How To Create An Online University

Starting an online school or academy in 2021 can mark the beginning of an exciting journey. With online learning becoming more widespread due to the pandemic, online courses offer an easy and accessible way for everyone to learn a new skill and an opportunity to invest in knowledge.

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Being able to transmit that knowledge in the best way possible is a skill on its own.

Education is a beautiful gift and should always come in a beautifully wrapped package ready to be delivered to learners – regardless if these are called students or employees.

Just like learning coach Connie Malamed says:

"One of the most important areas we can develop as professionals is competence in accessing and sharing knowledge."

Table of contents

• 1 Step 1: Choose a Platform
  
  
• 2 Step 2: Validate Your Idea
  
  
• 3 Step 3: Find a Profitable Topic
• 4 Step 4: Your School's Branding and Website
  
• 5 Step 5: The Tools You Will Need
  
  
• 6 Step 6: Connect the Analytics and Know Your Numbers
  
  
• 7 Step 7: Sales & Marketing Features
• 8 Step 8: Schedule Automated Email Notifications
  
  
• 9 Step 9: Most Important Settings of an Online Academy
  
  
• 10 Step 10: Go Live
  
  
• 11 Online School Examples to Get Inspired
  
  
• 12 Infographic: 10 Steps to Starting Your Online School or Academy
  
  

Step 1: Choose a Platform to Build Your Online Courses

With the plethora of online learning platforms and learning management systems (LMS) out there today, it's easy to build your online school.

However, each one comes with its features, tools, and capabilities for building and promoting online courses, for learners' enrollment and community management, and it's essential to choose the LMS customized to your needs.

Using a state-of-the-art online learning management system like LearnWorlds will make your academy the must-go learning destination in your industry.

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Step 2: Validate Your Online Course Idea

Developing an online course is time and resource-intensive. It would be best if you first validated your learning subject before setting out to create one.

To test whether your idea has potential, you must first condense it into a value proposition. You can make a list of questions that address your audience's needs and traits for online education. The answers to these questions will help you refine your idea. Here's a sample list of such questions:

• Which pain(s) is the course supposed to solve?
• Why would a learner pay for this course?
• What outcome(s) can your learners expect when they complete this course?

During the validation process, you will most probably identify competitors with a similar course. Ensure your elevator pitch stands out from the competition by demonstrating how your online course differs from others.

Besides, it would help if you also made a forecast for a small budget to promote your online course through paid advertising. Also, run the numbers to know how much it will cost to develop and run a pilot program, the course itself, and the course revenue you need to make your desired profit.

Move on to analyzing the demand for creating new content compared to the content you already have for the specific course. You can search online for keywords and terms you think people will use to learn more about your course's subject.

Dig deeper and talk to your target audience -either by emailing them a brief poll or through your online community- to identify challenges that your course can solve or skills that your learners want to excel in after participating in your online course.

You can also use lead magnets that address the same topics as the course you want to create to identify if there actually is a demand for the specific course subject. Suggest people download pieces of content from your website (e.g., checklists, reports, or ebooks) by providing their email address.

Another way you can validate your idea for an online course before investing time and money into designing and implementing it is to run a pilot program or a webinar. The pilot program/webinar will allow you to try out your idea on a group of learners (aka your online course's beta testers). You can create just a couple of course sections of your online course with just enough content to deliver results to your beta testers.

Step 3: Find a Profitable Topic for your Online Course

Once you have your virtual school's website up and running, it's time to get some learning content on there.

All you need to come up with your own is to find a profitable idea for a course and then work on that idea to create e-learning content. Prefer to choose a subject that you are passionate and knowledgeable about or is relevant to your online business industry that your learners can follow easily via remote learning.

Creating the content on your first course's subject requires setting your learning objectives and then building a course outline that helps guide the learning process.

Create an outline for our online course

To create a course outline, you will need to divide the course curriculum into main topics and sub-topics. Set the course sections apart by the level of difficulty, a specific pedagogical approach, or any other category you prefer.

It might help to brainstorm ideas on how to teach the subject, research the literature, search the web and look at what others in relevant topics are doing.

