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13 Must-Have Features of Online Learning Platform (Future of E-Learning)

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Online learning was growing at 9.1% prior to the pandemic and is currently projected to grow at 20% annually for the next 5 years.

Today, there are many ways to offer an online education on the topic you want to teach. But if your platform do not have the essential features for smooth learning process, you will not be able to provide good online learning experience for your students.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

To become a successful as a course creator, your ability to succeed comes with choosing the right online educational platform that fulfils all these basic requirements which allows you to create a plan of action with a solid foundation that guides you from course creation to student engagement.

When selecting the best online education platform, it needs to have features that can do task such as:

13 Key Features To Look For in An Online Learning Platform

High-quality e-learning experience is essential if you want to build a successful online course business.

The key to become successful as an edupreneur is to setup your course with the best eLearning platform that will not only meet these basic requirements but exceed in them:

  • Platform for education that coincide with your goals, needs and mission of your online course and learning content.
  • Ability to deliver your online training and learning resources to students that enable learners for optimal knowledge retention.
  • Offers professional teacher management and proper student management.

For the features offered you’ll want to look for things like interactive learning tools, social learning, ability to offer different course materials and learning resources, membership management, minimalism in the platform’s approach, marketing tools and customization of courses and classes, among a host of others.

As a course creator, here we’ll discuss the top 13 key must-have features of an online education platform.

1. Interactive Learning Tools

One of the most desirable features an online learning platform can have is a variety of interactive learning tools. The more methods the site has for student engagement, the more enjoyable and easy it is to learn the material. This includes things like:

  • Quizzes: Test students’ knowledge after each section or lesson in the course.
  • Downloads: Offer members-only or free downloads to attract more students or to enrich the learning experience.
  • Gamification: Turn learning material into a fun and engaging game rather than it feeling like studying.
  • Assessments: You can let students share their opinions with you or give an assessment of their progress.
  • Questionnaires: Set up a series of questions to for students to make suggestions to improve the course or lessons.
  • Multimedia Access: Video players, picture galleries, audio libraries and similar multimedia features will widen your material capacity. Plus, you’ll be able to cater to the learning styles of various students.
  • Community-Building Tools: A platform that boasts community-building is the ultimate for student engagement. Things like chat rooms, message boards, online cafés and other ways students can interact with you and each other will be optimal.

The best one out there for all these features is LearnWorlds.

This powerful eLearning platform have a huge stockpile of features from which to choose. Their video player is particularly desirable, offering pop ups to appear at specific times to ensure student interactivity. What’s more, it also has navigation buttons and its design lends itself to immersing students into the learning experience.

But, there are a few honorable mentions worth looking into. LearnDash, Thinkific, Teachable and Podia all have great interactivity that make learning addictive. But, they fall short next to LearnWorld because they don’t offer nearly as many options and nuanced customizations.

2. Membership Management And Community Building

Another sought after feature of an online learning platform is membership management and community building. While many online learning platforms offers similar features, only a few allows you to create a membership site that enables you to build a community on the platform.

Community Building

Community building is a highly sort after feature as it enables higher level of engagement between learners and building a sense of belonging for your course users.

  • Ability to turn on social learning and social sharing.
  • Creating forums and group for online discussions.
  • Learning the best practices through peer-to-peer learning.

While community building is a must-have feature membership management is just as essential in this category.

Membership Management

An eLearning platform that offers a good membership management tools will have the ability to:

  • Enable the trainer to view student progress.
  • See when they sign onto the site, how long they spend time there.
  • Understand which relevant online course and content they view most.
  • Customize each roles based on performance and requirements.

This will give you an overall scope of how well things are going and what you can do to improve student engagement. The interface should be seamless and simple to use while not feeling something akin to operating a space ship.

Podia and Passion.io are the two best learning platform that offers the best membership management. In fact, part of their main feature is how you can create a community and help students build relationships with one another. They offers you the ability to create a community board and live feed where you can post information and announcements in real time.

3. Minimalist Approach

The best learning platform will be one that uses a minimalist approach in their setup. This means everything is easy to understand, simple to operate and engaging for everyone, including yourself.

An online learning platform is best when it includes all the important features, that let you create a variety of learning experience while cutting out all the “fats”, features that are downright redundant. A minimalist approach.

Thinkific is hands down the digital learning platform that fits this characteristic perfectly, they offer the most basic yet feature-rich learning environment that’s so easy to use and quick to setup. Providing best in class user experience for both the learners and course creators. Thousands of instructors swear by their results with Thinkific and learners find themselves frequently returning to the interface. This translates to considerable engagement and increased sales.

