Best Thinkific alternative for building online courses

If you are a developer/programmer who wants to create a coding course and needs a highly interactive platform for your learners, or you are already an instructor and want to migrate your content to a better alternative. If you are going to host your course on Thinkific, then it may be the wrong move for you as a coding instructor.

Thinkific is also a viable option to host your content, but have certain limitations in terms of coding courses.

I will tell you about the best Thinkific alternative platform so that you can give your learners a seamless experience.

Let’s dive in.

Why is Thinkific not a good choice?

Sometimes it makes sense to use Thinkific for your courses. But it doesn’t make sense when we talk specifically about coding courses. There are certain limitations and disadvantages to using Thinkific for hosting your coding courses.

Thinkific is not for coding courses

Thinkific is used to host courses in various fields (music, cooking, coding, finance, and so on) in general. Coding courses are not the only focus of this platform. The infrastructure of Thinkific does not focus on interactive courses. It is more sort of a video hosting platform with some quizzes. Practicing the learned things from videos is difficult in Thinkific.

It makes no sense to only upload videos for your learners to watch. There are other cheaper alternatives to do so.

Lack of practice

You can watch videos of a course uploaded on Thinkific. There is a lack of interactivity on Thinkific. Due to this, there are no labs or environments available on this platform to practice the theoretical concepts watched through a video. The Thinkific alternative we will see, give you special features for practicing.

You can lose interest in the topic as you go ahead in the course.

Lack of coding-related audience

Thinkific is a general-purpose content hosting platform. So, the audience using Thinkific are also related to various domains. In the coding section, Thinkific will only advertise the courses having more sales.

If you don’t have your own audience on your YouTube channel or thousands of Instagram followers, it is not easy for you to sell your coding courses and make some money.

It’s always a better choice to host your coding course on a platform designed specially to serve coding courses. Codedamn is the Thinkific alternative for this.

The best alternative to Thinkific for hosting a coding course

Codedamn is the ultimate Thinkific alternative, which will help you to cater to all your needs while building a coding course.

Why use Codedamn

1. Codedamn is especially for hosting coding courses and also the best Thinkific alternative.
2. Codedamn has more than 1 lakh registered users, most of which are developers.
3. Coding is highly interactive ( labs, quizzes, videos, and projects are available).
4. You can earn up to 97% of the total revenue generated through direct sales of your course.
5. The founder of Codedamn is Mehul Mohan. He is also a coding instructor and developer with more than ten years of experience. He knows the stuff requires to create a coding course.

Codedamn playground

Codedamn playground is a unique feature that is not available in Thinific. It helps Codedamn stand way ahead of Thinkific in terms of coding courses. It helps us to practice the concepts we learned throughout the videos and articles.

Playgrounds by codedamn are freely available in-browser IDE environments. Use them to code collaboratively with your friends without downloading anything on your computer.

You don’t have to use any external IDE when learning on Codedamn.
Codedamn playgrounds support multiple tools and technologies like React, Solidity, Java, etc.

Given below is an image of a demo React playground.

How to join the Codedamn instructor program

First of all, you have to sign up on Codedamn. Then, log in to Codedamn using your credentials & you will see a beautiful dashboard in front of you.

You can register yourself as an instructor in two ways. The first one is to click teach on codedamn on the navigation bar.

The second way is to click on the profile icon on the extreme right in the top end. A drop-down menu will open. Select the switch to instructor mode.

After switching to the instructor mode, codedamn.com/instructor will open on your screen. Click on sign up as an instructor. After this, the instructor dashboard will show up on your screen.

The instructor dashboard will show you every data related to your course. The analytics gets updated in real-time. It includes monthly revenue, course sales, comments, chat with codedamn support, etc.

The instructor dashboard looks something like this-

Set course pricing

Setting up the pricing of your course is one of the main aspects before launching a new Course.

You can set the pricing of your course using the following steps.

Firstly, visit the Instructor dashboard. Then, click on interactive courses. After that, you can set up prices for an existing interactive course or create a new one.