Download Our Free Online Course Outline Templates for 2021

Choose your learning method

Decide on a learning method or a blended approach you want to follow and stick with it. This will define the type of content and activities and the format of your whole academy, since it's not just about the course, but about the space that your teaching is taking place.

Remember that learning does not happen in a social vacuum, but rather in a social environment with multiple variables. Besides, this is what a successful online academy is all about.

Learning online and especially in an ecosystem that is part of your website has several interactions you can consider or leverage. This includes social activities, group study, or educators' feedback through messages or email.

Upload your first online course

If you have already prepared training material on the subject – video, text documents, or blog posts, you are one step ahead as you can reuse your content into the course. However, if you are creating new content from scratch, our step-by-step guide on creating online courses can give you the best guidelines.

Once you have prepared your learning material, you can upload them on the LearnWorlds platform by following our quick instructions below:

Click on the "Create Course" button and go through the course creation process.

View of the LearnWorlds' Course Wizard

Give a catchy title to the course, select a user-friendly URL for it, select the type of access for the course, and choose an image that goes with it. And that's it.

Then, you are ready to start editing the course layout:

and you can add your content and learning activities section by section:

Depending on the kind of learning, training, or coaching you will be doing, you will probably use various learning activities. The most common learning activities on courses are ebooks, PDFs, video, and audio lessons. You can complement these with educational quizzes, exams, SCORM/HTML5 or certificates.

Adding the learning material

Putting all of this into practice means thinking about how you can use the learning materials and the tools you have in your inventory most engagingly. This should help to create an enhanced learning experience and increase the number of students.

1. 1. Elearning & Interactive Videos

A video is a powerful tool for delivering online education. It is a vehicle of communication that increases student participation. When using the right video editing equipment and choosing its place carefully, a video can do wonders.

Interactive Video with Quiz on LearnWorlds

Insert a short 1-2 minute intro video to your course, and you will see the difference. With LearnWorlds, you can create interactive videos while adding interactive elements and activities – like captions, inside them. Try them out to avoid boring content and offer something unique!

1. 1. Text Document & Ebook

The most commonly used medium for delivering education online and offline is the written word. While the video might be popular and considered high-value, many people prefer to read.

Text documents are much easier to produce. They allow more knowledge to be retained and are more familiar to us since childhood. They may take the form of educational leaflets, guides, reports, case studies, or any material you have used before in offline training.

PDF is the best format to use for your Word documents, or you can spice them up using the LearnWorlds' Ebook Authoring Tool to create a web-friendly ebook.

With LearnWorlds interactive ebook, you help students mark up parts of the text, take notes, and highlight essential sections.

Regardless of what you choose to add, you can adjust the teaching environment and output to suit the course subject's needs.

For example:

1. 1. • Is your teaching approach self-paced, and learners can access the learning materials in their own time? Excellent! You can drip your content to your learners week by week and guide them with pre-recorded videos, audio logs, and informational ebooks.
      • Are you offering to coach? Then, you can run a live webinar at your school.
      • Is there a certificate of completion or an examination? Awesome! Your students can also showcase their new knowledge.

What's great about creating courses this way is that it gives you the ability to add any elements you want inside your course to make it as unique as it can be and centered around your students' learning needs.

Step 4: Your School's Branding and Website

First off, start building a website that will host your online school. A landing page is the first page your website visitors will 'land on,' so it makes sense to begin from there.

While working on it, make sure to invest in your brand identity. Add your logo, change the colors of the theme you are using and the fonts.

The LearnWorlds pages builder is doing a fantastic job on this since it offers the ability to personalize your website within minutes, without the need for any technical or coding skills.

Choosing a unique website template

You will find a rich collection of templates to choose from and customize as you see fit on the pages builder. Selecting and editing yours is super easy and feels like editing a Microsoft Word's or Mac's pages file!

LearnWorlds comes with pre-build page templates you can use.

With this handy tool, you can get creative with the colors of your brand and the logo to create a landing page that is customized to your personal or professional brand, message, and audience.

Also, you can use it to choose the right font that suits the style you want to create for your online academy.

The theme editor on LearnWorlds allows for complete creative customization.

