The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the growth of the online education industry. Several online platforms emerged, enabling teachers, instructors, and content creators to teach their skills on a wide range of subjects, and at the same time have an alternate source of income, or even earning a full time living from teaching online.
But what about pay when it comes to eLearning platforms? You might be wondering about this, and that’s precisely why you’re here. So, let us look at some of the best online education platforms where teachers can sell and offer their courses. We’ll also give you a few insights on the in-demand niches and how you can stand out as an instructor.
| Name | No. of Learners | Average Instructor Earnings |
| Coursera | 100 million+ | $66,020 per annum |
| Udemy | 57 million+ | $1,000 - $3 million lifetime earnings |
| Skillshare | 38 million+ | $1,600 per month |
| Udacity | 14 million+ | $78,665 - $251,000 per annum |
| EdX | 46 million+ | $58,768 per annum |
| UpGrad | 2 million+ | $13K - $26K per annum |
| Teachable | 10 million+ | $16 - $23 per hour |
| LearnWorlds | 5 million+ | $100 - $100K per annum |
| Thinkific | 100 million+ | $100 - $10K+ per month |
| Kajabi | 60 million+ | $40K per annum |
The above 10 platforms have varied structures for course creation and even payment to teachers. For instance, Udemy claims that the teachers get 97% of the revenue share. However, according to some forums, Coursera doesn’t directly pay teachers but pays the colleges/universities that host their courses online. In EdX’s case, the revenue sharing is quite complex. Thus, different platforms pay their instructors in different ways.
If you’re a course creator or teacher looking to earn a stable living by teaching online, you must remember a few things:
Being an online teacher and creating courses for a living has its challenges, but the skills needed to be successful and earn a full-time living from it can easily be learned.
Here are some of the important things you need to remember to be an excellent online instructor.
The below guidance assumes you have already defined your niche and the subjects you wish to teach. If you're still in the dark about what you would like to teach, then perhaps try building on your existing passions and skillset, and see how you could create that into online courses and a teaching career. You'd be surprised at just how many varied subjects people are interested in learning.
When you create a course to be sold online, you must understand the students’ mindset. Whether you’re hosting the sessions live or as pre-recorded training videos, learn to break down the concepts into segments and sub-segments. This enables the students to establish a flow while learning, and makes it easier for them to be engaged and pay attention.
Guidelines:
When creating your course outline, and even the course content, using AI tools will help you to create a framework and sections. Once you have that in place you're then able to build-out the individual lesson.
A great prompt for generating a course outline for an online course would be clear, concise, and informative. It should specify the following:
Here is an example of how to structure the prompt for a course on Machine Learning using Python:
Prompt: Generate a course outline for an online course on the topic of machine learning for beginners. The target audience is people with no prior experience in machine learning. The desired learning outcomes are that students will be able to:
- Define machine learning and explain the different types of machine learning algorithms.
- Train and evaluate machine learning models using Python.
- Apply machine learning to solve real-world problems.
The course should be 10 weeks long and consist of 2-3 hours of video content per week.
In addition to the above, you can also specify the following parameters in your prompt to further refine the results:
For example, you could add the following parameters to the above prompt:
Additional parameters:
By providing a clear and concise prompt, you can help the language model to generate a course outline that is designed to your specific needs.
Here are some additional tips for writing effective prompts:
As an online instructor, you’ll need to become a bit savvy with video recording equipment and software. This could be a camera, a mic, online streaming devices, and more. The better the quality of your videos the more engaged your students will become. Understanding how the students see you through this equipment, the easier it will become for you to know how to present the class. This includes everything right from how you dress to how the green/whiteboard (if any) is seen. It would help if you considered whether the student can see what you’re writing.
You also don't need fancy video editing software to create high-quality courses. See the best choices for video editors article for some suggested video editors to create your courses.
Examples of Professional Looking Courses:
Visualisation is an important element for keeping students engaged. Some concepts tend to be more complex than others. However, with the right tools, you can create engaging visuals to make the concepts memorable and understandable. Visualization helps students not only understand the concepts more clearly but also retain the information presented.
A sense of community is key when it comes to online education. Students should feel welcome and be able to interact with you and other students, asking questions or being part of a conversation about related topics. This is why many top course creators will have a community forum or a Q&A section on their course pages.
Live Classes: If you’re hosting a live class, it is important to set the rules and the class atmosphere. While not all students will align with it, the idea is to manage the chaos and thrive in it.
Create a safe space for students and ensure no mishaps occur on the live stream. Having said that, be polite and approachable. Understand that you’re not merely discussing a subject but teaching it to students.
So ensure that there are ways for them to ask you doubts, approach you for discussion, or even have an impromptu debate about certain subjects. All this makes the course more insightful.
The beauty of creating online courses is that they are digital and can be sold many times over. However, the challenge is finding your audience and bringing traffic to your course sign up pages.
It is not enough to be a good teacher in today’s online teaching industry. You must learn to market yourself and your course online to attract more students. Understand what they look for when they think of your subject and create a marketing campaign that leads people to your course. Whether conducting courses on your platform/website or with a third-party platform, you must know how to captivate the students’ attention.
The platforms listed here in this article are a great way to jump-start your online teaching career. By uploading your courses to these platforms you are able to promote your own personal brand and leverage the large amount of members and traffic they already have.
Ways to Attract New Signups:
Email marketing: Build an email list of interested prospects and regularly send them valuable content, course updates, and promotional offers to encourage enrollment. Link to your email signup page from your website, social media channels and on your LinkedIn profile.
Blog Articles and SEO: having your own website is a must. Once your courses are created you can then break down each course into very specific subtopics to create content around them. Research a few primary keywords for those subtopics. Then create a series of articles around your courses and their subject matter to drive traffic to the course signup pages. The more specific the keywords and subtopics the better, as you will attract a highly targeted audience.
Guest blogging: Write guest posts on popular blogs in your niche to reach a wider audience. Include a link to your course or website in the author bio or within the content if allowed.
Collaborate with other platforms: Leverage the traffic of other platforms by hosting your courses on popular e-learning platforms or online course marketplaces. This can help you tap into their existing user base and gain exposure to a new audience.
Use existing platforms like the ones mentioned above, but take it a step further. There are many private websites and platforms where individuals or groups of people have put together collections of super-relevant courses from top creators around the world. These collections are normally centered around a specific niche or topic. They are always looking to add new content and grow their offering, so could be looking for a course just like yours.
Tap into their audience and list your course with them to gain exposure, grow your personal brand, and also add a new revenue stream.
Examples
With over 20 years of experience in the eCommerce world, I’m a 7-figure business expert, having launched and scaled multiple successful online businesses. In 2022, I took on the role of Head of E-commerce for a European food tech company, managing 14 e-shops across Europe and South Africa. Today, through Selljam, I share AI-driven strategies and eCommerce hacks to help business professionals like you achieve success. Over 750+ students to date have already enrolled in my online courses, and I’m excited to help you take the next step toward building the online business of your dreams!
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