Greetings, and welcome to our comprehensive review of LearnWorlds.
Within this article, we will delve into the widely recognized Learning Management System (LMS) and online course platform known as LearnWorlds. We aim to provide an overview of its functionality, explore pricing options, thoroughly test its primary features and tools, and conclude by sharing our expert assessment of its strengths and weaknesses based on our hands-on experience.
Are you prepared? Let’s embark on this journey together.
What is LearnWorlds?
LearnWorlds offers creators a versatile platform for developing and marketing their own courses directly from their website.
With LearnWorlds, you have the capability to craft an entire online course from the ground up, complete with a high-conversion website for hosting it. Furthermore, the platform provides built-in marketing and sales tools to kickstart enrollment.
To enhance the learning journey, LearnWorlds is equipped with an array of advanced engagement features. These include an interactive video and course player, adaptable assessment tools with question banks, comprehensive analytics and reporting, a community building feature, a gamification engine, and much more.
We’ll delve deeper into these features shortly.
What features does LearnWorlds offer?
LearnWorlds boasts an extensive range of features that go beyond what we can cover on this page. Nonetheless, it’s vital to highlight the primary features that you need to know about are:
- Course builder
- Course player
- Interactive videos
- Assessments
- Website builder
- User management
- Marketing tools
- Mobile app
- Analytics and reporting
- Learning Apps
Now, we will delve deeper into each of these features directly within the LearnWorlds user interface. We’ll commence with the topmost feature.
Getting started
Upon your initial registration with LearnWorlds, you’ll encounter the School Wizard, designed to gather essential information about your business and assist you in establishing your interactive online school.
Subsequently, you’ll arrive at the primary dashboard, resembling the following:
Within this dashboard, you can readily access a summary of crucial key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to your online store or school. Additionally, you’ll find user-related data and a log of recent events.
On the left-hand side, a sidebar is prominently displayed. By selecting various tabs within this sidebar, you can gain access to LearnWorlds’ primary features. Let’s begin by examining them, commencing with the “Courses” tab.
Courses
LearnWorlds’ primary standout feature is its robust online course builder, streamlining the process of creating educational content.
To begin, navigate to “Courses” and select “Create Course.”
A window will appear, prompting you to input fundamental details about your course. This includes specifying a name, image, description, URL slug, access type, pricing, and delivery options.
When it comes to pricing, LearnWorlds offers the flexibility of setting both a starting price and a discount price, a feature that can significantly boost conversion rates.
Regarding delivery options, you can either grant students immediate access upon enrollment or set up a drip-feed schedule. With drip feed, course content is scheduled for delivery at specified intervals, such as releasing individual lessons on specific dates or unlocking content based on the date of enrollment, like a new lesson or chapter every week or every three days.
Once these details are set, you’ll enter the drag-and-drop course builder, which is remarkably sophisticated, flexible, and user-friendly. The top of the page features tabs for Layout, Content, Access, Pricing, Settings, Course Player, Video Library, and Dashboard.
Within the Layout tab, you can intuitively edit your course enrollment landing page using a drag-and-drop interface.
We’ll delve deeper into this feature when we discuss the site builder. For now, let’s navigate to the Contents tab to begin constructing our course content.
LearnWorlds structures courses into two levels: Sections and Learning Activities. Sections serve as the top-level organization, similar to units/modules in a university course or chapters in a book. Learning Activities constitute the second organizational level, resembling lessons within those modules or pages within a chapter of a book. Your course can comprise as many sections as needed, each containing multiple learning activities.
To create your first section, click “Add section” and configure details like title, access, description, drip-feed schedule, and more. 
Subsequently, click “Add activity” to generate your first lesson or learning activity.
You’ll find a multitude of options at your disposal, including the ability to incorporate multimedia content like interactive videos, PDFs, audio files, and more. You can even set up live sessions (such as Zoom meetings) as learning activities, add ebook pages, create graded exams, assign text or video tasks, integrate Slideshare presentations, design forms, issue certificates, and much more.