Choosing the right templates, especially for the header image, is crucial because it is a make-it-or-break-it move. If your landing page can't entice your site visitors to read your content within a matter of seconds, then they will reach immediately for the X button, and the opportunity is lost.

Completing the look of your website

Apart from a landing page, the pages builder can help you create any other type of page that needs to go into your school's website. This is the "About Us" page – which can be used to introduce your brand, and the "Thank You" page – which appears after course purchase and can help you get your message(s) across effectively.

Similarly, you can create any page that either has to offer more to your current students of your education website, helps to get new ones onboard your academy or serves a specific goal you want to achieve.

For example:

• Subscription Pages: Need to showcase your online courses or school subscriptions and accreditations? Then, choose a template that you like and focus on presenting the information they need to get about them.
• Unique Promotions: Want to promote special offers or coupons to your subscribers? Create a call-to-action button that has a high conversion potential, and you are good to go!
• Blog: Share useful information and create a 'buzz' around your academy. Build a blog or create an ebook to educate your audience and promote your online classes.
  Testimonial Page: Tell others what your students are saying about your coursework. You can create a customer testimonials page!

How a subscription zone will look for your school.

For some more advanced customizations, you can also customize the CSS code and customize each course's player to create a unique experience.

As you can see, with the LearnWorlds pages builder, possibilities are endless, and there is no need for spending money on expensive tools, hosting, and maintenance to set up your school's website.

With it, you have all you need to create the most stunning pages and fill them with videos, images, text styles, or even embed and mirror external content! In short, we have you covered.

Step 5: The Tools You Will Need

Every business has an essential tool-set to help them manage different aspects of it, automate repetitive tasks, or improve productivity.

LearnWorlds comes equipped with many of these tools as built-in functionalities and connects with the top software tools to take care of the rest.

Some of those come as direct integrations or can be connected by using Zapier.

So, what are the essential tools for an e-learning business?

• Email marketing software
• Referral/affiliate marketing tool
• Analytics software (see Step 4)
• General Marketing & Sales tools (see Step 5)
• Productivity apps, Zapier, and others
• API & Includes

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Email marketing software

Email is the king of marketing software for the web. Each business owner or marketer likes to use their favorite email marketing software to communicate with their students and sell online classes.

We have connected with the four most popular email marketing software: ActiveCampaign, AWeber, MailChimp, and ConvertKit to make your life easier.

If you are using any other email marketing tool, chances are it integrates with LearnWorlds through a Zapier integration.

Referral & Affiliate Tool

Referral management tools are usually quite expensive, and you need to test a few before you see what works for you. This is why we have created our own built-in affiliate management tool that works incredibly well for recruiting your students as affiliates to promote your courses.

Invite your students, influencers, and partners to join your online school and your affiliate program and grow your education business!

To start using Affiliate Management, you need to have a Pro trainer or a higher plan. Then, you log into your school, navigate to the "Marketing Tools" menu, and you click on the "Affiliate Management."

Got to "Setup" and Switch to 'On' to enable the affiliate program:

Adjust your settings by setting your own commission rate, expiration date, and commission payable after duration:

And manage all of your affiliate marketing efforts through the main dashboard.

A view of the dashboard in the affiliate management tool.

Productivity apps, Zapier and others

Productivity apps are everything that makes your job easier. From a Hubspot CRM to an automation software like Zapier.

Anything that makes tedious tasks not an issue can help you manage your business more efficiently and save you the valuable time you would otherwise spend on activities that needed more attention.

LearnWorlds integrates with most productivity apps through direct integration or Zapier. This way, you can automate many of the tedious tasks, i.e., updating customer information in a CRM.

You can create LearnWorlds Zaps to automate an abundance of repetitive workflows. Learn more about LearnWorlds integrations powered by zapier in this article.

API, SSO & Custom code

An API can be used for more complex connections and custom work for businesses with in-house technical expertise. Whether you are looking to create a seamless transition between your website, automate tasks from an in-house software, or any other tasks that cannot be achieved with simple integration. Please take a look at our API documentation here.

The API is also an essential part of the Single-Sign-On (SSO) capability, which allows you to seamlessly transition from your website's login process to an online academy without requiring the students to log in twice with different credentials. We have also built an easy-to-implement WordPress SSO plugin to make this even more comfortable!

