Being good at something has many incentives. You get to help those around you, you also can start making some easier money. One such way can be to start your own on line course. This can be sold easily as a paid product, but only if you prove your competence.
Thrive Apprentice is a great platform for making your own course online. Today, that is exactly what we will be taking a look at in our Thrive Apprentice review.
What is Thrive Apprentice?
Thrive Themes is a quite well known platform right now. They let you build great websites very easily using templates and ready made components. Thrive Apprentice is a WordPress extension that is included after you get a Thrive Themes plugin suite.
Thrive Apprentice lets you create digital courses easily serving as a learning management system. The service can be bought as stand alone or by membership. The membership will also include Thrive Ultimatum, Architect and Themes. These are just to name three, but you will find many other smaller incentives.
You might just decide to customize the theme into doing it. However, that approach does not let you create something really special. In brief, its just some content being displayed by word press. Online courses need to have a visual aesthetic that compares differently to a general blog.
Building Your Own Online Course
To start building your own online course, you will need Thrive Apprentice in order to follow the next steps. You can also get the entire suite, if you have a business going on too. It can be very helpful to optimize your website for general conveniences and designs.
Getting Started
After you have activated the Thrive Apprentice plugin, you will be able to access the dashboard. Just like any other Thrive Apprentice tool, you will get a popup asking you something. In this particular case, you will be asked to create your Course Dashboard.
You can personalize the template however you want. You can also skip this step and do it at a later time, however – it is highly advisable that you do take part in it. Customization is important in adding to your brand value. Assuming you know what a dashboard is, all your customers will be redirected to this after the first click.
Filling in the Details
Now you will be prompted to fill out the intricacies of your course. You will need to add a title, a description and an image. If you want to make use of videos, it is obviously available. Be sure that you use the features available for best engagement with the visitors.
After saving, comes the most important part of Thrive Apprentice. The modules and the structure of the courses. This is what your future students or customers will be viewing when accessing the courses. You will have a lot of creativity to utilize here, but make sure to not go overboard.
The best approach to making a course like this is to keep it balanced. Do not make it too flashy. It may appear unprofessional to do that in a domain that is mostly about learning. At the same time, underwhelming your course will not give a good vibe either.
Making the Models, Chapters and Lessons
Your courses will need to be separated into different modules for a student to navigate properly. Each of the modules will also consist of chapters, but more on that in a bit.
When setting up the modules, give them a title and create a description for understanding what is taught in them. For example, the first module can be called “Introduction”, and the description can be “This module explores the basics of programming” for a Python programming course. Also, you have to make sure whether you want the comment facility to stay on or turn it off.
Chapters can be dfined in a similar manner next. It is not necessary to make the description as elaborate as the module name.
Finally, you will create the lessons, but you will have the option to choose from any combination of text, audio or video. For audio, you will be able to put it up as a URL, while for video, embedding it is the way to go.
With that, you are set on having made your first course through this Thrive Apprentice Review, the base line of it at least.
Using the Premium Course Options
In case you find the UI of Thrive Apprentice, you can always use it to sell premium courses. While it is possible to have free courses through Thrive Apprentice, a lot of individuals tend to use Thrive for lead management. You will however, need third party integration for this.
Sendowl integration works very efficiently with Thrive Apprentice. You can have a shopping card, a course UI and affiliate management using Sendowl Moreover, there is a tutorial available for you to understand how to integrate Thrive Apprentice with Sendowl.
You can sell your course even more easily as a membership. This way, you can attract more people for a “community” like place. The thing to take note of here is to make sure that you are staying within your limits. Do not try to sell something that is more than what you can serve.
Course Monitoring
Now that your course has been set up, you can understand how your users will be navigating the system. Unfortunately, learners will tend to show very different behavior, so you can’t really predict this and have a premade design.
Regardless of that, you need to make a course tracker and monitor. Your learner will need to stay in track to keep their progress in a positive trajectory. Also, it is likely that they will require reminders every now and then to finish the course they started but haven’t finished.
The cookies feature that Thrive Apprentice has built into it makes sure that the learner’s progress is being saved into it, without needing of third part integration. Every time your student finishes a course or a module, that particular lesson gets marked as complete.
