Coursify.me

Coursify.me is a hosted platform for building an online school and selling online courses, open to individual teachers and companies alike. The About page describes it as "an online learning platform with focus on Distance Education" and as a SaaS that provides the resources needed to create and sell online courses. The company presents itself as a young and dynamic one, formed by a multidisciplinary team with training in engineering, architecture, software development and content management, and says the idea came from its founders' passion for technology and their wish to build a web application connecting teachers and companies with their students. The About page also calls Coursify.me one of the pioneers in the segment of online education. There is a free-forever plan, and the home page repeats that no credit card is required to get started.

Setting up the school

The school itself is put together in a few steps with a builder. You choose the school's name, slogan and URL, upload a logo and pick a cover image, then choose from 8 customizable color schemes so the school matches your brand. Links to your social networks and institutional pages round out the site. The address can be a friendly one on the Coursify.me domain or your own custom domain, and every plan, the Free plan included, carries no Coursify.me brand on the website, courses or emails. That last point matters for anyone who wants a school that looks like their own business from the first day without paying for it.

The platform is responsive, with optimized support for desktop, tablets and mobile, and the home page lists support for the most popular browsers, naming Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer. Course pages are optimized for SEO, which the site says makes them easy to find on Google.

Building courses

The course builder shows how a course will look in real time as you build it. Courses are organized into modules with sections and lessons, and lessons can be video, audio, text or image. Content can be imported from Dropbox, YouTube or Vimeo, or uploaded from your computer, which gives a creator with large video files a way around the upload cap on the smaller plans. Each course page can carry useful extras such as a video presentation and testimonials from your students.

Assessment and completion are built in. You can create quizzes and exams to assess what students know and track their performance, and Coursify.me issues customized certificates automatically when students complete a course. Exams and certificates are listed on every plan. Custom fields let you add your own questions to the registration form, so you can collect information about each student when they sign up.

The student experience

Students enter a student area that carries the same logo, images and color scheme as the school. From a dashboard they manage their online courses and monitor their progress. The learning environment is described as a "restricted area optimized to learn", where students follow the lessons and ask questions. Each lesson has its own comments section for those questions, which the site also calls a discussion forum, meant to help students grow their knowledge and their networking.

A teacher quoted on the home page, Victor Regis of English for you, says the platform helped him reach people who could not attend his classes in person, and that "It is easy to use to create courses and has an interface attractive to potential new students." Another testimonial, from Bruno Campagnolo of the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná, calls it a straightforward tool for distance education, or as support for a flipped classroom.

Selling, tracking and running the school

Courses can be free or paid. The home page says payments are received securely via PayPal or Stripe, in the currency of your choice, and the Portuguese version of the home page adds PagSeguro to that list. The pricing page's comparison table names sales in Dollar, Euro and Real, courses with a promotional price, and courses with payment in installments.

For running the school, growth charts follow the number of sales, and the comparison table lists a sales tracking dashboard, an enrollment tracking dashboard, a student tracking dashboard, tracking statistics, and students and enrollments management. Teachers can track each student's progress and performance in real time. Coursify.me hosts the courses with redundancy and backup, and the About page says the software is online 24 hours a day, with support staff, security and data protection, and periodic updates. A Help Center and a blog are linked from every page. According to the comparison table, the platform is available in English and Portuguese, while the website itself can be switched between English, Portuguese, Spanish and Faroese.

The About page also points to companies as users, describing the platform as a help for professionals and companies that want to train their employees in a personalized and flexible way.

Plans and prices

The pricing page offers monthly plans and annual plans at 20% off, with prices in US dollars. The four plans share the same feature list, which covers customization of visual identity, a platform for mobile, tablet and desktop, SEO, exams, certificates, domain customization, no Coursify.me brand and custom fields. They differ in volume:

• Free, free forever: 1 course, up to 25 students, up to 300 MB per uploaded file.
• Starter, US$19 a month on the monthly plan or US$15 a month billed yearly: 5 courses, up to 500 students, up to 1 GB per uploaded file.
• Pro, US$49 a month or US$39 a month billed yearly: 25 courses, up to 5,000 students, up to 3 GB per uploaded file.
• Business, US$99 a month or US$79 a month billed yearly: unlimited courses, unlimited students, up to 5 GB per uploaded file.

The home page still says you can host as many online courses as you want without paying anything; the pricing table is the more specific statement, and on it the Free plan covers 1 course. The pricing page does not mention transaction fees.

Who it suits

Coursify.me suits a teacher, trainer or small school that wants a branded course site without a monthly bill to start with. The Free plan is enough to run one real course for up to 25 students, with exams, certificates, a custom domain and no platform branding, which is a fair test before paying anything. Growing schools move up by volume rather than by feature: Starter for a handful of courses and up to 500 students, Pro for up to 25 courses and 5,000 students, Business when the limits need to go. Because every plan has the same features, nobody pays more just to get certificates or a custom domain.

Teachers working in Portuguese have a platform available in their language, with PagSeguro and sales in Real alongside PayPal, Stripe, Dollar and Euro. Companies training employees can use the same school structure, exams and certificates for internal courses.

The caveat is the per-file upload limit on the lower plans, from 300 MB on Free to 1 GB on Starter, which a creator with long, high-resolution lessons will feel. The Dropbox, YouTube and Vimeo imports are the practical answer, and the larger plans raise the cap to 3 GB and 5 GB.