Notably, there are numerous pre-made templates available for these activities, simplifying the course content creation process. Examples include a Welcome Activity template for setting the course tone, an Instructor Evaluation form for gathering feedback, and an interactive Diary activity for student reflections.
These templates offer interactive and engaging experiences that go beyond what most other online course platforms provide, allowing you to elevate your course quality.
For any activity you add, you can click “Preview” to view it in the course player and assess how it will appear to students, which leads us to our next feature…
Course player
My favorite aspect of LearnWorlds undoubtedly revolves around its course player, surpassing the offerings of most competitors. The standout feature of this player is its remarkable interactivity.
In LearnWorlds, students aren’t passive recipients merely clicking through course pages, watching videos, and reading text. Instead, they actively engage with course content through the player. Let’s examine its functionality in action.
At first glance, the player appears as expected, with a progress bar in the top left, allowing students to track their advancement within the current section. Below that, there’s an overview of each section and the individual learning activities contained within. Students can easily click on these to navigate through different parts of the course as needed.
The primary window displays the course’s actual content, showcasing the current lesson or learning activity the student is engaged in. For standard text or video activities, such as the one depicted in the image above, students can read the content and click “Next” to mark it as completed, proceeding to the next activity.
However, there are a few impressive features that might not be immediately apparent. For instance, when a learner hovers over the text, a note-taking toolbar conveniently appears, enabling them to highlight text in various colors and add notes or comments.
This enhances the reading experience and contributes to improved educational outcomes, making it a valuable tool for revision as well.
Students also have the option to click “Share” to post snippets from your course content on their social media accounts, simplifying your marketing efforts as they promote your course within their networks.
Furthermore, the “Learners” tab allows students to view and connect with other learners in the course, fostering engagement and creating a collaborative learning environment.
Certain learning activities take interactivity to another level within the course player. For instance, consider the course player’s appearance when you add a “Diary” activity:
When students click “Start writing,” a text box appears on the screen, allowing them to type directly and submit their entries.
Additionally, you have the flexibility to customize the course player’s appearance. Simply access your course in the course builder and click on “Course player.” Here, you can select from a variety of different ‘skins’ to instantly alter the player’s aesthetics.
Furthermore, you can enable or disable various player features such as the progress bar, learners tab, course discussion tab, estimated reading time, and more. You can also modify navigation settings, allowing students to navigate freely or enforcing sequential navigation. Additionally, you can establish learning activity completion rules and make further adjustments to suit your course’s specific needs.
Interactive videos
If you incorporate a Video learning activity into your course, you have the option to select “Edit video” next to that learning activity, which opens up LearnWorlds’ interactive video editor—a transformative tool.
Within LearnWorlds’ interactive video editor, you can harness a multitude of advanced features to enhance the engagement of your videos for students.
For instance, you have the ability to introduce interactions into the video, such as navigational buttons and clickable elements that offer tips and additional contextual information. Additionally, you can integrate multiple-choice hotspot questions and clickable offers, introducing gamification elements to your videos. The flow of the video can be adjusted based on learners’ responses to questions or the navigational buttons they interact with, granting them control over their viewing path.
The editor also allows you to automatically generate an interactive transcript extracted from your videos, overlay videos with custom embeds, insert tables of contents for users to quickly navigate to relevant sections, incorporate pre-made pop-ups, and much more.
Upon completion of your edits, simply click “Save,” and your modified video will be live within the course player, ready for students to engage with interactively.
Assessments
LearnWorlds offers the capability to evaluate student performance through a feature called “Assessments.” Similar to regular course content, assessments can be added as a learning activity within your course.
A wide array of assessment types is at your disposal, including Graded SCORM assignments, text, file, video, and audio assignments, as well as self-assessments where students provide their own feedback and evaluate their work, among others.
Should you desire, you can establish a minimum passing score for assessments and control access to specific course sections until students achieve the required minimum grade, ensuring adherence to course requirements.
To motivate students to excel in their assessments, you can introduce Certificate awards.
To grade submitted assessments, navigate to your instructor dashboard and access “Reports Center” followed by “Review Center.”
