The transformation of the education sector is relentless and the majority of university and school programs were bound to transfer to online platforms. Below we present examples of top educational platforms that will help you and your company or institution make the most of what elearning has to offer.
1. EdApp LMS online platform
The leading LMS system is used worldwide by big and small institutions equally. EdApp is a top-notch award-winning educational platform that is available for free for all users, private or corporate. It offers simple design solutions and templates to make creating and sharing courses and quizzes as simple and efficient as possible.
EdApp offers ready-to-learn courses designed by the world’s top specialists, which you can simply add to your curriculum. EdApp’s priority lies in microlearning – they design their courses so that it works best with mobile devices, making it possible to learn any time, anywhere. Games and quizzes are also reinforced between lessons to make learning more effective and engaging for the learners.
On top of a staggering variety of courses, EdApp offers a data-driven course builder tool, allowing you to create your own well-organized and effective courses for digital learning. You can also make them as visually appealing as possible, all without any complex authoring process. This is because EdApp is integrated with Canva’s powerful design tools, allowing for indefinite customization.
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2. Google Classroom
The educational tool proposed by the software giant is more than a decent solution for schools, which suddenly had to switch to online learning. Although not entirely free, it offers a fully functional free tier, which allows for conducting distant teaching and giving assignments. Google Classroom uses well-known G Suite tools, such as Google Docs, calculations’ sheets, online presentation tools and video call tool (Google Hangouts). Its simple and well-known design, basic functionalities available for free and high accessibility rates, all make Google Classroom a straightforward choice for school and university courses, where there’s no need for high-end supplementary options and tools.
3. Udemy School
Udemy is one of the most well-known educational platforms offering a number of peer-reviewed courses taught by instructors from around the world. Udemy offers many standard designing tools for course creators: videos, calculation sheets, documents, presentations. Unfortunately, on the downside, Udemy doesn’t allow for a seamless exchange between the teacher and the students. Additionally, there’s almost no quality control of the courses which are being published. Therefore, a good peer-review rating is a crucial element when choosing a class at Udemy. As it is geared towards personalized learning and self-paced learning mode, there’s no big community support and neither is the possibility of feedback from the teacher.
4. WizIQ
While it’s dedicated to traditional classroom learning rather than professional training and development, this LMS platform allows teachers to create their own unique, instructor-led training online courses. WizIQ is an award-winning educational platform, which delivers interactive learning experience. Online courses created with WizIQ can also be offered for sale and with the possibility to turn them into MOOCs (massive open online courses), they can easily be made into a source of revenue. WizIQ also offers digital tutoring software for those interested in giving personal instruction on a chosen subject. WizIQ doesn’t have a very transparent pricing policy – for every potential client is given an individual quota after contacting the sales team.
5. edX
Together with Coursera, edX are two holy grails among the LMS focused on delivering college-quality of education. Created by a Harvard and MIT graduates, edX is a higher-education oriented platform hosting online courses from different universities. While it isn’t quite suited for professional training in the workplace, you can attend a Yale business program or Harvard physics class for free. EdX’s interest lies in improving the global accessibility to top-class resources and educators. The choice offered by edX is however way smaller than on other platforms and limited to very specialized fields. EdX also doesn’t support microlearning and its policy still advocated traditional teaching methods, with listening to lectures and writing essays. Its focus is chiefly on natural sciences, leaving humanities and arts on the last position. It’s therefore clear, that not necessarily everyone will be satisfied with what they’ll find on this platform.
6. BlackboardLearn
BlackBoard learn is aimed at higher-education teachers and students, who need to be able to store and share the materials in the cloud or a course management system. Apart from teaching, it can be used for corporate and governmental training programs, although there are other LMS that offer more built-in features for less. It’s mobile-friendly, which caters to the younger users’ habits, as it enables then to attend classes anywhere. Blackboard delivers content without fuss but takes away some of the fun other LMS provide along with great functionality. Blackboard is not free, however, there’s no clear pricing on their website and one has to request for a quote.
