When you master your major, it’s time to turn your personal blog toward a virtual online class. You can help others achieve success via your real experience and at the same time make a lot of money.
Unlike brick and mortar classrooms, an online teaching environment helps you attract a lot of students without worrying about class sizes. Just create the course once then utilize it a thousand times.
Making an online class website on WordPress sounds too technical and expensive at the beginning if you don’t have any expertise. Fortunately, there are supporting tools greatly simplifying this task for most online trainers.
Need more proof? Let’s break down why you should run a virtual class. After that, we’ll list out requirements for running an online class as well as steps to build one and start making money.
Benefits of online classes
Everything can go online now and it’s challenging traditional colleges and universities. As a result, a new adaptation or an alternative model is crucial to solving the situation. Instead of investing a lot of effort and expense on building lecture rooms, you can consider these enormous benefits of online training.
#1 Apply for multiple types of classes
You’re missing out on something huge if you think that only technical subjects like math or engineering can go virtual. Online training doesn’t limit you to the kinds of services you provide. You can teach online anything you’re professional at, from yoga, cooking to blogging and design, etc.
There is also a variety of programs and courses presented online. Students will have different choices among universities or even a one-time live-streaming classroom. They’re able to earn certificates and degrees too.
#2 Offer flexibility to students
Online courses give students the opportunity to decide their study time. They don’t have to attend compulsory classes on a fixed schedule. Since courses are always accessible online, it’s possible for them to take the lectures, complete assignments at any time without leaving home.
What’s more, the geographical factor might affect students when selecting which class to enroll in. Even if they are interested in the course, learners tend to give up due to long physical distance.
Online class tackles the issue with ease. You can attract learners from all over the world since the worry about accommodation or transportation is relieved.
#3 Provide unlimited class capabilities
A quality university class is capable of 30 to 50 students maximum. This means that you must organize and divide students into smaller groups and go to school multiple times just to teach one lesson.
With virtual courses, it’s possible to give speeches to thousands of learners at the same time. There is always a slot for them to sign up and join the class.
It’s a myth that online learning is designed for classes with a lot of students. This model enables you to offer one-to-one services too, for instance, math tutoring or career counseling. Since each student is at a different level, applying this type of class makes it easier for you to track their improvement.
#4 Reduce costs
Last but not least, the budget comes as the most outstanding advantage when comparing online and offline training systems. You’re permitted to prepare teaching materials, record videos in advance, and use them a lot of times. As a result, you save hundreds of extra hours to brainstorm new ideas and make your lessons more interesting.
Requirements to run a class online using WordPress
WordPress proves easy to use for most non-tech users thanks to its great flexibility. You can create, share, upload new content within seconds. You’re authorized to restrict content to members only using membership or LMS plugins as well.
WordPress enables you to provide different training materials, based on content types. For example, educational content can be formatted as pages and posts. Videos, podcasts, or live-training are for real-time sessions.
However, building a virtual classroom with this platform is not that simple if you don’t have the right method and direction. Apart from a required WordPress based website, you must find a way to get students to sign up for your class, make a payment, and access your courses.
Noticeably, it’s essential to protect your WordPress content, from pages and posts to videos. Imagine one learner has access to your class then shares the training materials with their relatives or friends. Consequently, you lose a huge amount of income and your precious content is leaked.
How to create an online class using WordPress
Let’s say you already have offline content in hand and it’s ready to be added to your WordPress site. The next step is installing an LMS plugin. Then, upload and manage your content to the site. After that, start selling courses. Remember to protect your valuable and hard-to-make materials.
Step 1: Pick a Learning Management System plugin
Rather than building an e-commerce store, adding a payment method, then finding a way to deliver content to students, it’s recommended to get the assistance from an LMS plugin.
There are hundreds of free LMS tools available on the WordPress repository for you to choose from such as LearnPress, Sensei. They’re all well-known plugins trusted by thousands of WordPress users so don’t worry about their quality.
All you need to do is find the one offering features that suit your business demands the best. Intend to build a simple online course website? Free LearnPress, Sensei should be your solutions. To design bigger and long-term programs, LearnDash premium plugin is your way to go.
Step 2: Manage your content
A learning management system will support you in managing courses and learners effectively. Upon installation and activation, they already create a well-organized system permitting you to add content, create quizzes, and watch statistics, etc.
In addition, it’s possible for you to communicate with students via multiple channels via support forums or chat rooms. Learners can also interact with each other, make friends, have fun, and bring the in-person environment to online courses.
Step 3: Protect your training materials
There is a chance of your students sharing educational pages, posts, PDFs, or videos with others. One person will pay for the course and others can access them for free. To prevent this, you need a comprehensive solution for content protection
For downloadable products like PDF guides, ebooks, and tutorial videos, it’s necessary to prevent learners from accessing directly or downloading them. What’s more, training pages and posts should be protected by passwords and user roles. Or at least, their original URLs need to be secure enough so that unwelcome users.
Prevent Direct Access Gold proves the best plugin to secure unlimited educational files. Instead of letting students view your files with the original URLs, you can replace them with private links. The outcome is that they will see a 404 not found page whenever accessing your protected files.
If you offer private lectures via WordPress pages and posts, secure them with passwords. Your students don’t have to log in to open their training doc. All they need to do is enter the correct passwords.
You’re able to make it even simpler by granting learners passwordless access to the protected content via quick access links. They can get rid of remembering passwords for individual pages and posts.
Make money from WordPress virtual online classes
We can’t deny the roles of online classes in modern teaching. Thanks to the support from WordPress as well as its free plugins, creating a virtual classroom has never been easier. Simply pick a suitable LMS tool available on the WordPress repository and let it handle the job.
Although learning management systems already provide their own features to protect your training materials. However, you can look for other specialized designed plugins to bring security to a higher level.
While PDA Gold prevents unauthorized students from accessing the original URL, Password Protect WordPress Pro enables you to lock WordPress pages and posts with passwords. Each plugin comes with its own sets of benefits that differentiate themselves from others.
Do you still have a question on how to run a virtual classroom online with WordPress? Let us know in the comment section below.