Here, you’ll find all student-submitted work pending grading and/or feedback. You can also switch to the “Reviewed/Graded” tab to review previously graded work. Within the “Gradebook” section, you can obtain an overview of all grades for a particular course and export these grades as necessary.
Furthermore, you’ll notice a “Question Banks” section in the sidebar menu, located just below the “Review Center.” This is where you can create and store questions for use in various courses.
Website builder
LearnWorlds is equipped with a user-friendly, drag-and-drop website builder that empowers you to create your entire School Site effortlessly.
To initiate the process, navigate to the main dashboard, and then, from the sidebar, select “Site builder” followed by “Edit School Site.”
If you have prior experience with drag-and-drop page builders, this interface will likely feel quite familiar. You can simply click on individual elements within the preview window to modify their content, style, and settings.
Additionally, you can augment your site’s functionality by adding new widgets and elements via the “+” icon. The selection of pre-built widgets is extensive and includes animations, buttons, text blocks, images, downloadable files, forms, sliders, timers, and more.
To introduce new pages, click on the “Pages” button at the top left corner.
Here, you’ll find pre-designed templates tailored for various types of landing pages, such as “About Us,” “Pricing,” “Contact,” “Thank You,” and more. These templates are professionally crafted and fully customizable, offering options suitable for different niches.
The site builder boasts numerous other impressive features and tools, including a sales funnel builder, popup builder, form builder, and a blogging tool.
Additionally, the “Theme Explorer” allows you to make design adjustments at the site level, enabling you to modify colors, fonts, button styles, and more across all the pages on your site.
During the free trial period, your site is hosted on a LearnWorlds subdomain.
However, paid users have the option to connect to their custom domain via the “Site Settings” feature.
User management
You can oversee the students enrolled in your courses and manage your course instructors by accessing the “Users” tab in the primary sidebar.
Depending on your subscription plan, you have the flexibility to add multiple individuals to various roles, including admins, course creators, instructors, assistant instructors, reporters, seat managers, and affiliates, as part of your team. You also have the ability to customize the permissions and responsibilities of each user through custom administrative roles.
For instance, designating someone as an “Instructor” allows them to oversee courses assigned to them but restricts their ability to create new courses. Similarly, appointing someone as a “Website Designer” grants access to all site-building tools while preventing changes to course content, pricing, and more.
You can also streamline common management tasks through “User Automations.” Pre-designed automations are available for typical workflows.
For example, one automation automatically enrolls new users in specific courses immediately upon signup, while another re-engages students who have not met assignment requirements by automatically providing them with additional learning materials and instructions.
All of these automations can be tailored to your specific needs, or you can initiate a new automation from scratch to create a customized workflow.
Marketing tools
Within the main sidebar, under the “Marketing” tab, you gain access to LearnWorlds’ comprehensive suite of marketing and sales tools.
While we won’t delve into the full spectrum of available features here, some noteworthy highlights encompass:
- Bundles: This feature allows you to bundle different courses together and market them as a single product.
- Subscriptions: Generate recurring revenue by offering subscription memberships to users, as an alternative to one-time course purchases.
- Promotions: Create discount coupons to incentivize potential customers and encourage them to enroll in your courses.
- Leads: Utilize your school’s landing pages to collect email addresses and efficiently manage and nurture these leads directly within the LearnWorlds platform.
- Affiliate Management: Establish and oversee your affiliate program, enabling learners to refer more customers to your school and earn commissions on the sales they generate.
These tools are designed to enhance your marketing and sales strategies, offering versatility and effectiveness in promoting your educational offerings.
Analytics and reporting
The Reports Center serves as a hub where you can access valuable analytics and insights to inform your course performance assessment and guide your future strategic decisions.
Within the “User Progress” section, you have the ability to review various metrics related to your students, including their total study time, platform usage duration, course completion status, average scores, and certificates earned.
In the “User Segments” segment, you can observe similar metrics for groups of students, allowing you to discern variations in engagement and educational outcomes among different segments.
The “Course Insights” section provides a range of informative graphs and visual representations that offer a quick overview of your overall performance.
