LearnWorlds Review 2021: A Standout Platform In Its Class

When we published our first LearnWorlds review, there were not many are out there. That’s definitely changed over time as the company has gained significant ground against major competitors like Thinkific and Teachable. We’ve kept our review up to date, though, and it continues to offer some of the most comprehensive insights you’ll find to help you determine if this online course creation and selling platform is right for you.

So, let’s dive in.

LearnWorlds Overview

If you’re an individual or enterprise who’s looking to create and sell online courses, LearnWorlds has definitely earned its “premium” title in its peer group of online course platforms. Not only does it provide a powerful sales engine, extensive analytics, and 3^rd party marketing tools to help you generate residual income, but it stands out from its competitors by allowing you to develop courses with an unparalleled capacity for student interactivity and engagement. To that end, LearnWorlds markets to a crowd of driven entrepreneurs and aspiring leaders who aim to provide learning experiences, rather than just courses.

Features and perks

• Unlimited courses
• Landing and sales pages
• Course builder, video uploads
• Ability to import SCORM courses
• Digital downloads
• Online testing engine
• Interactive engagement
• Built-in social network
• Custom domain
• Custom native mobile apps
• Full white label
• 24/7 customer support

The above list of features and perks hardly scratches the surface of what LearnWorlds has to offer. The full list is much longer and depends on the pricing plan you select. Because I don’t want to overwhelm you, I’m going to cover the most critical components you should consider.

Navigating the Interface

I would consider myself a moderate techie. As such, it doesn’t usually take long for me to efficiently maneuver around a new site or software application. However, after signing up for a free 30-day trial (no credit cards!), I was a little  overwhelmed by the layout of the dashboard. I’ve always preferred minimalist interfaces, and certainly didn’t think this dashboard was the easy on the eyes.

Nevertheless, once I focused on the top and left margins, the dashboard became much more intuitive. The design actually makes a lot of sense if you view the analytics as the command center, which effectively “commands” the center of the page. While it takes some effort to decipher all the visualizations, once you’ve adjusted, the possibilities are limitless.

Under “Active Learners”, you can see who is currently logged in, enabling you to promote engagement and collaboration in real time. You can also track your revenue and sales from the last 7, 30, or 60 days and trace how it has changed over time. Even though the analytics seemed daunting at first glance, I quickly came to appreciate how easy it is to access, understand, and leverage this feature. It takes the guesswork out of future decision-making and also allows me to make adjustments to current projects before continuing them.

The actionable elements of the page are in the top and left margins. Some of the most critical functions – such as “Create course” and “Preview page” – can be accessed from either area, depending on your preference as user.

Looking at the top of the page, I could tell right away that the first thing I needed to do was use the “School wizard” before creating a course. Whether you’re creating a school or entire course, the interface will walk you through everything step-by-step. It’s a very smooth process with detailed information explaining what’s happening every step along the way.

Creating your school is a simple two-step process of naming it and specifying the language, time zone, and currency. Once your school is set-up and you are ready to start creating online courses the course creation wizard prompts you to:

1. Name your course
2. Give the course an SEO-friendly URL
3. Select what type of course (free, paid, upcoming, or an invisible draft)
4. Select a price (if paid)
5. Upload a course image and description

Everything is super easy. LearnWorlds supports you every step of the way without assuming any prior knowledge. So if you’re a first timer, you can simply focus on creating instead of dealing with confusing or unhelpful navigation.

Once you’ve set up your course parameters, you’ll find that the text editor is not only familiar and user-friendly in layout, but also highly attractive. To the left, you can click “Layout” and scroll through a variety of eye-grabbing templates, visualizing them in real time to make the selection process fun and efficient. Just under layout, you can select the background color, add text by double-clicking the text fields, and just in case you’re not familiar with the font and text options, Learnworlds describes their function when you hover over them.

To the right, you have the option of using an embed code or uploading a video file. While uploading chunky video files can get pricey, all of LearnWorlds’ plans include unlimited video hosting – a valuable and comforting feature.

