As Thinkific reviews go, this will be your most in-depth and comprehensive look at the online course platform. As we’ve reviewed many other platforms, we’ve come to find that there are certain features that some platforms deliver well, however, others that fall shy of what course creators need to be successful. In this review, we’ll highlight the great features and share what we think can be improved upon.
- What is Thinkific?
- Why Thinkific was Created
- Features Breakdown
- Manage Learning Content
- Designing Your Site
- Market and Sell Your Course
- Advanced Reporting
- Students Support
- Your Settings Area
- Getting Help from Thinkific
- Thinkific Pros and Cons
- Key Takeaways for Instructors
- Thinkific Rating
- Frequently Asked Questions
What is Thinkific?
Thinkific is an online course platform. It offers instructors a collection of features designed to create, market and sell their courses. These include a course creation tool, a website builder, a marketing and sales suite, and student engagement tools.
Why Thinkific was Created
It all started back in 2012. Something interesting happened. Greg Smith decided to take his LSAT course online with the help of his brother Matt. And it was a success. The revenue generated from his online course eclipsed that of his corporate law practice. And with the success of his online course, other entrepreneurs began to ask questions about how they could cash in on online courses.
So, Greg and Matt, along with Miranda Lievers and Matt Payne got started on what you now know as Thinkific. And in the last 7+ years, the team has achieved some amazing feats. Over 50,000 course creators have used the platform, 75 million courses have been taken, Thinkific is used in 190 countries, and they’ve helped course creators earn over $500 million.
Thinkific is home to some of the most prominent names online. Customers include former athlete and professional football player Lewis Howes, who teaches how to build a lifestyle business; Jonathan Levy, serial entrepreneur and founder of the SuperHuman Academy and TedX speaker who helps people improve their learning and memory skills; and Entrepreneurs on Fire award-winning podcast founder John Lee Dumas, who helps entrepreneurs launch and grow their businesses through coaching and online courses
Features Breakdown
Getting started on the platform is a simple two-step process. The first involves entering your name and email address, where the second is all about a series of onboarding questions all collected on one page. After that, you are immediately transported to your Thinkific dashboard.
Onboarding
Onboarding is an essential practice and one we've seen used across the board for all education platforms. It's the smartest way to help course creators get started. And for Thinkific, they've created a simple four-step process to help you become acclimated with the platform.
Her’s what that looks like:
Step one is the creation of your account.
Step two is about exploring the platform, how things work, and all that you can accomplish using Thinkific. And we love the idea that demos are in the form of a video. It’s easier to get through and a great way to communicate what could be seen as a complex experience in a simple way.
As you move through step two, you begin building your school. Thinkific uses the term "school" as a place where all instructors can offer an unlimited number of courses. During the onboarding process you can customize the course player and later preview it.
When you preview your customized school for the first time, you experience a pleasant surprise. A new window pops up with a video delivered by Paddy who walks you through the Thinkific student experience tour. Paddy explains that everything you see is customizable.
The preview window also includes short example videos. The second example video, or lesson two, is designed to show you what students see when they first access your course. It's a rundown of how to use the course of navigation menu. Students learn how to cycle through content, watch videos, ultimately check off what they have completed, and use the comment section (if enabled by an instructor). While all of this seems amazing, we love the idea that the student experience also includes a sample survey, presentation lesson, download lesson, text lesson, and a quiz.
Course backend
Student course preview
As you can tell, a considerable amount of thought has gone into helping instructors quickly take to the platform. Completing the onboarding process leaves you feeling much more equipped than you'd imagine, lessening any anxiety you may have built up about creating your own online course, especially if you have zero experience.
Thinkific's dashboard also comes with a handy progress bar. As you build out your course, the course progress bar is measured as a percentage towards getting ready to launch. As far as the building experience goes, this transforms the idea of creating a course from a seemingly challenging one to a fun, light, and exciting undertaking.
Manage Learning Content
Once you've completed the on-boarding process, you are pretty much good to start exploring the rest of the Thinkific dashboard. There are five core sections to work in, starting with the Manage Learning Content area. This part of your dashboard includes five sections.
Courses
Courses is where you'll find any existing course or begin to create a new one by clicking on the New Course button in the top right-hand corner of your browser window.
To get started on editing an existing course, simply click on the course and you'll be transported to a new tab. We love the idea that Thinkific continues the learning process for instructors by paying attention to how much experience instructors gain on the platform. As a newbie, Thinkific offers a quick tutorial on how to create your first lesson.
Creating a New Course
By default, loading your course page will show the course created during the on-boarding process, but this doesn't prevent you from creating a new course altogether and deleting the other. Clicking on the New Course button will launch a pop-up window to choose a course template.
Thinkific offers six course template options. They are:
- Blank: create a new course from scratch and tailored to your specific needs.
- Pre-sell: promote your course and generate interest by collecting email addresses for your course waitlist.
- Mini-course: create a free or low-cost mini-course to generate leads you can later upsell to a more comprehensive or flagship course or service.
- Flagship Course: create a complete online course with a comprehensive curriculum.
- Webinar Replay: host webinars that replay to allow registrants to view your presentation or offer on demand.
- Membership Resource Library: host a collection of downloadable content as part of a membership bundle.
Once you select a course template, enter your course name and click on the Create Course button. Thinkific will then send you through to the course section where you'll see a breakdown of your curriculum and the course template structure to edit and add content.
Thinkific has the ability to preview your course. Typically, most platforms offer a preview of a specific page or a limited preview of what students will see. Thinkific offers two options. You get to see all course lessons and the course as an enrolled student.
