Come November and It is going to be a year since I offered my course on Skillshare and I currently have 44 students (one deleted recently and more on that later) but it has not been a profitable move to Skillshare, though initially I had hoped for much better results. So, for those of you who are planning a course or courses on Skillshare, here is my advice, “You aren’t going to make it big from this learning portal”. Why? Because you make very little money after spending a ton of efforts creating your course. True, there are instructors making a big money on Skillshare but these are very few and they are the top elite instructors and teachers, the cream of the crop. These top paid instructors have more than one course too. Most others are making only peanuts. Even those with 1000’s of students make very little money. One instructor even has a over 6000 students and makes just about a 100 US Dollars a month. Pathetic!
Now if you are considering Udemy, that is another “No No” from me. In fact, I wanted to launch my course on Udemy in 2016 when I first made it. It was when Udemy were slashing their course fees to $20 per course. I had taken a year to make my course partly because Help & Manual had moved from version 6 to version 7 and I had to remake all videos I made with version 6, for version 7. Udemy said they are never going to change the course fee and asked me to split my course into 5 or more smaller courses, offering each for $20. There was no way I was going to do that. I then went with Teachable and had my course there for a year or so. Sadly, Teachable does not do the marketing (not sure if they have tools now) but back then you had to market your course but setting the price of the course is the course maker’s choice.
Last year when I decided to put my course back online, I did start with Udemy. This time, one of the videos would never get approved by them no matter how many times I edited and re-created it. It was probably a blessing in disguise. Also, with Udemy you’ll be making half or even lesser than the course price you set and there is no place for project work of your students to be uploaded or showcased. Udemy even offers courses for free and that is tragedy for course creators. It was then I researched Skillshare but now I am convinced even Skillshare isn’t the place. A few weeks ago, I notice that a student who joined in April has been deleted. All premium minutes that the student had taken (some 300+ minutes and that too in August/September) for which I get paid, also gets removed. When asked I was told spurious accounts are checked on a daily basis and deleted. If they were checking on a daily basis how come they couldn’t detect a fake or disingenous account as they call it since April. I haven’t had any experience with Coursera but I am not going to try them either.
I am left with only two other alternatives, use Kajabi and Thinkific type of portals or create my own course and classrooms on my website all by myself. LMS tools for WordPress exist for this but the work to be done is “a lot” for this.
Whatever be the case this time my future course will be priced reasonably and not offered for free as in the sites mentioned above. Putting a price on a course also elicits better participation from the students.
Watch this space for announcement of future course.
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