Lastly, with our custom code editor, you can easily add custom code in different slots (slots are places where you can inject your custom code) of your HTML page and edit the already existing code generated. More specifically, you can add custom HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

You can use it for redirecting new users to your favorite youtube video, showing a popup to all users tagged as premium, wishing happy birthday to your students with an alert instead of a section, and much more. Read more about it from here.

Step 6: Connect the Analytics and Know Your Numbers

The course content is on the site, and everything is working as it should. What's next?
Before you are ready to launch your academy and start receiving enrollments, you need to set up your analytics tools. This is a crucial step to take since such tools can help you assess your online academy's overall business model performance in terms of website traffic and brand exposure.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an industry-leading tool that allows you to monitor web traffic and can be easily integrated with your virtual learning academy.
To connect Google Analytics with your school, follow these steps.

Facebook Pixel

Also, out of the many analytics and monitoring integrations you can get with LearnWorlds is Facebook Pixel, another powerful tool to use. With it, you can leverage the actions people take on your website across devices to create more effective Facebook advertising campaigns.
To connect Facebook Pixel with your school, follow these steps.

Mixpanel

This is the big boy player of analytics. Mixpanel allows for more advanced tracking and analysis of users.
If you are looking to track user interactions in more detail, our Mixpanel integration will solve everything for you!

Step 7: Sales & Marketing Features

HJust like with any business, your online academy needs to follow a marketing plan. Adopting a marketing strategy can help sell your online courses and gradually grow your students' number.

These are the tools that help you sell your digital products such as online courses, online classes, and online training, create offers, manage promotions, and upsell to your customers. LearnWorlds comes with built-in marketing tools such as the following:

Bundles

Create a bundle of courses to upsell to your customers. Sell more courses in one quick swoop and offer a great offer to your customers by grouping similar courses together into one big bundle.

For example, if you have four courses worth $325 in total if bought individually, you can bundle them up and offer them at the price of $150 to entice people to buy them all at once. Here's how you can create a course bundle:

First, go to Marketing Products and choose "Bundles":

Click on 'Create bundle,' and then another window will open up to choose the courses you want to bundle up and their price.

Example of a photography course bundle created with LearnWorlds.

Promotions / Coupons

Another way to increase interest in your courses is by offering promotional coupons with or without an expiry date. Coupons can be used for unique offerings, sharing with partners, or loyal customers as a gift.

They are also great for discount periods, sharing them by email or on coupon sites to attract first-time remote learning customers.

To create a promotion or coupon, go to 'Marketing Tools,' 'Promotions (Coupons),' and click on 'Create Course/Bundle Promotion'.

Then, give your promotion a name, decide the discount for it, and select the courses for which the promotion will apply.

Create a coupon code by giving it a name, set the maximum number of times this coupon can be used, and choose an expiration date for it. And that's it!

For more details on how to create and share promotional coupons, go through these steps.

Lead capturing

Lead captures are an excellent tool for getting people to opt-in to your email list. For it to work, you need to offer your school website visitors the option to join your email newsletter subscription.

Get them to complete an online form to opt-in and ask them to give you their contact details, e.g., their name and email address, through an online form.

As an extra incentive, you can also offer a free course, an ebook, a PDF document, or a checklist related to the subject of your course and get them more interested in it.

When you come to think about it, there are tons of online marketing ideas you can try out. In the end, it's up to you which one(s) you prefer to use and works best with your target audience. The important thing is to make sure to have a clear description of your audience; you will not provide the same offers to a high school student and to a business professional, right?

Step 8: Most Important Settings of an Online Academy

Having your own online academy goes beyond building a website, a landing page, and customizing the email notifications. You will need tools & options that can give you absolute control, and you can find these listed in your LearnWorlds school admin menu.

On this menu, you can find various customizable settings for even the slightest detail and make the academy of your dreams a reality:

Table of contents

• 1 Site settings: Sign in/up & Navigation
• 2 Go through the general settings
• 3 Course settings
• 4 Pricing the course
  
• 5 Customize the Email Notifications
• 6 Financials: Payment Gateways, Currency & Invoices
• 7 Go through the integrations
• 8 Connect your domain

Site settings: Sign in/up & Navigation

First of all, controlling the students' experience is more than mere settings; it also defines who is allowed to log in to your school, in what cases you can block a user from signing up or enable social logins.