Codedamn provides you with five pre-defined tiers to set up the courses. You don’t have to worry about the price difference in different countries. These prices automatically adjust with the purchase power parity of more than 50 countries.

You can also keep your courses free for your learners. For this, you have to choose tier 0.

The five tiers are the following:-

How to earn money through Codedamn as an instructor?

There are two ways by which you can earn money as an instructor on Codedamn.

You can keep up to 97% of the total revenue made by the direct sale through your coupon or referral link. 50% of the total amount is rewarded to you if the sale happens organically. 30% of the total revenue is for you if the sale happens through Codedamn’s affiliate network or paid ads run by Codedamn.

There is also a second way to earn money from your coding courses. Users subscribed to Codedamn pro membership get the courses bundled with the pro membership. 35% of the total revenue made through Codedamn pro is for the content creators.

For example, Codedamn generates $120 of revenue per month from pro memberships. Suppose there are only two creators on the platform. Creator A gets a total content consumption time of 100 minutes, and creator B gets a consumption time of 200 minutes. The payout of creator A will be (100/(100+200)) * $42 = $14. The payout of creator B will be (200/100+200)) * $42 = 28$.

If you want to know the payment structure in detail, click here.

How to get your earnings?

If you are living in India, Codedamn can do a direct bank transfer for you.

If you are living outside India, Codedamn sends your payments through PayPal.

Build your first course

Now that you understand the basics of this Instructor program. It’s time to create your first course. I will show you how to build up your first course through an example of creating an Html Basics course.

First, switch to instructor mode from the user mode. Now, you are on the Instructor Dashboard. Now, click on the option of the interactive course on the left-hand side. Click on create a new course button.

Details of your new course

A new screen will open before you. Now, you enter all your course details like Title, subtitle, description, etc. Let’s see all the details you should fill in while creating a new course.

• Enter the Title of your course
• Enter the subtitle of your course
• Fill in the course slug (for example- Html-basics)
• Write a description of your content
• Upload an image of your course (appear as a thumbnail)
• Select a primary and secondary category of your course

Click on save changes. It will complete the basic overview of your course. It’s time to upload your course’s content (videos, articles, quizzes, etc.).

You can create multiple sections for your course. After the creation, it’s time to add some content to this section you created for your curriculum.

There are different content types available for you to include in your course. We will talk about them one by one.

Article

You can use an article to describe a topic. Insert a Topic for the article and start writing about it. There are plenty of editing options available to edit the article. You can also insert links and images in this.

Quiz

You can also include a quiz in your course, which you can use to validate the knowledge learned by a student in the previous article or video. This quiz contains multiple options to choose a correct answer. You can also add an explanation for this quiz, which the learner can only see after submitting the quiz.

Video

Videos are one of the main aspects of an interactive course. There is a video library available inside the instructor dashboard. You can use this library to upload videos you will use. It will take some time to include the videos in your content.

Lab

A lab is one of the unique features that Codedamn provides. It is one of the important elements while making an interactive course. Labs help the learner practice the topic on which he watched a video or read an article. Labs can take you quite some time to learn. Codedamn supports most of the tools and technologies commonly used for a coding course. If you find difficulty creating a lab for your learners, feel free to visit here.

The image below showcases all the above elements included in a section.

What to do when stuck?

There are various methods to use when you feel stuck in a situation. Some of them are:-

• Documentation:- you can always use the instructor’s documentation if you feel stuck. It is your best friend when you are creating a course on Codedamn.
• Discord:- You can join the instructor-only discord channel by Codedamn. Feel free to ask any questions on this channel.
• Codedamn support:- you can always contact codedamn support if you feel something is missing on the platform or other issues.
• Chat support:- there is a dedicated chat support available in the bottom-right corner of your instructor dashboard.
• One-on-one call:- You can book a slot for face-to-face interaction with Mehul Mohan (founder of Codedamn) to discuss the instructor program.

Conclusion

Codeadan is the best Thinkific alternative for hosting interactive coding courses. I discussed Codedamn’s instructor program in detail. I hope this will help you to start your journey as a coding instructor.