CreateOnlineAcademy

CreateOnlineAcademy is a hosted LMS for building your own branded online academy and selling courses from it. The home page names its audience in one line, "Teachers / Coaches / Trainers / YouTubers / Corporates", and describes the product as "A streamlined LMS platform that helps you to create your own unique knowledge business website, create campaigns and sell online courses in real-time." Besides course businesses, it pitches the same academy as a portal for employee training, product training or customer support, on a new or an existing website. The footer names the company as Educron Private Limited, with a US office in North Chicago and an India office in Nagpur. The home page says hundreds of people use CreateOnlineAcademy to create their academy and sell courses for themselves and their organizations.

Building courses

The course builder is drag-and-drop, and the features page says it is trusted by training organizations as well as individual trainers. Courses are made of sections, lectures, assignments, exams and certificates. A lecture can use audio, video, PDF, text, HTML, Flash and PowerPoint, and the features page says you can insert lectures authored in Adobe Captivate or Articulate Storyline. Video is hosted on the platform, YouTube and Vimeo videos can be used too, both private and public, and existing course content can be imported through the same builder. Exercise files and other study materials can be attached and updated at any time.

Course types go beyond a single self-paced course. You can set up a standalone one-time subscription course with sequential or non-sequential lectures, a time-based subscription course, a drip course or a standalone webinar course. In a drip course, lectures are released on particular dates or on subsequent days, and any drip slot can hold either a regular lecture or a scheduled live webinar, which the site presents as a way to run blended teaching automatically. Courses can also mix self-paced and live lectures.

Assessment is handled by a question creation tool that supports exams with any pattern of question, along with quizzes, assignments and practice tests. The home page describes the result as fool-proof exams and interviews that run without an invigilator. Learners are tracked by score, and a teacher can check any individual student's score. Certificates are awarded on successful completion, designed either from the platform's templates or from your own complete design.

Live classes

Every academy includes a webinar feature for running a live classroom in the browser without an additional plugin. The home page lists 1-1 chat, text and video chatrooms, a whiteboard and screen sharing among the tools, and the features page adds scheduled virtual classroom sessions with a whiteboard alongside webinar training sessions. Classroom sessions, webinars and teleconferences can be added to a course's content, so a trainer can combine recorded lectures and live teaching in one program.

The learner side

Students get progress indicators, unlimited access to course material and the ability to resume a course exactly where they stopped, on any device. Assignments and Q&As accept multimedia uploads and downloads, and in-course discussion lets students raise questions in a lecture and discuss them with the trainer and other students. Customized welcome and course completion emails go out automatically. The academy is fully responsive, and the home page names desktop, mobile and iPad. Learners can register with their Facebook or Google accounts, which the site calls single sign-in.

Selling and marketing

CreateOnlineAcademy takes no commission on sales. Students pay through PayPal or credit card, and the features page says funds are deposited directly into the merchant account linked to your academy. Courses can be free, paid, or included in subscription plans, including monthly subscriptions. Coupons and vouchers can be set with discounts, quantities, expiry dates and the courses they apply to, and individual courses can be offered as free trials to attract leads.

Marketing tools let you create campaigns and automate emails to learners, and the site names SurveyMonkey, Google Analytics, Hello Bar and tawk.to as integrations. Social plugins let visitors share pages, blogs and course landing pages. Each course has settings for keywords and other SEO details, and URLs are SEO-friendly.

Branding, administration and the platform

You can use an included address in the form myacademy.createonlineacademy.com or your own custom domain, add your logo, banner and color scheme, and edit the look and feel of the site. Landing pages can show featured courses, calls to action and promotional videos, and the academy can have extra pages, a blog, a contact page and a generic terms and conditions page you can amend. Removing CreateOnlineAcademy's own branding is an optional white-label service that depends on the plan you select. The features page also says you remain the owner of your course content and student data.

Administration is largely automated: purchases, receipts, enrollments, course access, password resets and notifications. A dashboard and email alerts report new enrollments, sales and student progress. You can create invitation-only courses, close a course to new enrollments for private classes, enroll or remove students manually, extend expiry dates and update login details. Several instructors can each have a profile on their own courses, with a course administrator overseeing the academy. A public API lets developers access and manage the site programmatically, including users, enrollments and promotions.

On the technical side, the features page lists secured cloud hosting with backups, PCI compliance and SSL, and automatic upgrades, along with a knowledge base of guides and videos and a customer support team.

Trial, demo and pricing

The home page offers a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. You can also request a one-on-one demo, which the features page says comes with a pricing proposal, ideas and case studies, plus login access to a full-featured demo academy sent by email. Neither the home page nor the features page states a plan price, although the site has a separate pricing page.

Three testimonials on the home page focus on ease of use and support. Tom Welsh writes, "Easy to use. valuable for the price." Roger Testa singles out the customer support, which helped his team when it was new to e-learning: "The team was of great help!"

Who it suits

CreateOnlineAcademy suits trainers, coaches and small education businesses that want their own academy, pay no commission on their sales, and teach both recorded and live from the same place. The mix of drip, time-based and webinar-only course types, exams built with the question creation tool and in-browser live classrooms makes it a reasonable fit for institutes and trainers running blended programs, and the site's own examples reach as far as artists, dancers and acting schools. Companies can use the same academy for employee, product or customer training, with invitation-only courses, manual enrollment and an API for connecting it to other systems.

The caveat is that pricing and white-label availability both depend on the plan, and the plans are set out on a pricing page and in the demo's pricing proposal rather than alongside the features. Anyone who needs the academy fully free of CreateOnlineAcademy branding should check which plan includes that during the trial.