LearnWorlds review bottom line: Navigating LearnWorlds is very easy. Every step is accompanied with visual and textual clues for added support, making it as easy as possible to convert your ideas into a full-fledged online course.

Creating Learning Experiences

As someone who’s taught in both traditional and online learning environments for nearly a decade, I’m quite passionate about the breadth of learning experiences that a learning management system (LMS) – the fancy term for what LearnWorlds is – makes possible. The overwhelming majority of LMSes I’ve encountered to date do not offer anywhere near as much interactivity and engagement as LearnWorlds. While LearnWorlds dually functions as an e-commerce platform, you can tell there was substantial emphasis placed on instructional design techniques and accommodating different learning styles.

LearnWorlds offers:

• Live online classes
• An interactive video player
• Interactive eBooks
• Online Testing Engines
• Certificates
• Social learning

Now, especially thanks to COVID, there’s a newfound and unprecedented reliance on online learning. To best ease the transition and mimic the way students naturally learn, it’s important to incorporate synchronous learning via live online classes. That’s why LearnWorlds now seamlessly integrates with Zoom to support direct student-instructor interactions. The flexibility this Zoom integration affords is unparalleled, and includes one on one, group, and webinar classes!

The interactive video player is my favorite feature because it enables me to engage every learning style simultaneously. In other words, your videos can engage visual, auditory, verbal, and kinetic learners by including text and/or pop-up text, navigation buttons, questionnaires with feedback on your responses, external links, etc. You can automatically pause the video to draw attention to something or give the reader time to ponder your questions.

In addition, the interactive eBooks also function to engage multiple learning styles, such as verbal and kinetic! Your learners can highlight key or interesting areas of the text or make annotations directly on the reading. As an e-learning specialist and instructional designer, these features are rare to find in your standard learning management systems. Furthermore, regardless of whether you’re in a traditional or online learning environment, kinetic learners are often ignored, as it is difficult to incorporate this style into lessons while staying close to the learning objectives. With both the video player and interactive eBooks, your learners will be able to physically interact with the videos and readings.

In addition to embedded questionnaires or assessments within your videos or eBooks, you can also host them as stand-alone assessments to test your students’ knowledge on a module or entire course – it’s up to you how to structure it. Learnworlds’ online testing engine also allows you to generate custom digital certificates which can feature your brand, logo, course name, date of issue, etc.

As with the interactive videos, few platforms in LearnWorld’s class allow you to award certificates with this degree of control. Certificates are a tangible and thus powerful reinforcer of one’s competency and achievements. And, in addition to helping motivate your students, certificates can also boost your marketing. For example, students who share their certificates on social networks like LinkedIn will also be sharing your brand and drawing attention to your offerings.

Speaking of social networks: most platforms do a poor job of supporting interpersonal – or social – learning. LearnWorlds, on the other hand, provides built-in social learning tools that offer a wide degree of functionality. There’s no need for additional software, 3^rd-party plug-ins, technical complications, or privacy scares. Your students will be able to prompt meaningful discussions with questions, or exchange tips to help reinforce learning in a fun and social atmosphere.

LearnWorlds’ built-in social tools provide a much better experience than the inactive forums you see in most platforms. LearnWorlds actually provides a networking hub where each learner has a personalized profile displaying their activity, achievements, and the courses they’re taking. Not only is this an excellent tool for even shy learners to motivate themselves, but you become the center of a professional network in which learners can forge meaningful connections.

Finally, unlike most of the platforms in its class, LearnWorlds is SCORM compliant, meaning you can upload and configure high-interactivity course content according to the most widely adopted e-learning industry standard. (More about SCORM here.)

Note: This is a big deal. LearnWorld’s major competitors – Thinkific, Teachable, Kajabi, Podia – do not support SCORM. If you want/need to create courses in a standards-compliant authoring tool like Articulate Storyline or Camtasia, you really should use a platform that supports SCORM.

LearnWorlds review bottom line: LearnWorlds has done more than prove its commitment to foster interactive learning experiences. By maximizing interactivity with its videos, eBooks, assessments, certifications, and social learning tools, it has placed itself above the curve within the e-learning realm.