4. Marketing Tools

If your goal is to drive sales and collect as many students as possible, then the online platform you need should have a plethora of marketing tools at your disposal. They should have things such as:

  • Course customization to fit your brand
  • Sales pages for offering courses to the public
  • Various ways to accept files and assignments from students
  • Several methods for selling courses and classes (free or tiered memberships, for example)
  • Student emails and notifications from you about their enrollment along with staying in touch after their participation ends
  • Coupon and discount redemption
  • Ways to collect student feedback and track their progress
  • Integration with websites, apps and social media pages

If these points fit what you’re looking for, then ThinkiFic will be your online learning platform. They focus on student engagement while offering instructors a wide range of options to integrate their services for marketing and advertising. ThinkiFic’s marketing tools allow you view analytics while building community and earning the most profit possible.

5. Full Customization and Course Authoring

In the case you want full control over the customization and authoring of your course, then you’re going to want a platform that offers plenty of options. They should be feature-rich with an abundant selection of creator assets and useful resources. But, it shouldn’t be so complex that it takes forever to develop your course.

Ergo, it should have a myriad of ways to teach material with livestreams and hosted videos. But, the platform should also provide ways for students to interact with the content and you. For this kind of format, Articulate Storyline 360 is a popular choice. However, there are other teaching platforms, which work well for specific topics or goals. For instance:

  • Teachable is good for business expansion with a plentitude of themes and templates to reflect your brand. Their drag-and-drop course builder makes the experience fun, fast and simple.
  • LearnWorlds gives the ultimate in customization although they have limited templates. Regardless, instructors have total control over the look and feel of their courses and classes. You can change colors, layouts, fonts, images, presentations and so much more.
  • Podia allows for nuanced customization of course bundles or stand alone classes as well as drip courses and cohort classes. Plus, they specifically advertise the ability to pre-sell and prelaunch your courses before you’re done designing them.
  • Thinkific is not only easy to use with an abundance of powerful features, but they also allow for the importation of existing content. You can migrate easily from an older learning platform to ThinkiFic in just a few clicks.

6. Grading, Scoring and Certification

If the topic and your teaching style require a more traditional method, then you’ll want a way to grade and score students while offering certifications for advancement. You’ll need the right online learning platform with features like:

  • Multiple assessment types such as; diagnostic, formative, interim, and summative.
  • Multiple quiz types such as; multiple choice, true/false, fill-in-the-blank, fill-in-multiple-blanks, drop-down (Likert scale etc.), matching, numerical answer, etc.

Unfortunately, many online learning platforms fail at this component. However, two are worth mentioning that go head-to-head in the running: LearnWorlds and Coursera.

Both of these platforms have topnotch grading systems that are easily to calculate, keep track of and administer.

  • Self-hosted online course: LearnWorlds has a dedicated interface for creating grades through quizzes and assignments.
  • Online course marketplace: Coursera offers awards and advancements with degrees, certificates and other incentives.

7. Payment Options and Methods

When you want to attract a wide range of students, especially from all over the world, you’re going to need a platform that has various payment options and methods. It should be able to accept different currencies with a seamless way of exchanging it into your linked financial account.

Payment plans:

  • Offers free memberships and free trials to attact new students.
  • Offers one-off payment options for purchasing individual course or products.
  • Offers recurring payment options such as subscription payment plans with a variety of tiers.

Payment options includes:

  • Pay with normal money (via a bank account or credit card).
  • Digital payments (i.e. Apple Pay, PayPal or Stripe).
  • Cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin or Ethereum.

Having as many options for students to submit their payment will attract more people to your course because it makes the material more accessible. It’s a known fact that if someone can’t pay with their preferred method, they will look elsewhere and you’ll lose the sale.

Online Course Platform With Best Payment Plans

While Thinkific is king for most forms of payment with several payment options for students, Moodle is taking the eLearning world by storm. They allow instructors to accept over 24 methods of payment and they are the only ones (so far) that accept cryptocurrencies.

However, Thinkific is the most popular and they are updating their payment options and acceptances all the time. Otherwise, you may want to consider your own payment processing outside of the platform, such as on your personal website or through snail mail.

Yet, LearnWorlds and Podia also offer acceptance of various currencies from all over the world. While they don’t accept cryptocurrency , this is a possible feature in the future. Regardless, these platforms offers wide range of payment method abailable.

8. Multimedia Capabilities

Giving students a wide range of learning options not only caters to their specific style of learning but also turns boring subject matter into entertaining fun. An all-encompassing learning platform should be able to accept and disseminate:

  • PDFs
  • Image Formats (i.e. JPG or GIF files)
  • Documents (Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, TXT files)
  • Slideshow Presentations (i.e. Google Slides or PowerPoint)
  • Flashcards
  • Audio Files and Video Hosting
  • Livestreams, Broadcast and Live Webinars
  • Layered Multimedia (to offer more than one multimedia format at the same time)

Thinkific is the primary learning platform for multimedia options. They accept everything mentioned on the list above and then some. You can create an entire lesson based on the multimedia format of your choice and grade students with a quiz or assignment.

However, eLearning platforms like Podia also have wonderful multimedia options with nuanced customization. The difference is that they aren’t as all-encompassing as Thinkific.

But on the other hand, LearnWorlds offers the ability to create pop up dialogue boxes throughout all their media options to keep students on track and on their toes, which as a fellow course creator, I think is pretty impressive.

