Are you thinking about creating an online course? When you teach online, you can share your expertise with students from all over the globe, giving you a great way to earn extra income or just to share a skill you’re passionate about with an enthusiastic audience.
To make your online courses come alive, though, it’s necessary to find the right platform to build, host, and manage your content.
There are plenty of options out there, of course, but they’re not all created equal.
In this article, I want to talk about why WordPress.com, perhaps best known as a blogging platform, is also a great choice for getting your online courses off and running.
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With WordPress.com, you can quickly and easily build websites, online courses, membership sites, and more!
1. WordPress.com is User-Friendly
Anyone who has used WordPress for blogging knows the site is unmatched in terms of user-friendliness.
WordPress utilizes a simple block interface called Gutenberg for blogging, in which users can click on the type of block they need (text, image, quote, et cetera) to effortlessly add content to their posts.
Their course creation interface is much the same, allowing you to easily build each element of your class step-by-step with minimal tech experience necessary.
Once you’ve opted for the WordPress Creator plan, designed for course building, it’s easy to bring your course to life… even if you’re not an experienced instructional designer.
This means you’ll be able to build attractive, highly functional courses without hiring outside help or spending hours and hours writing code – making it possible to actually focus on your content instead!
WordPress’s intuitive navigation is also helpful for your students, who won’t have any trouble working through your course’s sections and completing any checkpoints along the way.
2. WordPress Has Great Design Options
Just because it’s easy to use doesn’t mean WordPress.com doesn’t have elegant design options.
You can select a premade template that matches your course’s needs, then choose from thousands of ways to customize your aesthetic in whatever way you’d like.
The WordPress Creator plan includes 5GB of storage, along with thousands of premium themes and design options, to help you store all of your content and bring your vision to life.
You can even choose your own unique domain name, making it easy to unify your online courses under your own personal brand.
Plus, WordPress courses are mobile-friendly and ad-free, enhancing the learning experience for your students and boosting your course’s professional appeal.
3. WordPress Takes the Guesswork Out of Management
One of the trickiest elements of running online courses is making sure things are well-managed.
Staying organized is essential to making sure that meaningful learning is actually taking place… and that students are having a positive experience.
This is why you’ll need to choose a good LMS, or Learning Management System, to support you on your course creation journey.
An LMS is an online software application designed to help you manage and deliver all of your online classes and trainings.
WordPress.com is compatible with tons of LMS plugin options, but the easiest choice is undoubtedly Sensei LMS.
Sensei LMS
With the Sensei LMS WordPress plugin, you can easily create, publish, and sell interactive online courses to customers all across the world.
Sensei, designed by WordPress creators, is specifically tailored to handle all of your management needs and work perfectly with your WordPress-designed classes.
From student enrollment to attendance to calendars and grading, Sensei keeps you on track and makes sure nothing falls through the cracks.
With Sensei, you can automate tedious workflows and spend more time focusing on actual instruction and engagement.
Use it to send out important reminders, build in student progress checks, grade tests and quizzes, calculate your gradebook percentages, and add fun gamified elements to your lessons.
You can also use Sensei to create different types of quizzes and assignments – and thanks to the variety of different question types it offers, you can be sure your students won’t lose interest.
Sensei provides your learners with a student portal to help them monitor their progress and stay on task, as well. This is a great way to keep everyone on the same page and boost strong communication.
Whether you’re offering dozens of courses or just a few, the powerful Sensei LMS is equipped to seamlessly handle all of your organizational needs.
4. WordPress is Highly Customizable
Sensei LMS is a great place to start, but the plugin options are almost endless with WordPress Creator.
In fact, you can choose from almost 60,000 compatible plugins to customize and improve your courses.
Maybe you want to create an email list, a newsletter, an online discussion forum, or an interactive calendar.
These enhancements are sure to build community and motivation among your learners, and can be a great way to encourage prospective students to enroll in your courses.
Whatever you envision for your online courses, there’s a WordPress-friendly plugin to choose from that can make it happen… and a surprising number of them are absolutely free!
This will help you improve user experience on your courses and keep your content exciting and fresh.
5. WordPress Makes It Easy to Sell
Even if you’re not in it for the money, the option to effortlessly monetize your courses is a big perk of using WordPress.
WordPress allows you to choose the pay structure that works best for your needs.
Maybe you’re just starting out and would like to keep your content free as you build interest in your classes.
Or perhaps you’d like to offer one-time payments to keep things simple as your audience begins to grow.
WordPress also allows you to create memberships or different subscription tiers as your online courses gain popularity and your number of students increases.
The monetizing capacity of WordPress keeps the commercial side of your courses stress-free, for both you and your students.
6. WordPress is Affordable
While we’re talking about money, let’s touch on how affordable WordPress is… especially when compared with some of the other online course hosting options out there.
WordPress Creator comes out to $25/a month when billed annually, which comes out to less than a dollar a day to host, build, market, and manage your online courses.
This is a lot of bang for your buck, so to speak, since this program can help you build your courses from the ground up with minimal hassle.
WordPress Creator walks you through every step of the design process, and makes it easy to integrate the Sensei LMS and other helpful plugins to keep your course running smoothly.
Plus, WordPress makes it easy to market your content by integrating with blogs and social media outlets.
The platform also includes helpful SEO content to guarantee you’re using the correct keywords in your lesson titles and descriptions to draw traffic to your site.
Unless you’re an experienced web designer who feels comfortable building their entire online course business from scratch, there’s no better value on the market today when it comes to course creation.
7. WordPress.com Grows With You
Creating online courses is a journey.
You’ll probably end up tweaking and changing your classes, content, and structure as time goes on.
Maybe you’ll want to add in more deluxe features or more premium content as your following grows.
You might want to create a blog or other web presence to support your courses.
Perhaps your classes started out free, but now you’re ready to add in a paid tier and start earning some money from your expertise.
The great thing about WordPress is that it’s highly scalable and built to grow along with you.
Instead of having to revamp all of your courses as your needs evolve, you can easily make changes and keep your momentum going when you use WordPress.
Whether it’s adjusting your course content, adding in new resources, supplementing your experience with additional plugins, or restructuring your commercial aspects, WordPress makes it easy to keep growing.
Final Thoughts
From beginning teachers just starting out to seasoned pros with plenty of experience, WordPress.com is equipped to support your online courses.
WordPress Creator is highly functional and intuitive to use, for both instructors and learners.
It incorporates sophisticated design elements, tons of customizable themes, and mobile-friendly, ad-free web experiences.
WordPress is compatible with thousands of useful plugins, and works seamlessly with the highly powerful Sensei LMS to keep your courses organized and professional.
It’s a breeze to monetize your courses at whatever structure works best for you, and perhaps more importantly, WordPress allows for flexibility as your online teaching business evolves.
Whatever knowledge you want to share, WordPress makes it possible to create highly effective courses that will help you connect with the people you want to reach.
Become a WordPress course creator and start sharing your knowledge with the world.
Click here to get started with WordPress.com today.
Are you an online course creator, or think you might like to become one? Do you have experience using WordPress or Sensei? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below!
