How to Create and Sell Online Courses

The online education trend is growing all the time with high-speed internet connectivity and the ease of creating online courses. Choosing a reliable video hosting platform is critical to ensure a smooth viewing experience for students. Cincopa is a private video hosting platform with many benefits and features to help deliver high-quality educational content. Educators, eLearning professionals, and online course creators will find that it’s helpful to successfully create, host, and sell online courses.

What is an online course?

An online course uses an online course platform to teach knowledge or skills to anyone who wants to learn. Learning may be asynchronous where lessons are pre-recorded and students can access them from anywhere at any time. All they need is internet access and a device like a mobile phone or tablet. They can easily select video after video from a database of content and watch when they have time. This makes online courses a flexible and convenient educational option. Students may also log in at a specific time to listen to a live lecture.

Creating online courses with Cincopa

Cincopa video hosting and multimedia management tools make it easy to create professional online courses. As course creators, you are able to use educational videos, images, audio files, worksheets, etc. in your courses.

More bandwidth, speed, and storage space

Many online courses make use of videos because studies show that they allow students to retain more information than when using text alone. Self-hosting video courses isn’t a good idea due to the size of videos and the technical complexities of hosting and distributing them.

On the Cincopa platform, course creators can pre-record video lessons and upload them onto its servers. You can then embed them on your websites using a video embed code with video SEO automatically included. This results in better website performance, optimal page load speed, and higher ranking in search engines. When using Cincopa course creators don’t have to worry about bandwidth, speed, or storage space.

Customize, organize and control media

Organizing media is vital when creating an online course. Cincopa has many templates that allow course creators to organize course content. Customizing multimedia presentations may involve combining multiple videos into gallery sets to build a systematic structure for viewers to access.

E-learning platforms are useful for non-technical course creators but the Cincopa platform allows you to maintain complete control over course organization and distribution. Cincopa templates integrate with most web hosting platforms.

As a course creator, you can brand the HTML5 video player with your logo, choose brand colors and customize the controls to suit viewers.

Easy search

Automatic closed captioning and auto-tagging enhance search and help students easily access video content. With in-video search, they can access specific information in a video. Video chapters help to divide long videos into short sections with titles. Students can find what they need without having to watch the whole video.

On-video tools

On-video tools boost interactivity and enhance engagement. They include calls-to-action (CTAs), email collection forms, and annotated links. Students learn more when they learn actively rather than passively. They will click on a CTA and download an ebook or watch another video, fill in a contact form, or access an annotation for more information. Subtitles offer ways for a broader audience to interact with videos. This may be those watching videos in public places or those who are hearing impaired.

Automatic updating

On Cincopa it is easy to replace a video asset with a new version and automatically keep all the enhancements. Even when users upload multiple versions of a video, the latest version will be the active one.

Hosting and streaming videos

Hosting and streaming videos involve complex technical processes. Videos must scale in all browsers and on all devices to offer a good viewing experience. Video encoding, transcoding, and adaptive bitrate streaming are some of the technical processes Cincopa uses to ensure all viewers have a quality viewing experience. It also uses a content delivery network (CDN) with widely distributed servers so it can serve video content from the server closest to the viewer’s device. Viewers can experience streaming without any freezing or buffering.

Cincopa’s security for online courses

A free video hosting platform often comes with various limitations such as lack of customization and limited control over privacy settings. It is almost impossible to keep videos private to limit access to those who purchase a course. One of the most important aspects when creating online courses is limiting video access to those who purchase a course. Without proper security, it is easy to pirate online course videos and redistribute them without consent.

Online course creators have to comply with increasingly stringent data privacy regulations. These regulations help to prevent identity theft and data breaches. Course participants want to know that their confidential information is safe and secure.

Some of Cincopa’s security measures include:

  • Two-factor authentication – requires a second step of authentication that offers more security if a password is compromised.
  • Encryption – uses mathematical models to scramble data so only parties who have the key to unscramble it can access it.
  • Domain Lock – only allows embedding of videos on listed domains.
  • Watermarking – adding a visible watermark to videos makes it more difficult for unauthorized sharing to go unnoticed.
  • User permissions – limits viewership to registered users enrolled in a course.
  • Right-click control to prevent unauthorized viewers from downloading videos.

Selling online courses with Cincopa

In the eLearning industry, businesses can make income from subscriptions that give students access to a range of learning materials. On CincoTube, you can create a video library of playlists on auto-play so students can sit back and learn. Secure private channels keep videos safe from unwanted viewers and students pay a monthly recurring fee for access. Course creators can drive leads with CTAs, forms, and auto-generated captions. You can track what students are watching and give them access based on their course and learning level.

Integrating Cincopa with a Learning Management System (LMS)

An LMS is a common tool online educational institutions use to build websites and educate students. It isn’t designed to stream videos effectively. Integrating an LMS with a video hosting platform like Cincopa offers a quality learning experience.

Cincopa integrates with Shopify which has an LMS application that allows course creators to sell online courses. Magento is another ecommerce platform Cincopa integrates with where it’s possible to sell online courses and it also provides you with all you need to sell online.

An LMS allows course creators to build courses, create quizzes, utilize mobile interface techniques, etc. You can synchronize the completion of videos and viewing data with LMS reports. This can provide an understanding of how watching videos is impacting grades and progress.

Cincopa integrates with Moodle, Skillsoft, Brightspace, Edmodo, and Blackboard. It is even possible to add LMS functionality to a WordPress site using plugins.

Using marketing tools and analytics

The use of marketing tools and analytics makes it possible to track course performance and optimize sales strategies. Online course creators can receive insights into how specific videos are performing and measure student engagement, attention span, etc. On Cincopa video heatmaps give deep insights into how students interact with videos. This enables course creators to make data-driven improvements that offer the most benefits.

Conclusion

Course creators who create online courses and sell them from an online course platform have an exciting opportunity to share expertise with a wide audience and generate income. It is important for you to create high-quality videos and choose the right video hosting platform. you must be able to implement strong security measures and have access to analytics if you want to establish a successful online course business. 

For course creators, Cincopa offers a free 30-day trial. You can try the platform with this offer and explore how it can help you to succeed in the online education space.

Originally published on June 28th, 2024
The Blog

How to Create and Sell Online Courses

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