For instance, you can access a graph illustrating the trend in enrollments over time, enabling you to assess the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. Additionally, you can conduct side-by-side comparisons of your top courses during specific time intervals.
The Reports Center also houses data concerning sales and orders, product revenues, investor revenues, an events log, email log, and more.
Depending on your chosen subscription plan, you may also have the option to schedule reports for automated distribution at specific dates and times, streamlining your reporting process.
Mobile app
Within the sidebar, under the “Mobile App” tab, you have the capability to create a personalized iOS and Android application for your educational institution.
This feature is one of the standout offerings of LearnWorlds and sets it apart from many other platforms. However, it’s important to note that access to this feature is exclusively available to users subscribed to the Learning Center plan or higher.
The process of building your app with LearnWorlds doesn’t require any programming expertise, as the platform has already handled the technical complexities for you. Your role primarily involves customizing the app using the intuitive drag-and-drop editor. You can name the app, set its icon and splash screen, and configure sign-in/signup preferences according to your needs.
Once your app is tailored to your satisfaction, you can prepare it for submission to both Google Play and the Apple App Store before launching it.
Following the app’s launch, you can manage it conveniently through your LearnWorlds account. This includes the ability to send push notifications and learning reminders to your users, monitor analytics, and perform various other functions related to app administration.
Learning Apps
Lastly, but certainly not least, there’s one more notable feature we’d like to discuss: Learning Apps.
These are additional tools that enhance and expand the functionality of your school, and some of them are genuinely intriguing. You have the option to enable or disable these apps conveniently within the “Settings” tab located in the main sidebar.
While we won’t delve into each Learning App in detail due to time constraints, here’s a brief overview of the primary ones:
- Community: Establish a designated community space within your school where learners can interact, akin to a private social network. You have complete control and the ability to review and remove posts as necessary.
- Gamification Engine: Elevate the engagement level of your school and motivate students to actively participate by bestowing digital badges upon them when they achieve specific milestones.
- Daily News: Keep your students well-informed with the latest relevant news and announcements by crafting your digital newspaper, populated by RSS feeds.
- Best Resources: Offer learners a library of curated links to supplementary educational resources.
- People Directory: Enable learners to discover and communicate with fellow students within your school.
- Profile: Grant learners the ability to create public profiles that showcase their accomplishments, enrolled courses, contributions to the community, and more.
These Learning Apps contribute to the overall richness and versatility of your school’s offerings, fostering engagement and interaction among your students.
How much does LearnWorlds cost?
LearnWorlds provides three primary subscription plans for your consideration: Starter, Pro Trainer, and Learning Center.
The Starter plan is priced at $29 per month (or $24 per month when billed annually), with an additional fee of $5 per course sale. Starter plan users gain access to unlimited paid courses, an eBook page builder, exams and quizzes, a 3-page website, site templates, and most other essential tools and features. Please note that the Starter plan is limited to a single admin.
The Pro Trainer plan is available at $99 per month (or $79 per month when billed annually), and it doesn’t entail transaction fees. This plan encompasses all the elements of the Starter plan and further offers the capability to create free courses, customization options for the course player, assessments and certificates, live classes and webinars, 20 SCORMs/HTML5 integrations, unlimited website pages and popups, subscriptions and memberships, funnels, and more. Users of the Pro Trainer plan can have up to 5 admins/instructors.
The Learning Center plan is priced at $299 per month (or $249 per month when billed annually) without transaction fees. It includes everything within the Pro Trainer plan, as well as additional features such as interactive videos, advanced assessments, unlimited SCORMs/HTML5 integrations, Android and iOS app availability, progress reports, automations, API and Webhooks access, and more.
In addition to these plans, there’s a High Volume & Corporate plan tailored for larger businesses. This plan encompasses offerings like daily backups, premium cloud servers, unlimited admins and user roles, a dedicated success manager, flexible invoicing, and various enterprise-focused features. To obtain a personalized quote for this plan, it’s necessary to contact the LearnWorlds sales department.
Regrettably, LearnWorlds does not offer a free plan, but they do provide a 30-day free trial that grants access to all core features and functionalities.