This is the Sign in/up screen. Be sure to check the settings there and customize it to work for your dream school!

This is even more important if you plan to allow only paid users through 1-click funnels or operate a private school for specific users you want to enroll.

By clicking on the navigation option below, you will see the Site Navigation options. From there, you can control how a student navigates through your school.

For example, in our case at LearnWorlds, at the Just Launch It! Challenge, we operate a school with one course. This is why we choose the skip to the default after-login page and take anyone who logs in directly to the course page.

There are a few more options to explore here, such as sending someone who hasn't enrolled in any courses yet and a logout URL, where your users go after they log out.

With so much control, you can create a sales funnel or a customized learning journey!

Go through the General Settings

The last section on the left side of your school's menu is the 'Settings' menu. Be sure to go through those at least once.

It's essential to control the students' experience, regardless of whether you have a fully open or private social environment to the downloading permissions.

• School Info: These are your school's name, your company's name (if different from your school's name), contact details (e.g., phone number, email, address, and so on), notification email addresses (for support, for sales, for general contact), and social media business profiles. Be sure to complete this, as it will show up in your school's various places, such as receipts.
• Community Access: Who is allowed to comment, where, and how? Who can send private messages and more.
• Site Language: This is the language interface for buttons, automated messages, error messages, student menus, etc. You can choose to load one of the available languages or customize it yourself. Be aware that you can have one language per account.
• Copyright protection: Watermarking settings for videos and PDFs, and PDF permissions (for printing, copying, and downloading).
  Privacy/GDPR: The level of GDPR management and compliance. You can change it based on your local requirements.

Notification Emails

LearnWorlds sends several emails automatically. You have already received one saying that you have registered for the school.

In the notification settings, you will choose which emails are going to the instructor or the admins and which emails go to the students.

You can also customize the emails and the signature of those emails. It's a good idea to give your personal touch to those emails.

The emails are always in English. If you have changed the language of the school, the emails will also need to be changed.

Video Settings

Video hosting is included in all plans when using LearnWorlds. If you are already using your Vimeo or Wistia account and wish to keep using that, you can connect them with LearnWorlds to manage the videos directly from there.

Here, you will also be able to change some typical settings, like how videos appear in the course player and adjust the transcripts' settings.

Interactive transcripts are a premium feature for the Learning Center and above plans. You can read more about it here.

Learning Apps

Learning apps are applications/features within LearnWorlds that you can enable, disable, and manage from here. These are:

• Daily news app: An RSS feed of your blog/website to showcase news directly to a "newspaper" page inside your school.
• Best resources app: A notebook for your students to view their notes, highlights, and you can add external resources for them.
• People directory app: A page showing all your students in one place. People can discover, follow, and connect with others from here.
• Profile app: You can enable or disable the students' profile page. This is a page where students can share something about themselves with their social networks, and they can view each other's activities, such as posts and comments.

Course Settings

You have probably already seen the Access, Pricing, Settings, and Course Player tabs when creating and updating your course.

Those are all basic settings you need to go through before launching.

Access:

Those are the settings on how students access the course and its contents. Is your course paid, still draft, coming soon, free, or private? Do you release content weekly or 10 days after a student enrolls?

Pricing:

The price of your course, the discounts connected to it, and how to show the course's payment options. Is this course in a bundle or a subscription? Can the course be purchased at a discount with certain coupons?

Settings:

Your course's name, description, labels, images, category, and SEO fields.

Course Player:

How does your course player look? We have five themes and even more customization options to show up information and your students' progress.

Course Navigation / Prerequisites / Completion:

Course navigation is located under the Course Player settings. This is an essential part for anyone delivering continuing professional education (CPE) training or any other accredited or not program that needs to lock activities before progressing to the next activity. Read more about it here.

It's also where you can set the requirements for the completion of the course.

Double-check the sections

Check that all units are either Free or Paid. While working on your course contents, you might have forgotten to change a finished draft section into paid/free, so your students' will not be able to see it.
On the other hand, if you are offering only a few sections and still working on the last ones, remember to make them draft or "coming soon".