This gives a new horizon to the learner’s overall experience, as it is easier to look at their own progress and understand where to focus next.
Things to Remember
Here are just a few points to keep in mind when making a course using a learning management system.
Video over Audio and Text
Strange as it may sound at first, video is the format of online courses that have proved most useful in the past. While text and audio facilities can be great as an additional resource, majority of the students will prefer video over it.
There is a high chance that a student will be more interactive with a video than with any other medium of learning. Video has become very crucial to educational systems everywhere, and statistics show that students tend to process video knowledge 60, 000 times faster than text.
Notes, Diagrams and Snippets
In case your course ends up being long, you have to facilitate some things to make sure it’s not a snooze fest. This includes notes, diagrams and snippets. After you have explained something on a course, it is helpful to have that followed by a short note that has all of the content summarized in short.
Diagrams and snippets work in the same way. When explaining a very complicated process or system, it is very helpful to include it in a diagram later so that the learner can remember it rather easily. Instead of needing to keep going back to the video, a diagram or snippet helps the brain remember things we already learned much more easily.
Drip-fed Content
When making a course like this, it is important to remember that not everyone will be as dedicated as others. For this reason, a “drip-fed” approach proves effective. What this means is, a learner cannot progress to the later parts without completing the previous parts.
Skimming through videos will prove to be ineffective in this case, as you will have to pass a short quiz in order to access the next portion. Why is this important? You want your course to be as effective in practice as possible. This can easily be achieved by making it a mandate to go through most of the content in order to access later parts. Otherwise, don’t be too surprised if a student ends up finishing a 10 hour course in 20 minutes!
What is the Target Audience for Thrive Apprentice?
Generally speaking, anyone can create a course if they have enough knowledge about it. Thrive Apprenticeship tries to be welcoming to everyone, but also do a little more. Before we get into who the target audience is for Thrive Apprentice, we need to do a little review of Lead Magnets.
Lead magnet courses refers to links and advertisements that appear on other websites that attracts people to the original source. The whole point of this is to market the course to people on the internet, specially those on alike websites or content.
So Thrive Apprentice is mainly, but not restricted to, for:
- Individuals who want to sell their free courses as lead magnets. Maybe you are someone who has a lot of knowledge on a particular domain, and are unable to teach it right now physically in classrooms. You could also be someone who has extensive knowledge on particular topics and need to generate some extra cash for your next step in life.
- People who are already certified good teachers according to their audience, and now wish to offer their services for a more premium experience. Many YouTube instructors tend to do this after running free tutorials for years. Usually, these end up doing well in their case for already having an existing fan base.
- Business owners who offer courses as a service. Instead of hosting them elsewhere, you can offer your services using the optimized UI and UX of Thrive and also generate traffic towards your courses. It is also great if you already know about selling courses online, making Thrive Apprentice even easier to use.
These are a general demography that Thrive Apprentice has been used most by in the past. There are many, many exceptions and thus taking this as an evidence for anything might not prove effective in most cases. Remember that anyone can be a teacher as long as they have the skill to teach, regardless of age or status!
Pros and Cons
Like everything in life, our Thrive Apprentice review would be incomplete without one of these. Regardless of how great Thrive Apprentice is, there are definite flaws. However, let’s go through what they get right at first.
Pros
- Thrive Apprentice is competent as a Learning Management Solution, and the pricings are also cost effective. You do not have to worry about some hefty, heavy price for every month. Rather, Thrive Apprentice makes it easier for e-learners and e-teachers.
- Very user friendly interface. It makes navigating the pages easier, and interactivity with the system is also optimized.
Cons
- You will be unable to find a shopping cart. It can be done by integrating a third party integration. This is ineffective, as a learning management system should have a simple facility as shopping carts.
- There is no content protection in the software. It is open to some risks of security, thus there is a chance of being attacked by malware or hackers at times.
Conclusion
To conclude our Thrive Apprentice review, it is a great platform for teachers and instructors to start off their online courses. It provides enough facilities for the initial steps, and then can be improved with integration of third party software or content. The reason Thrive Apprentice has proved useful in the past for many is because of its accessibility and easiness of use.
We hope this article has answered some of your questions and that you now feel more comfortable trying out Thrive Apprentice. Happy teaching!