Here are the main factors students should rely on when choosing a distance learning system.
- Ease of use. Study the interface, make sure that you don’t need to put a lot of effort to access learning materials, complete assignments, communicate with a tutor and track your success.
- Level of credibility and feedback. Pay attention to the credibility of the resource where you plan to study. Read reviews and cases of other students about the course and the tutor.
- Requirements and schedule. Familiarize yourself with the class schedule. See if there are deadlines, and if you can download lessons, outlines, and presentations to study offline.
- Cost. Before you buy a particular course, pay attention to what is included in the price. Make sure you will have access to all the training materials and you won’t have to pay for them separately. Also, pay attention to the availability of a certificate.
Tutors have different goals in the educational process. Therefore, below we have prepared recommendations for choosing a distance learning system for those who want to create their own online course and monetize it.
- Familiarize yourself with the platform. Study the interface, make sure that the service is easy to use and you have all the features you need to work. Do not rush to buy a paid package. Carefully study the features of the platform in the demo version or on the free plan.
- Make sure you can use different training formats. See if you can add audio lectures and notes in addition to videos.
- See if you can make changes. Make sure that once lessons are created in your course they can be edited, rearranged, removed, or new lessons can be added.
- Explore the student knowledge test feature. Pay attention to the ease of creating tests and quizzes.
- Make sure you can track statistics and monitor student success.
- Explore the possibilities of integration with other services. Consider whether you can work with messengers and chatbots, send email notifications, SMS and web push notifications.
- See if you can add moderators. Working with a large number of students at the same time is quite difficult, despite the automation of the work. To answer questions and comments, give individual feedback, and help students who are falling behind, you should add assistants.
- Explore the possibility of creating certificates. For students, a certificate is a certificate of learning and a reward for their efforts, and for the tutor, it is a way to promote the course and themselves as a specialist. So before you choose a particular platform, be sure to see if there is an option to create personalized certificates.
- Make sure there is a help desk. After creating and launching an online course, there can be difficulties at various stages of the work. To deal with difficulties and not lose students, make sure the platform you choose has experts you can reach out to.