Test the content

While you are looking through the course settings, you will want to see that everything works correctly. Creating one or more test users is important.

A test user can be yourself with a secondary email that is a simple user without admin privileges, a colleague, or a friend helping you check that everything works well.

P.S.: Use the discussion here to ask from someone to help you as a test user!
It's pretty easy. All you need is to add a user, add a name, email, and then change the password to the one you will remember. You can see the full process by reading this article.

You can see the full process of how to create a test user account by reading this article.

Remember to also check the purchase journey by making a test purchase in Sandbox mode. Read more here.

Customize the Email Notifications

Using the email as your primary channel of communication between you and your students (and customers) comes with an added advantage: Automated Email Notifications.

These are "the voice" of your school, and you can send them out to your learners whenever certain events take place in your academy. For example, you can send an email to welcome them to your academy when they first sign up to your school, enroll in a course, or even when they complete an assignment. Editing the notification emails of your school is super easy.

Editing the notification emails of your school is super easy.

Through our notification center, divided into nine different sections, you can create and edit the text of the emails you want to send out.

Customizing your email notifications comes with a few handy guides. Go through them to create a dedicated message for each notification:

• Admin settings
• Learners Settings
• Email signature
• Affiliates emails
• Course emails
• Payment plans emails
• Registration emails
• SCA-related emails
• Subscription emails

There is also the option to send automated emails when drip-feeding the course content. Create an email course sequence or a notification when new course sections become available, and make sure to customize each email in the sequence.

Pricing the course

One of the biggest challenges course creators need to face is determining the price of their course.

• How much should you price the course?
• Will anyone be willing to pay for it?
• What if it's too cheap/expensive?

There are many tactics for pricing your course, and we have written an Ultimate Guide on How to Price Your Course.

A piece of quick advice will be to price above the level you would feel comfortable to ask. Then, test different price points by pre-launching the course, offering early access, special discounts for Black Friday, Christmas, Special Promo days, and diverse audiences.

Figure out where the best value for money is.

It might be better to sell five courses for $100 than sell 50 for $10. You will need to test what works for your audience.

Also, be sure to evaluate the time you need to spend with your students. A full self-paced course can be priced cheaply, but if you offer coaching, live classes, and feedback, you can't undervalue your own time!

Financials: Payment Gateways, Currency & Invoices

Chances are, you are expecting to get paid for your course, am I right? If not, you are either offering the courses for free, manually enrolling users, or using our API to do so.

It would help if you didn't forget to connect your payment gateway – through which you will set up the sales and receive the money.

LearnWorlds supports:

• Stripe
• Paypal
• Shopify
• PagSeguro

You can even have two or more payment gateways if you will combine, for example, PayPal payments with a Stripe Checkout.

Just remember, Stripe is the only payment gateway that supports subscriptions and payment plans.

Click on the one that works for you, follow the installation instructions and let the sales flow. 🙂

Local Payment Gateways

LearnWorlds is also the only one adding local payment gateways for specific European countries such as:

• iDeal (Netherlands)
• Bancontact (Belgium)
• Giropay (Germany)
• Sofort (Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Belgium, The Netherlands)
• Przelewy24 (Poland)

You can read more about these local payment gateways that work using Stripe here.

Go through the integrations

LearnWorlds integrates with your favorite tools, whether that's the software you are using to send mass emails, track visits to your website, or add a chat bubble!

If we don't have an integration, then this is probably achievable using Zapier.
For example, connecting Mailchimp with LearnWorlds will automatically sync all emails to your Mailchimp account, so your lists are always ready without additional work.

You can see all the integrations here or visit your school to check them out!
IMAGE

Connect your domain

Your trial LearnWorlds account looks something like myschool.learnworlds.com. This is not the best way to promote your brand (but it's not uncommon). A website that owns its domain name is more inviting and trustworthy because it looks credible.

With LearnWorlds, you have the option to go fully white-label on a paid plan, to connect your website domain, and enhance your branding efforts.

The white-label option can help you sell more courses or price them higher while at the same time differentiating you from the competition.