Building Your School Website

When it comes to building and branding your website for selling online courses, LearnWorlds has always done a great job of catering to design and coding gurus while still making life easy for the rest of us. With the more recent upgrades to its site builder, though, it has taken things to a new level.

The site builder makes it very easy for you to control the layout, visual elements, and overall look and feel of your school Website. There are hundreds of preset designs elements you can use. So if you’re looking to optimize your courses and maximize customer conversions, the hardest part is already taken care of.

The LearnWorlds site builder also makes it easy to connect to your social accounts, add in animated elements like countdown timers, pop-up forms, and a blog. Overall, I’m impressed with how much freedom it even affords users of the most basic technological proficiency.

One of my favorite features in the site builder is “site flavors”, which enable users to effectively create a new look and feel for entirely separate online schools. From a marketing perspective, this is brilliant! Let’s say that you’re creating and selling courses on completely unrelated topics like software development and lifestyle wellness coaching, then you might want to categorize them into different schools to really hone in on a target audience/market. The ability to further customize the full site design of these schools is indispensable, particularly from a customer conversion perspective! (Note: Site Flavors requires a Learning Center level subscription, though you can try it our in the free trial.)

Another key feature of LearnWorlds’ sleek designs is that they all offer mobile responsivity. Your audience or demographic might be more inclined towards learning on iPads, tablets, and smartphones rather than PCs. If you’re not familiar with using HTML and CSS to make necessary adjustments for different devices, then LearnWorlds’ mobile and tablet ready designs will do the heavy lifting for you. Your students won’t need to download any native apps. That said, if you want to create a mobile app for your school LearnWorlds can do that for you. (See more on this topic below in “Marketing and selling your courses.”

While I do have basic HTML and CSS skills, I was quite impressed with not only the modern and professional template designs, but also the breadth of options. Nevertheless, you might have a very specific vision in mind for your brand and possess the know-how (or help) to execute it. In that case, LearnWorlds lets you effortlessly add code to customize any aspect of your courses, pages, and branding. You can even insert code so your sites can integrate with 3^rd party analytics and marketing tools.

The bottom line: Learnworlds’ most outstanding features is the range and customizability of its designs. While you don’t need to be a web developer to have an appealing and professional brand, you still have the option to customize any aspect of your courses and pages with coding.  With access to a wide range of pre-made design elements and extensive design tools, you’ll have ample options to customize your brand and minimal limitations!

Marketing and Selling Your Courses

When I began my career as an e-learning specialist 6 years ago, I mainly focused on conquering learning curves related to course development. Marketing and selling was certainly on my mind, but I’ve always preferred platforms that take on the majority of the marketing work while also providing me with new ideas. LearnWorlds definitely does not disappoint in this area.

Like many other platforms, LearnWorlds supports effective search engine optimization (SEO) with clean code for its software along with the ability to manage metatags and keywords. Other common features it provides include:

• Subscriptions and plans: Subscriptions are a great way to generate residual, rather than one-off income!
• Coupons and promotions: Increase your sales with temporary discounts! The urgency and scarcity of your offerings will spur them to action!
• Free courses: Attract more leads with free offerings! Entice potential customers with a commitment and risk-free taste of what you have to offer!
• Integrations: If LearnWorlds doesn’t provide a marketing feature – or you already have a preferred option – chances are it’s got you covered by the range of integrations it offers with third party application. (See the full list of integrations here.)

In addition to the above, some LearnWorlds marketing and selling features that really stood out for me include:

• Free chapters: offer small parts of your courses for free, as teasers, to attract potential customers. Let them taste the added value of your offering and then buy.
• Conversion Pixels: You can easily add add tracking pixels to create custom audiences and launch remarketing/retargeting campaigns on platforms like Facebook and Google.

Native Mobile Apps: Already mentioned above, but well worth repeating. LearnWorlds can create a native mobile app for your school that will enable you to get your courses in front of millions of potential customers in Google Play and Apple App Store.

