LMS (Learning Management Systems) Websites
(also known as Online Schools)
An LMS allows you to create an online learning environment. You can create courses on any subject you wish to teach people about.
LMS websites bring extra considerations on top of Informational Websites.
Will your courses be free, paid or a mixture of both? Might you have one free lesson in a paid course as a taster?
Will a course start and end on specific dates, within a range of dates, or be always open?
Will you make all content available from the start of the course, or will you drip feed it over time?
Will you force students to complete certain sections before allowing them to continue to others? Do they need to pass certain tests before progressing?
How do you motivate students to compete your courses?
For paid courses will you accept staged payments, coupons, offer membership discounts?
Payment processing is obviously key if you are offering paid courses. Your potential customers need to trust that their financial and personal data is secure, and in many countries government legislation demands this. Throughout Europe the most well known example of this is GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations). These apply not only to eCommerce sites but to any site where you collect personally identifiable information (such as an email address).
How much does an LMS website cost?
You are providing the course content. Our job is to build the school onto which you add your content. The school will have a student portal where a student can enroll on a course, pay if required, and return at any time to see how much of each course they have completed and return where they left off. It will also offer all of the course delivery options mentioned above.
We’ll provide training videos and support you in all you need to administer your school.
As with all websites we can only give an indicative range of costs but we do have an incredible deal running on our LMS websites for a very limited number of customers.
Are there alternatives to an LMS website?
Yes. There are several “portals” – sites that have many different schools on them. You pay a fee and they handle the hosting and payment processing side of things.
You’ll be on the same site as all of your competitors of course, and will have limited customisation capability. The other risk to consider is what happens if the portal goes out of business. This may seem unlikely, but things can change very quickly in the online world. Who remembers MySpace? It totally dominated the music and video genre not so long ago. Also consider if a portal changes its monthly fees, how easy will it be for you to move all of your content and your students to an alternative? These are some of the reasons that people prefer to own their own school on their own website.
Well known portals include Teachable and Thinkific. Both offer a managed service with tiered pricing. The last time we checked both were charging $99 per month for equivalent features to the ones listed above.