LearnWorlds pros and cons
Having thoroughly tested LearnWorlds, here is my assessment of its primary pros and cons:
LearnWorlds Pros:
- Exceptional Student Engagement: LearnWorlds stands out for its ability to create highly engaging courses. It provides a robust set of tools for delivering interactive learning experiences, including pre-designed templates for various interactive activities, gamification features, learning communities, and more.
- Outstanding Interactivity: One of LearnWorlds’ standout features is its remarkable interactivity. Its course player empowers students to take notes and actively participate in their learning process. Additionally, its interactive video player offers advanced functionalities such as automatic transcript extraction, quizzes, table of contents, and more.
- SCORM Compliance: LearnWorlds is among the few LMS platforms that offer support for SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model), a set of eLearning standards. This allows you to upload SCORM lessons and graded assessments using relevant templates.
- Robust Course Compliance Options: LearnWorlds sets itself apart by providing extensive course compliance options. For instance, you can enforce a strict lesson sequence, require students to complete video content, or mandate passing a graded quiz with a minimum score before progressing to the next lesson.
- Exceptional Support: LearnWorlds receives high praise for its customer support. It offers a 5-star support team for personalized assistance, in addition to an array of self-help resources such as a help center, daily webinars, LearnWorlds Academy, a company blog, Course Masters, and more, ensuring you have ample guidance and answers to your queries.
- Mobile App: LearnWorlds distinguishes itself by allowing users to create their fully white-labeled mobile apps for both iOS and Android. This not only enables mobile learning but also facilitates push notifications and in-app purchases, potentially boosting sales and revenue.
LearnWorlds Cons:
- Transaction Fees on Starter Plan: A drawback of LearnWorlds is the substantial transaction fee of $5 per sale associated with the Starter plan. To eliminate transaction fees, users need to upgrade to the more expensive Pro Trainer plan or higher. Some competitors, like Thinkific, offer fee-free transactions across all their plans.
- Learning Curve: Despite its efforts to be user-friendly, LearnWorlds still has a learning curve due to its extensive feature set. The platform offers numerous tools and settings, which can take time to fully grasp and integrate into a cohesive workflow.
LearnWorlds alternatives
If LearnWorlds doesn’t appear to be the ideal online course platform for your needs, here are some alternative options worth exploring.
Here are some of the best LearnWorlds alternatives in 2023:
- Thinkific is a popular all-in-one online course creation platform that offers a variety of features, including a drag-and-drop course builder, interactive content, e-commerce tools, and marketing automation. Thinkific also offers a free plan, which is a great option for beginners.
- Teachable is another popular online course creation platform that is known for its user-friendly interface and ease of use. Teachable offers a variety of features, including a drag-and-drop course builder, video hosting, and payment processing.
- Podia is a newer online course creation platform that is quickly gaining popularity. Podia offers a variety of features, including a drag-and-drop course builder, video hosting, email marketing, and membership management.
- LearnDash is a WordPress plugin that allows you to create and sell online courses. LearnDash is a good option for users who are already familiar with WordPress.
- Systeme.io is an all-in-one marketing platform that includes features such as a website builder, email marketing, landing pages, and webinars. Systeme.io also offers a free plan.
Wrapping up
That concludes our comprehensive review of LearnWorlds.
In summary, LearnWorlds undeniably lives up to its reputation as one of the premier online course platforms available today. It has redefined online learning with its exceptional course player, engaging pre-designed lesson activities, remarkable interactive video features, note-taking tools, and more.
This platform is an excellent choice for course creators who prioritize student engagement and are committed to delivering top-notch learning experiences. It also stands out as a suitable option for corporate training, offering advanced features and a developer-friendly API and webhooks.
While beginners may need some time to explore all the features LearnWorlds offers and fully grasp its functionality, the platform provides extensive support through its knowledge base and a responsive 5-star support team.
To truly determine if LearnWorlds aligns with your business needs, we encourage you to take the next step and experience it firsthand. Simply click the button below to initiate a 30-day free trial:
Good Luck