If you already own a website or a domain name, then you can connect that to your LearnWorlds account. You will need to choose whether to use your main domain as your school's website or a sub-domain. How does that work?

Let's say you own www.myperfectonlinecourse.com. You can connect your school to that address.

But, if you already have a website or blog connected to the domain, then you don't want to lose that. Here comes the sub-domain to save the day!

You can create a subdomain like "academy" and connect your school there. In this case, it looks like academy.myperfectonlinecourse.com.

Popular subdomains for this case are:

• Academy
• School
• University
• Course(s)
• Training
• Elearning
• Education
• Coaching
• Program(me)
• Online

Learn more about setting up your custom domain in this useful article published by our stellar customer support team and build your own branded academy in no time.

Step 9: Get Inspired by Successful Course Creators!

You are now ready for launching. All you are missing is the right funnel, and a marketing/sales strategy!

But, before we go to the next step, you are probably looking for some inspiration on how others have built their academies on LearnWorlds.

We have eight incredible stories, of course, creators finding success using LearnWorlds to create & deliver their online courses.

You can download and read their stories from here:

• School of Calisthenics (Fitness)
• The Jar Method (Lifestyle / Instagram)
• NailArts (Beauty)
• Pause Platform (Family / Parenting)
• Learning Liaisons (Education / CPE)
• Virtual Kenpo (Fitness / Martial Arts)
• Improv Piano Tips (Music)
• Drone It (Hobby / CPE)

Step 10: Go Live

Going live means that you make your academy publicly available to people. Now is the time to start setting up and selling your courses.

There are numerous ways that you can start promoting your brand new online school and announce your online courses even before they go live. One of the most effective ways, especially if you already have an email list of subscribers, is to create an email sequence campaign to raise anticipation.

The great thing about sequence emails is that you can write them once and then use an email marketing tool to send them directly to subscribers.

Also, check out our Ultimate Guide on Marketing for Courses:

Here are More Resources to Help You Create and Sell Online Courses

Our very own LearnWorlds Academy is here to save the day and educate you on creating and selling online courses. Sign up to the LearnWorlds Academy and enroll in our online courses for free:

• Creating a Course With LearnWorlds</a
• How to Market Your Online Courses
• The Complete Guide to Creating Awesome Interactive Videos

Also, we have a huge database of support articles on our Help Center to guide you through the process of starting your online academy, and a variety of useful elearning resources to check out:

Checklists:

• Complete Checklist to Selling More Courses
• The Ultimate Checklist to Selling Online Courses with Email Marketing
• The Essential Checklist to Creating Learning Videos
• The Definite Checklist to Design Your Course Contents

Ebooks:

• The Ultimate Guide To Selling & Marketing Online Courses
  
• Selling Online Courses Through Email Marketing
• Video-Based Learning: A Complete Guide on How to Use Video to Improve Your Online Course
• Email Templates & Sequences to Launch Your Online Course
• How To Thrive In Affiliate Marketing
• The Essential Guide to Selling Online courses using Facebook Ads

Go through our ebooks and checklists and download them for free, or read our large collection of articles on our blog!

Online School Examples to Get Inspired By

All of this information may be overwhelming, but if you take it piece by piece, you will be surprised to find out that building an online academy from scratch is a lot easier than you think. We dare to say that it may even be easier than putting together a full-time traditional school.

You may be asking, how do we know?

Well, we believe that if you can dream it, you can achieve it. And we are proof that this is true because tons of people have done it, and today they are more than happy with their results.

Check out a few more beautiful online learning academies that were built with LearnWorlds. Take some inspiration from them, gather your ideas, filter out the ones that don't work, and start working on yours!

Example 1: The Unraveled Academy

Industry: Photography

As a remote learning academy for photography, and through its main branding message, the Unraveled Academy welcomes photographers of all experience levels, professional or amateur.

Their subscription-based program is bursting with courses from industry experts, networking opportunities, access to mentors and an inclusive, nurturing community. Their purpose is clear and stated right away "we offer artists a place to grow and create without fear of judgement and become masters of their own unique, creative journeys."

