With each day of technology advancement, the geographical gap bridges little by little. Every function of human life is dependent on technology, let alone learning. Traditional learning with carrying heavy books and bags, spending hours in commuting and being limited to one institution for gaining knowledge were almost diminishing; when Covid-19 pandemic attacked and the whole world completely switched to e-learning in a blink. Online learning is the third world’s smart system in which electricity, the internet along with a few other tools are integrated together to create a study environment.
What is Thinkific?
Theoretical knowledge is crucial to have a basic understanding over any subject area. However, business persons go through various business situations that help them to get firsthand experience and to apply the analytical skills to improve the knowledge. Every person has something unique to offer. The skills, knowledge and expertise if shared, can always enlarge the pie, instead of cutting a share of it.
Thinkific is a kind of online platform that follows this school of thought. They provide the opportunity to share all the practical life learnings through online medium. They help business persons to create online courses on their own branded site.
If one has been in a career for a few years, this will benefit one to gain skills in the particular field. Thinkific can help to create online course contents with that knowledge. For example, a real estate broker, Ryan Serhant while in his successful career opted for online courses to share his knowledge. This created himself as an establishing brand in the field of real estate.
Thinkific was founded in 2012. It is headquartered in British Columbia, Canada. This company maintains complete gender diversity. 50% of the total 235 employees are women here. The number of consultants, experts, authors, speakers, trainers, teachers, coaches, professional associations, and companies of the Thinkific family grows to 200,000 and more in over 190 countries. 100 millions of courses have achieved the earning of $650 million on this platform.
Getting Started in Thinkific ?
The employees of Thinkific work relentlessly to enhance the experience of sharing knowledge. Their endeavors are aimed to create an all-in-one online course platform where experts can quickly create an interactive website for customers to find, purchase, and learn all about a particular field.
Thinkific has the instructor and students as two general customer segments. An instructor can share his/her knowledge through creating an online school easily while keeping the following features in mind:
Admin Dashboard: Thinkific has a lot to offer and all these can’t be presented without a well managed dashboard. The admin dashboard is the control center of the course site which helps to explore all the tools and settings.
Course Content: Instructors will have to sign up first and then get started by creating a new course. One can quickly upload content via bulk importer. With every new chapter, video, audio or PDFs can be added just by dragging and dropping to the lessons in the curriculum tab.
Built-in Features: Instructors can use many built-in features to create certifications, quizzes, tests, discussion boards, surveys narrated slideshows and even a Zoom integration. However, few of these features are 3rd party things left to figure out with other learning platforms. Moreover, Thinkific and Zapier integration opens up all kinds of possibilities
Exceptional Features: As mentioned earlier, Thinkific has the best course and site building tools to create a brand or increase the sales. Therefore, it offers a very own sales page to add the pitch wit. Every page of the website including sales, home or study page can be customized to match the brand identity. Moreover, the checkout feature enables the instructor to sell courses for a one-time fee, as a subscription, with a payment plan, or all of the above.
That said, students sign up for a student account, select a payment method, input credit card details and confirm the purchase for one or more courses.
Detailed setting up and enrolling steps are discussed in Thinkific’s help centre. https://support.thinkific.com/hc/en-us
Who are the Competitors of Thinkific?
Thinkific is not the pioneer in this sector. There are numerous learning management systems, but only a few give strong competitions to Thinkific. Teachable, Blackboard LMS for Business, Bridge, Moodle, Podia, TutorBird and Kajabi are the major players who are always in this race. Thinkific’s course creation and site building tools, however, manages to differentiate it from the others.
How Pricey is Thinkific?
Thinkific offers several services and each of them are divided into Free, Basic, Pro, Growth, Premier and Plus subscription. The subscription payment is to be calculated in US Dollar and set to per month on an annual subscription. But customers can pay through more than 100 currencies. The Basic subscription costs $49 a month. Pro and Growth subscription can be availed in $99. Premier subscription worth $499. Nevertheless, from basic to premier subscription each has to be charged extra with every $0.10 USD per active student. Thinkific delighted offers first 100 students as free of this cost. Thinkific plus will be discussed later in the Thinkific vs Thinkific Plus section.
