The Best Platform for Your Online Course

As online learning becomes more and more prevalent, it becomes harder to distinguish between the increasing number of platforms for online courses. How do you choose which platform to use for your course? What makes one better than another?

The Goal of Online Education

When you think about the goal of your course, and your goals as a teacher or a coach, what do you come up with? You probably thought of something along the lines of “changing people’s lives” or “making an impact.” These are good goals and ones that should be reached for, but there is something that needs to happen before those goals can be reached.

Before you can make an impact by way of online courses, the student needs to have completed the course to earn the benefits and see the results. Unfortunately, completion rates for online courses are statistically super low, around 13%. So, how can we expect results with completion rates so low? Before you even think about your impact, you have to find a way to get your completion rates up!

Why Are Online Course Completion Rates So Low?

There are several reasons why completion rates tend to be so low for most online education courses. The overarching reason comes down to human discipline. Most online courses require a high level of discipline to keep up with the lessons and the content on your own. There are no due dates or administrators reminding you to get the work done, so online courses frequently slip to the back burner after just a few lessons. In addition, the lessons tend to be long such as hour long video lectures that cannot hold the students’ attention spans. The bottom line is, in this world of constant communication and growing technology, solitary learning is obsolete and fails to work.

How to Improve Completion Rates

Recent discoveries into education and why traditional online teaching has failed has led to a transformation in the way online teaching occurs. Instead of the classic online course set up, more companies are moving towards the “Quest” system of teaching. A Quest takes a problem and attempts to solve it, just like any course does. However, a Quest turns it relatable and incentivised to make people want to complete the course. A Quest tackles all of the issues created by typical online education.

• Automatic Feedback System

Quests include automatic feedback throughout the entire course, taking away the lack of reminders and “authority.” The ability to get feedback from the instructor and the automatic encouragements sent to the user throughout the Quest takes away the feeling of self-discipline associated with typical online courses.

• Micro-Learning

Quests take all of the information of the courses and break them down into bite-sized segments of information. Humans have small attention spans, making hour long lectures inefficient. Breaking the information up into small pieces makes it easier to take in and process information without getting distracted or overwhelmed.

• Community Discussion

Another issue that riddles the typical online education platform is the lack of a “classroom” setting, which provides a community of people that can provide support and help with problems you encounter. In a Quest, you have a community dashboard where you can ask questions, share your story, and interact with other people, creating a virtual “classroom” setting. This makes people less inclined to give up when things get tough, as they will have people to rely on and support them.

• Gamification

The main difference between a Quest and the traditional version of online courses is the use of gamification. A Quest essentially turns a course into a game, making the learning interactive and engaging. Each lesson is in the form of a challenge that the user must complete, rewarding them with trophies and points to incentivize the course. The rewards motivate the student to complete each level until they ultimately complete the entire course.

Choosing the Right Platform for Your Online Course

myQuest vs. Kajabi

myQuest and Kajabi share many of the same features: multimedia capabilities, optimization for all devices, community discussion, etc. However, the biggest difference between them is myQuest’s gamification feature. Unlike Kajabi, which uses a typical online education system, myQuest uses a gamified process in which students complete missions, move onto new levels and get rewards, incentivising them to complete the program.

Kajabi, on the other hand, uses a the more traditional approach to online learning. Each teacher uploads videos of their lessons which can be accessed on any device. There’s options for file uploads and different themes for each course. There are some overlaps with the Quest approach, such as a community element and email notifications about how far along each student should be. However, they do lack the action-reward element of the Quests, leaving most of the discipline up to the student. The gamification process uses habit formation to instill the behaviors in the students even after they complete the course. Compared to common online education platforms which have completion rates around 5%-10% per course, myQuest has seen completion rates up to 78% on its courses.

myQuest vs. Teachable

myQuest and Teachable also share a lot of features in common. Both platforms have multimedia capabilities that can be accessed from any device, both platforms allow the teachers to create custom landing pages that have high conversion rates, and both include community discussion aspects. However, as myQuest uses the Quest system for their learning, Teachable has stuck to the traditional system of online learning.

Teachable allows the teacher to include quizzes and student feedback, as well as send targeted emails to certain lists of students. Beyond that, Teachable does not really focus their features on engagement, but more on the actual courses. Although they do succeed and do fairly well at providing a good platform for traditional teaching, in general, the traditional method has very low engagement and completion rates, making it uncertain how a course would really do and if it would even be successful, regardless of how good the platform is.

The choice is yours. Stick to a traditional approach and risk low involvement and completion rates? Or grow your course with technology and build a Quest that increases potential impact and lets you see better results? Show the world what you can do! Start building your Quest !