Finally, you can take advantage of LearnWorlds’ impressive,  full-scale analytics to understand your customers’ behavior and maximize conversion rates.

LearnWorlds review bottom line: LearnWorlds provides an effective marketing and selling platform, especially for content-first creators who would rather not fixate on these details. Nevertheless, implementing certain features like coupons, drip courses, and subscriptions has never been easier!

Reporting and Analytics

Without a means to evaluate user engagement and course efficacy, your sales can only go so far. Fortunately, LearnWorlds provides capabilities to optimize user engagement and course success by analyzing user segments and user progress. User segments enables you to fine-tune your learner-analytics strategy, whereas user progress pertains more to individual progress.

For example, user segments allow you to assess users from a more zoomed-out perspective – that is, based on user data points. Let’s say a learner has enrolled in more than one of your courses or received multiple certificates. Unlike before, you can now determine who, among all your users, fits this criteria, and take further actions like saving and reusing reports, exporting or tagging users in those reports, or zooming into learner-specific details, which perfectly segues into exploring learner progress.

LearnWorlds’ advanced learning analytics truly comes into play when assessing user progress from a more zoomed-in perspective. That is, rather than segmenting your learner base, you can assess your courses in terms of educational quality and efficacy. For example, you can finally (and effortlessly!) answer critical and analytical types of questions, including:

• Who did or did not finish the course through to completion?
• How much of each course did learners complete before giving up?
• What lessons, modules, learning objectives, or learning activities are causing learners the most grief?
• What are the learners’ individual scores or scores of different learner groups?

While online learning platforms often offer learner analytics, they rarely enable such in-depth, sweeping insights into learner activity. This ability is central to not only analyzing which aspects of your course are working well and should thusly remain untouched, but which aspects need improvement!

To maximize your learning-analytics capabilities, LearnWorlds not only enables you to segment users based on various learner data points to afford users with more angles of analysis. It also lets you analyze the scores, success, and completion rates of both individuals and user-defined learner groups to diagnose weak and strong points in your course.

LearnWorlds review bottom line: LearnWorlds provides some of the best reporting and analytics available within its class. This is an aspect of online course platforms that many aspiring course creators overlook, but it is critical to growing your course business over the long term.

Learnworlds Review: Pricing

As mentioned at the beginning, LearnWorlds positions itself as a “premium” platform. Given the breadth and depth of features it offers, this positioning is reasonable – and so is the pricing that goes with it.

At the lower end of its packages, LearnWorlds is actually comparable to most other platforms in its class. The “Starter” plan is $29 per month ($24 if paid annually) plus $5 per course sales. The Pro Plan – which drops the $5 per course fee and adds in a range of features like subscriptions, a Web site builder, SCORM compatibility, and integrations – is $99 per month ($79 if paid annually).

If you want to get the full “premium” power of LearnWorlds, then I’d highly recommend their most popular plan, the “Learning Center” plan which is priced at $299 per month, or $249 if you go for the annual rate (a saving of $600). This is more than most edupreneurs may be accustomed to paying, but it gives you a platform that truly will stand your learning experiences out in the market.

You can click the image below to see the full details regarding pricing. Better yet, I’d highly recommend taking advantage of their free 30-day trial. No credit cards or commitments required.

And as a gift for making it this far, if you do decide to give LearnWorlds a try, then use the code LEARNINGREVOLUTION50 to get 50% off on the first month of a Pro plan or higher!

By Sydney Mansaray for Learning Revolution

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some of the question I often get from readers or see asked in other places.

Does LearnWorlds have a free plan?

No. You can sign up for a free 3–day trial, but there is no option to use the platform free of charge beyond that.

Does LearnWorlds support SCORM?

Yes. In fact, it is one of the few platforms in its class that does. Thinkific, Teachable, and Podia do not. Read more about LearnWorlds and SCORM here.

Does LearnWorlds integrate with Zoom?

Yes, LearnWorlds introduced Zoom integration in 2020.

What are the main alternatives to LearnWorlds?

If you are considering LearnWorlds, the three other platforms I would recommend vetting are Thinkific, Podia, and Teachable.