The services can be categorized in 8 sections. For example:
- Course Creation
- Sales and Marketing
- Design Customization
- Student Experience
- Teaching
- Site Administration
- Security Support
Thinkific Plus
Thinkific vs Thinkific Plus
Thinkific is targeted to the smaller businesses. It is completely self driven and generally without the need of advanced features like Customer Success Manager, Additional Security and Compliance Information etc. But what about the business that has the fast growing audience and aggressive growth projections. Thinkific Plus comes in here. Thinkific Plus is designed to drive additional revenue through direct course sales, to measure customer success metrics, to train the employees with advanced features too. Along with Thinkific’s basic features Plus offers White Glove Service, Business features and Advanced security features.Dedicated Customer Success Manager, Direct phone and email support, Strategic 1-to-1 kickoff call, Custom migration planning, Launch Preparedness Review call, Ongoing account services (Bulk content & student uploads, content duplication), 3 separate Thinkific sites etc are incorporated in Plus. Advanced security features include features like RECAPTCHA, Advanced password complexity, Service Level Agreement (SLA) 99.5% and Master Services Agreement (MSA). The pricing is based on the size of the active audience.
Why Thinkific?
Site building and Course Creating Tools: Customization features are the special ones to stand Thinkific out of the competitors. Every user of LMS has claimed one of the most important reasons to switch to Thinkific is the creative tools they offer. 3rd party integration just adds to all of the advantages.
Simplest Dashboard: Despite this learning management system has so many things to offer, it is not complicated in display. It has the easiest configuration and does not require additional setup or management.
Language Friendly: As today’s world is all about minimizing the barriers, how can one with language fall behind? Thinkific is operated in 39 simplified languages. Meaning people from 39 different languages can gain or share their knowledge through this platform. As of September 22, 2020, the languages supported by Thinkific are: Afrikaans, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Czech, Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, German, Greek, Georgian, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, , Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean , Latvian Lithuanian, Mandarin Simplified and Traditional both, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish European and Mexican both, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese.
Free Document Uploading: A lot of the instructors claim that the drag and drop course set up in the discussion area of the courses are a blessing to use, unlike other learning management systems. Cherry one the top, this doesn’t charge any transaction fee.
Interactive Learning: The dashboard layout is designed to save time and avoid complications for the students. Students can also set goals and track them regularly. Progress indicators work as their motivators.
Payment Method: Thinkific has the most user friendly payment portal among all the LMS. It Supports PayPal and Stripe. You can sell courses with Multiple Pricing plan. For example, One time payment plan, Recurring Monthly, Weekly, Yearly subscriptions plan. Moreover, if you want your students to pay you in installments, you can also do so.
Words from the Users
Thinkific is the most trusted Learning Management System (LMS). Customers have never been pinch pennies to share their wonderful experience with Thinkific. A few of the reviews of the satisfied customers can increase the credibility of this website.
“Thinkific has been great. The company made it easy for me to understand how to create a course and made itself very available to me whenever I needed help.”
“We’ve started getting a lot of inbound sales, and it’s been great to point them right to our courses and say, ‘choose the course right for you, go through it as you need to.’ Having the course so accessible has been a big weight off my shoulders.”
“Even on the free account which is awesome to better manage cash flow needs. I also love that you can see how your students are progressing and where people might be getting stuck on your content.”
“The usability, integrations and excellent support makes my work so much easier. I am really happy that I chose Thinkific as our platform.”
Online learning is today and Learning Management Systems like Thinkific manages to grow the number of the students to millions. It is the most convenient platform to share ideas and strategies, distribute information with a student-student interaction, and student-instructor interaction. So if your goal is to share knowledge and make today’s worlds a better place in the easiest way possible, Thinkific is just a click away!