The Unraveled Academy leverages the menu and homepage to directly present visitors with the academy's course catalogue, events, workshops, and blog. Right from the homepage, it highlights most of its services, among which is the application to become an Unraveled Expert Artist (UEA), elaborating further on how this is a great opportunity for a UEA to become a community leader and the first to be considered for instructor opportunities.

In addition, the online school uses the popup feature of the LearnWorlds platform to initiate the conversion of website visitors who have read and scrolled through the pages into monthly subscribers and access to all its courses. It throws in a promo code as well to further enhance conversions.

Example 2: FX Launcher

Industry: Animation & Visual effects (VFX)

FX Launcher is a superb example of an online school that has a fully branded website presentation. A great example of how simplicity can create a bold and outstanding result. They have used just their logo's main color and a total black background on all the remaining sections, throughout the entire website, with a touch of the human element (photos of people in full branded outfits).

A quick glance at the academy's page reveals an online training marketplace that emphasizes energy, dynamism, and drive, boosting learners to kick start their career in Visual Effects, Animation or Film and trainers to get rewarded for sharing their knowledge online.

Example 3: ArtNight

Industry: Arts & Crafts

ArtNight has built a super creative online school full of inspiration for everyone interested in DIY projects in arts and crafts. They have embedded a video in the home screen of their online academy to add motion and vibrance.

Besides, they also have integrated their eshop with their online learning academy, so that learners can purchase a course on learning how to make a specific artwork along with the material they need to proceed with their DIY project.
By including a section on their online academy homepage to their eshop of DIY materials, ArtNight manages to provide a seamless learning experience to its learners and has created an additional revenue source for its business! Simple, yet so genius, right?

Example 4: SELTROVE

Industry: Educational Services – Teacher Training

SELTROVE provides online courses and workshops for preschool through 12th grade teachers., students, and schools (e.g., for elementary schools, middle schools, regardless of whether they are public schools or private educational institutions or online schooling institutions) on learning social and emotional learning skills. Their focus is on social emotional learning and their message is straight to the point and clear throughout the whole website of their online academy.

Apart from the distinct online courses that SELTROVE provides, there is a wide array of useful training material on their homepage (e.g., planners, toolkits) that teachers can directly purchase. Additionally, the main menu is well organized by the type of solution they provide or concern they address.

Example 5: SUPAKIT

Industry: Pet Training (Cats)

Supakit is a luxury cat accessories brand, providing premium cat apparel worldwide. After years of global success and branding building, they decided to increase their range to include learning courses that run parallel to their products, providing consumers with the skills needed to get maximum enjoyment from their Supakit accessories.

The Supakit Academy was launched in the summer of 2021 and it is a remote learning center for cat owners who'd like to unlock their cat's true potential. The first Supakit course, How To Harness Train Your Cat, is targeted at cat owners who would like to take their cats outdoors on a harness and leash; whether to go on holiday or simply to take some leisurely strolls, this cat-specific course caters to both beginners and avid cat explorers looking to improve their skills.

Supakit also utilizes Learnworlds' community feature within the Academy. They already have a large social media community, so they understand the importance of peer support and encouragement. The community feature has allowed them to effortlessly transfer their social media community over to their learning center.

As an eCommerce retailer, Supakit has managed to scale its business by selling its physical products along with their newly introduced digital products (their online courses) through Shopify and delivering them on LearnWorlds.

Conclusion

Putting the work into creating, marketing, and selling your online courses, offers you the potential to make a six-figure income. Besides, everything is possible with an LMS, an online teaching platform that can adapt to your learning business model and is branded as your own virtual school.

So, make sure to start your own free trial with LearnWorlds today and start creating amazing learning experiences!

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Infographic: 10 Steps to Starting Your Online School or Academy

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Nick Malekos

Nick Malekos is a Senior Digital Marketer in LearnWorlds. He is a results based and well-rounded Digital Marketer with years of experience in the education industry, writer and digital literacy trainer.

Kyriaki Raouna

Kyriaki is a Content Creator for the LearnWorlds team writing about marketing and e-learning, helping course creators on their journey to create, market, and sell their online courses. Equipped with a degree in Career Guidance, she has a strong background in education management and career success. In her free time, she gets crafty and musical.

How To Create An Online University

Source: https://www.learnworlds.com/how-to-start-an-online-school/

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