Building your first course offers a collection of features all presented as a menu at the top of your browser window. In addition to the curriculum, where you'll add chapters and lessons, you have six other tabs to explore.
These include:
Bulk Importer
Bulk Importer allows you to drag-and-drop video, audio, and PDF files. In fact, you can drag-and-drop 44 different file extensions, making it easy for anyone on a platform to quickly build course content. The bulk importer also allows you to add chapters and leverage the drag-and-drop feature to add content to each. This is a godsend for a comprehensive course. You don't need to upload individual file types as you build your course, but can send them into the cloud in one go and select them as you create lessons.
Settings
Settings lets you update backend aspects of your course. This area comes with seven sections, and these include:
Basic settings: update your course name, course URL, select an instructor, and upgrade your Thinkific plan if you haven’t yet.
Course image and description: add a course image description
Course Player Appearance: changing the design elements including the theme, primary color, font, and your course player logo.
Course Progress and Completion: customize how students progress through and complete your course by activating and deactivating video lesson autoplay, requiring video completion, enabling chapter completion messages, providing a completion certificate, and customizing your course completion page.
Page Code: If you need additional design elements added to your course, JavaScript can be added to the footer of your course. You can add variables like a student name, course price, product ID, and a course ID.
Admins and Revenue Partners: used if you'd like to give access to a limited version of your admin dashboard.
While there is a general settings section in the main left-hand navigation menu which includes some similar features, we like the idea that you get to make updates for each course via a unique settings tab. It makes for a cleaner course management experience.
Categories
Categories are a smart addition to Thinkific's dashboard. They become available when you have published at least two courses and allow students to sift through courses for classes on similar topics. You can add and remove categories, add a category image, add courses and remove, and edit categories.
Instructors
The instructors area shows a list of all instructors added to your school. You can add a new instructor by clicking on the New Instructor button. Doing so will send you to a page to add your instructor’s first name and last name, email address, title, a bio, and an instructor profile image.
The instructors page also allows you to search for instructors by first or last name or title. You also have a filter feature that allows you to arrange results by first or last name. If for some reason you need to export a list of your instructors, you have the option of doing so in CSV file format. And if you need to edit instructor details, the Edit button next to an instructor’s profile makes it possible.
Video Library
Building a course is a mammoth task. It requires a lot of planning and attention to detail. If you're considering creating your course or have already published one, you know that arranging content is likely one of the biggest challenges you’ll encounter. While we've touched on the bulk content upload feature, you really get to see it shine in the Video Library section of your dashboard. Thinkific allows you to upload your videos in bulk, add captions, and offers you analytics on their performance.
But exactly how feature-rich is this section? When we took a closer look, we found that you could preview your videos, edit video titles, add and update thumbnails, and close captions, change the color of your video controls, remove the students' ability to fast-forward videos, download, archive, and delete videos.
When it comes to video analytics, all you need to do in the Video Library is click on the Edit button for the video you are interested in, then scroll to the bottom of your page.
You'll find:
- A percentage of average engagement which indicates how much of a video is watched on average.
- The number of total plays a video received.
- A percentage that indicates a play rate. This represents how many people click on the play button after the page loads.
- The date when a video was last watched.
Altogether, we think these stats are gold. Few online course platforms provide this much insight on how well content performs. When you know these numbers, you can use them to structure your material and elevate the quality of your course.
Share Revenue
The Share Revenue section of your dashboard is dedicated to showing the revenue generated from a course produced with the help of other creators. This can be when you've actively partnered with someone to create content for a brand new course or where you're bundling an already-created course as part of a larger offer for your students.
This is one of the surprising features we’ve come across in Thinkific. It makes the daunting process of managing funds and making payments much more simpler. Rolling this feature in shows that they really have a good handle on who their instructors are and how they generate income.
In this section, you can create a revenue partner, determine what they receive revenue for, and assign a percentage they are paid.
Designing Your Site
Site design isn't for everyone. The idea of working with code or trying to understand it, or finding the right images and copy, make for a painful experience if it's not your forte. Thinkific handles the creation of your site in a simple fashion. Here's a look at what you get when you begin building your site.
Site Builder
Clicking on the Site Builder section will send you through to the Site Builder page. You'll be met with a welcome message and the option to start a tour that will take you through how to create and customize your course website.
Using the Site Builder, you'll be presented with a left-hand panel where you can make all your edits to content. To the right, you'll see a preview of your site where updates appear as you populate your left-hand panel.
This approach to site design has pretty much become the standard for online learning platforms. It simplifies the complexities of web design, making the process easy to complete. In the left-hand editing panel you can add and edit everything from header, banner and product sections to headings, buttons, body text, and images on your site.
Theme settings allow you to update the look and feel of your site. You can adjust everything from header and footer colors to the background, change colors for text , links, buttons and the accent of your site.
Thinkific has also given careful thought about the appearance of your site on various devices. Site Builder comes with a preview of your site in both desktop and mobile views, ensuring that students get the best possible experience as they learn about what you have to offer.
Theme Library
The Theme Library is where you'll find a collection of themes that can be added or used for your site. By default you'll have a preselected theme, and to see more click on the Explore themes tab at the top of your screen.
At a glance, it may appear as if Thinkific doesn't have much to offer in the line of themes. At the writing of this review, only three were available. But don't write off what they have just yet. Themes come with four styles that can be applied. Each style has a unique look and feel, color scheme, font styles and sizes, giving you loads to work with. And remember, everything you see in each theme is customizable.