.
This platform is designed to provide knowledge entrepreneurs with everything they need in order to create, sell, and market eLearning products.
Thinkific can be used to create your site from scratch.
You can then use this site to sell the learning products that you created with Thinkific, as well as host your member areas/communities.
Other online platforms can also do the same thing. Thinkific is unique in a few ways.
It offers, for example, more advanced assessment options than most of its competitors. All plans are free of transaction fees, including the free one.
Thinkific is also flexible when it comes down to pricing. With Thinkific, you can make your course content free, charge one-time payments, offer subscriptions/memberships, set up monthly payment plans, etc.
You can customize anything: your site, the content of your course, the course player, mobile apps, text snippets, and completion messages…
What features does Thinkific have to offer?
Thinkific is a platform with a lot of features.
This post would be too long if we covered every feature. Here are the highlights that you should know:
We’ll look at these features and tools in more detail below, showing you how you can use them.
Course Builder
The course builder at Thinkific is its most important feature. It can be used to create courses from scratch.
Start by going to Manage learning products > courses> Create a new course.
You can choose from a variety of course templates. For now, let’s select the Blank template and start from scratch.
You’re now ready to begin building your course.
Chapters & lessons
You’ll need to start by creating the basic structure for your course. You can add chapters and lessons by using the Curriculum tab of the CourseBuilder.
Each chapter is like a module of the course, and each one focuses on a specific learning objective. Each chapter can contain multiple lessons.
Thinkific is compatible with almost all types of multimedia and allows you to use different media in each lesson.
You can include downloadable files and presentations as well as pre-recorded videos or live videos. You can consist of interactive assessments such as quizzes or assignments.
Upload files or enter text and fill out your lesson by selecting the type of content you wish to include.
Thinkific also offers native video hosting for all plans. You don’t need to embed videos from other platforms, such as YouTube or Vimeo. You can upload videos directly into your account and then manage and edit them in your Video Library.
You can, for example, choose to make a lesson free. By checking this box, you will allow students to access and enroll in the lesson at no cost. You can use this to provide free content as a lead generator and then sell additional paid lessons.
You can make a lesson a requirement. You can use this to ensure that your students are linearly progressing through the course.
You can also choose a lesson label and icon, make the video lesson content downloadable, or check the box for discussion.
Discussions allow you to have a conversation with your students, and they can interact with each other.
This creates a more collaborative environment for learning and improves educational outcomes.
Course Preview & Settings
Click View> Course for an enrolled student after you have finished adding your chapters and lessons to see what it will look like when it is live.
The Thinkific course player is very attractive. The Thinkific course player is super clean and simple, without any visual distractions. This allows students to focus on the content.
Students and instructors can use the chat icon at the top of the lesson pages to view/create comments and reply to others.
Students can mark each lesson as completed when they have finished it. The left-side bar allows students to see a summary of all the chapters/lessons that they have completed and track their progress by using the completion bar.
You can navigate between lessons and chapters or search for what you’re looking for.
The students will be shown a message of congratulations once they have completed a chapter. This is the default message:
You can, however, change the message to one of your choosing by visiting the Settings page.
From here, you can also customize the look of the Course Player. You can change the theme from light to dark or your brand colors.
You can also play around with other settings like the URL, image, and description of your course, settings for video autoplay, settings for completion certificates, SEO settings, options to share on social media, etc.
Drip schedule
To control the delivery of your course, click the Drip tab in the Course Builder.
You can create a schedule that determines when your students have access to certain parts of the course content.
You could, for example, set up the system to release the first chapter upon enrollment, then the second chapter three days later, the third chapter three days later, etc.
You don’t even have to base it on the date of enrollment. You can establish your drip schedule either on the start date of the course or on certain dates on the calendar.
When your student attempts to access a lesson that has not yet been released, a message will appear in the course player, letting them know when it will be available.
Why not release all of your content at once? It might be a good idea to remove all your content at once if you plan to charge a single-time fee for complete access.
But dripping content out at regular intervals makes more sense if you’re selling your courses on a subscription/membership basis because it gives students a reason to stay subscribed.
Pricing
The Pricing tab is where you can set the price of your course.
You can, for example, make a course free with limited access (similar to a trial period) or unlimited access.
You can sell courses with a one-time payment. Or you can sell courses as part of a subscription/membership and charge recurring monthly fees for continued access to your course content.
You can also set up a monthly payment plan to allow students the option to pay over several months.
You can bundle different products and courses together to sell as packages. There are many pricing options. To do this, you’ll have to click Manage Learning Products and then Packages on your dashboard.
You’ll first need to connect your shop to a payment processor. This can be done through your account settings.
Two payment gateways are supported: Thinkific Payments, the platform’s payment solution, and PayPal. If you’d like to access the TCommerce selling tools, then you will need to use Thinkific Payments.
After you connect your payment processor, you can also choose the currency in which you wish to accept payments.
After Purchase Flow
After purchase, Flow is the last feature that we would like to discuss before we leave the course builder.
Only users with the Start plan and above can access this feature.
You can create your flow after a customer purchases your course to determine where they land.
The SiteBuilder will send them to a Thank You Page by default. You can customize this page (more about that later).
With After Purchase Flow, you can instead send your customers to a customized URL after the purchase.
You could, for example, direct them to a section that promotes another product in order to maximize your revenue.
You could send them directly to the first lesson instead of sending a Thank You Page. This way, they can start learning right away.