7. Coursera
Coursera is an educational platform, which like edX, aims at delivering college-level education and quality training globally. It offers online degrees, specialized courses, and one-off activities, delivered by renowned partner universities from all over the world. Most of the courses at Coursera require active participation, feedback, writing tasks and attending lectures. The effort pays off, as after completing a course, one can apply for a certificate with a relevant stamp on it. Coursera is free for university students (except for degree courses) but requires admission fee from everyone else.
8. Skillshare
Skillshare counts among well-known educational platforms focused on delivering practical skill-oriented courses for its dynamic range of students. It is primarily limited as an educational video platform, where teachers and educators explain the topic in a series of clips. Skillshare is a community-based platform, meaning everyone can potentially become a teacher and it’s easy to gain feedback and support at the community forum. Contrary to EdX or Coursera, Skillshare focuses on teaching pragmatic skills helping with building an online presence (useful in the era of social media marketing), supporting small businesses or simply for entertainment purposes. Skillshare offers free two-month trial and after the access is based on a monthly subscription.
9. Thinkific
As a well-designed LMS platform system which makes creating your training courses feasible and easy, Thinkific offers a variety of templates and graphics to facilitate the design of your course. It’s mostly aimed at entrepreneurs, online educators, coaches and trainers, who wish to expand their reach and perhaps update their educational tools. Unfortunately, Thinkific is not free, and to access the full range of design and marketing tools, a monthly subscription plan is required.
10. LinkedIn Learning
LinkedIn Learning is an educational platform and SAAS that chiefly focuses on business and technology-related fields. The platform’s courses are delivered in video form in seven different languages which makes it adequately accessible, depending on your geographical location. LinkedIn Learning comes as a premium feature for LinkedIn users with upgraded profiles and aims at providing new, better qualifications for those searching for new opportunities at the job market. LinkedIn Learning is a good place to learn, more difficult to teach as becoming a coach there requires a lot of effort. The quality of the courses are not always easy to assess beforehand and requires some research.
11. GoToTraining
GoToTraining is a highly adaptable educational platform packed with reliable features that you can use to create learning materials and manage online training sessions. Through its unique, built-in tools, organizations can easily customize registration processes, manage training materials, as well as share and publish courses. Learners can also collaborate during live training sessions through small group activities, collaborations, discussions, and polls.
As a trainer or L&D professional, you can opt to send your course catalogs directly to your learners to encourage self-paced learning and adaptive learning, or you can host an online conference to ensure direct communication with your team. Another great feature is that GoToTraining allows trainers to host a content library, where they can upload, store, organize, and reuse learning materials like courses, tests, and class recordings. These can then be accessed by workers at their best convenience.
12. Trainual
Trainual is another educational platform that can help you onboard or train employees with a learning program. It allows you to customize elearning courses in just a few clicks. Simply choose from the platform’s 150+ free templates, embed your images or videos, add your training content, and deploy to your learners. Your workers can then access their course materials through multiple online platforms such as iOS, Android, Chrome extension, and web browser. It’s important to highlight, however, that this platform doesn’t support SCORM files or other elearning formats. This can be a huge deal-breaker for those with existing content on other online learning software. Apart from this disadvantage, you’ll also have to spend $99 USD to access all Trainual’s basic features.
Educational platform systems have become ubiquitous and continuously gain more customers: both teachers and students. From highly specialized university-degree platforms like Coursera to practical skill-oriented ones like Skillshare, each of them targets a special audience. Covid-19 pandemic has triggered a rise in the use of educational platform systems, which enable students to carry on their official education. Variety of tools, video-based teaching, peer-support system and user experience opinion ratings make elearning an attractive environment to further one’s knowledge and gain new skills easily. With platforms like EdApp, designing beautiful online courses has never been more accessible. With creative marketing tools and professional support system, gaining revenue from teaching becomes a dream job of future specialists. Sign up to EdApp for free!
Sources
//www.learnworlds.com/online-learning-platforms/
//www.techradar.com/best/best-online-learning-platforms
//www.guide2research.com/research/online-education-statistics
//www.adamenfroy.com/best-online-course-platforms
//www.talentlms.com/blog/educational-platform-vs-lms-vs-training-software/
//www.learnworlds.com/online-learning-platforms/