9. Website and Mobile Integration

If you have a website or desire to include a mobile app with the mobile learning experience, you need a platform that will accommodate this. But, it’s a bit tricky because you should know what you’re doing with code and how smartphone apps work. It’s not that you need an involved understanding, but you should have a solid grasp.

Otherwise, you may run into trouble and have to enlist the help of a professional. Regardless, several learning platforms make this possible by way of embeds with SCORM and API. You may also want the platform to integrate with social media pages as well.

The list below illustrates this integration ability on several sites, although not every learning platform available on the internet is here. Some can connect to places like LinkedIn, Twitter or YouTube while others offer payment integration through Shopify or WooCommerce, others integrate seamlessly with website builders such as WordPress, Wix or Squarespace.

Online PlatformSync Social MediaWebsite IntegrationMobile App
LearnWorldsXX (LMS Plugins/ API)X
ThinkificX (limited)X (API)X
PodiaX  
LearnDashX (LMS Plugins/ API)X
TalentLMS X (API)X
LifterLMSXX (LMS Plugins/ API)
iSpring Learn X (API)X
EduFlowXX (API)X
MoodleX (limited)X (API)X
Gurucan  X
WizIQ X (LMS Plugins/ API)X
E-Learning Platform Integration Capabilities

11. Statistics and Analytics

While studying the statistics and analytics is mostly part of the marketing tools package featured in an online learning platform, some sites have better capabilities than others do. But, if it’s incredibly important to your goals and mission for teaching, then you want to ensure you get the right platform for it.

Understand, though, that almost all LMS websites connect with Google Analytics. They simply make it easier to view and comprehend the data presented. They usually don’t actually do their own tracking and only offer an app to integrate your existing Google Analytics account with the learning platform.

However, a few LMS platforms offer detailed results and analysis. These usually allow you to look at individual students and groups in contrast to their performance, areas of struggle and content consumption.

  • LearnWorlds: You can measure user progress along with exam results, training history and survey responses while delving into your student’s content consumption. Plus, they allow for automated report distribution. All this culminates into being a better instructor for your students and displaying transparency.
  • ThinkiFic: The reporting features available through ThinkiFic gives a detailed account of your students, what they’re learning and how they’re doing on quizzes. This allows for greater feedback and planning courses to make them better in the future.
  • LearnDash: They have a very comprehensive analytics service where you can manage your course logistics. You can monitor detailed attendance and eLearning to focus on sections with which students struggle. This helps further personalize the learning experience while gaining feedback to predict the need for future classes.

12. Intuitive and Friendly Interface

Most LMS platforms have some version of an intuitive and friendly interface. However, it really depends on your skill level in understanding how to setup and design courses and classes. So, while some will advertise being user friendly, it’s mostly for those with an intermediate understanding of code.

Therefore, if you’re a beginner, you want to look for an online learning site that specifically caters to newcomers. Thinkific, LearnWorlds and Podia are all excellent if you’re just starting to get your feet wet in this realm of online education.

But, if you’re a little more advanced and have experience as a webmaster, then you’ll want something to accommodate your knowledge. LearnDash, TalentLMS, Moodle and LifterLMS are ideal.

13. Foreign Language Support and Translation

If you’re looking to attract a worldwide student base, then the learning platform of choice must be able to support several foreign languages. If you’re teaching language, engineering, science or botany, having an LMS to handle students from all over the world will be essential.

Teachable, Podia, Thinkific and LearnDash support at least 10 different languages and currencies. To illustrate, a student in Japan will see a quiz and submit it in their language. But, you will be able to view their work and progress in English.

Keys Features to Look for in an Learning Management System (LMS)

Not all key features mentioned are going to coincide with what you need for your courses. So, before making an immediate slam-dunk decision, you should identify your exact requisites for your online learning platform.

  • Define Your Purpose: It is crucial you understand your reasons for setting up an online learning course. For instance, are you looking to train current employees or for an ancillary learning solution? Alternatively, is it because you know you have a rare topic many people are looking to learn?
  • Analyze Future Growth: While you may have a hot subject right now, you have to determine if this is something with future implications. See what the potential is for growth and how your topic will expand in years to come.
  • Needs versus Wants: Before looking at any online learning platform, make a list of features you absolutely must have versus ones that would be nice but aren’t necessary. This will help whittle down selections.
  • Define Undesirable Elements: You should also determine what you certainly don’t want. For example, if you aren’t interested global attraction, then you don’t need support for foreign languages or currencies.

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Founder & Financial Writer at Income Buddies | Website | Posts by Author

Antony C. is a dividend investor with over 15+ years of investing experience. He’s also the book author of “Start Small, Dream Big“, certified PMP® holder and founder of IncomeBuddies.com (IB). At IB, he share his personal journey and expertise on growing passive income through dividend investing and building online business. Antony has been featured in global news outlet including Yahoo Finance, Nasdaq and Non Fiction Author Association (NFAA).

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