Thinkific VS Teachfloor: Which is the best solution for cohort-based courses?

It is often difficult and time-consuming to figure out which is the perfect LMS solution for your online course business. Therefore, we have come up with this brief and resourceful comparable article to highlight all the major focus points. Learn about the features, tools, pricing, and most importantly, find out which option is the best fit according to your learning methodology. So what sets the two apart? Find out in Thinkific VS Teachfloor!

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Why focus on Learning Methodology?

Course creators often overlook learning methodology when choosing a compliant LMS. Professionals get too busy determining the right prices and the most number of features a platform can offer. However, it is important to invest some time in this topic to yield optimal results.

Studies prove that majority of students who buy online courses end up not completing them. This is a consistent issue for students and companies alike.  

Low completion rates also reflect poor online learning. Most course makers don't concern themselves too much with this since they are making money in any case. However, their courses don't make any learning impact, and over time, lose relevance. This is a cognitive mislearning where course developers and marketeers think that the prospective students must know about the course as they are buying into it. The same is also true with guide books and manuals.

Sadly, this is a gap in the effectiveness of the online learning model. Udemy, a popular course platform, also reports a similar story with less than 5% of course completion rates. On one hand, students are not learning and on the other, schools need to find new students every month. Hence, complicating the dilemma.

Statistics show that students approach self-paced learning by 1.3 courses. This means that students buy one-two courses before realizing that learning in-depth about a specific topic requires a strong commitment issue and so eventually stop buying any further. All this is because of neglect towards developing an engaging learning methodology.

Some of the key issues with not having the right learning methodology are:

• No recurring customer
• No solving the student need
• The student is not completing
• The student is not learning

This is why it is important to stress effective learning methodologies as described in this article.

Learning Methodology: Thinkific VS Teachfloor

The key to improved student engagement lies in 'accountability'. Accountability refers to the phenomenon when a person cares about other people, in this case,  fellow students and instructors. The idea is entrenched in building strong personal relationships. This helps students overcome the feeling of loneliness that they often feel during online remote learning.

Hence, one of the most important features that a new generation LMS should have is a community section where students can network to know each other and create reliable relations.

Thinkfic was developed to offer an all-in-one solution to host self-paced learning courses and in my personal opinion, is the best tool for hosting such courses. However, it lacks all features, most importantly, the structure for hosting other more engaging and effective methodologies such as Cohort-based, Hybrid, Collaborative, and Social learning. 

Teachfloor has been designed to offer a more flexible learning environment. This allows organization owners and curriculum builders to build a more engaging course not necessarily fully in a video conference or in cohorts. This opens many different options that instructors can adapt to based on their topic to teach and the audience they wish to target.

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Thinkific VS Teachfloor: Features

Now let’s focus on differentiating the two - Thinkific VS Teachfloor - software based on the features they offer. Many features for self-paced learning and cohort-based are indeed similar, but the difference lies in how they operate in-depth to accommodate these two methodologies.

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Basic LMS features

Both solutions can host videos, all sorts of eLearning content, and quizzes. Nevertheless, Thinkfic is lacking in offering complete and robust assignment features, especially concerning providing feedback and review on students' entries. Teachfloor on the other hand provides multiple ways in which instructors can score and review student assignments. One can use private messaging/mailing or opt for a discussion wall. Moreover, the nuanced peer-review option is carefully designed to fill in this gap.

Assignments

Teachfloor offers different assignment features that create a very engaging and interactive environment, from a simple assignment to an assignment with real-time instructor review and peer review. Peer review is a crucial part of the accountability process, with this feature, students can provide feedback to each other, making the course collaborative social and creating relations between students.

Community

Thinkfic doesn’t have a community built-in, so you need to connect it with their party software. This leads to a fragmented student experience and requires more effort to manage two different learning environments at the same time. 

Teachfloor offers complete community features where it is possible to create discussion channels, post topics, comment, or chat 1-to-1 with other students and instructors. With such ample options, students never feel alone. They can easily get in touch in case of help or simply for some quality networking.

Video conferencing

In Thinkfic, the integration with the video conferencing platforms is possible but very marginal. Hence, making it a less reliable LMS for real-time distance learning. As talked about above, the primary focus for Thinkific is self-paced learning and so video conferencing is not as crucial an element for them.

However, video conferencing is a crucial part of Teachfloor and offers Zoom integration. In fact, Teachfloor offers several interesting features, such as automatic creation of Zoom events, sending notifications before lessons start, collecting the video recording and append to the course, and much more.

Other features

Thinkfic has a suite of tools for marketing their courses such as affiliate programs and managing offer free trials. Perhaps, making it the best platform in terms of product marketability. Teachfloor instead leaves all marketing activities to third-party software thanks to its integrations, making it less of a creator's hassle. Also, Thinkfic has a lot of integrations with other software.

Thinkific VS Teachfloor: Pricing

The first important point to note here is that Teachfloor charges for enrolment of active students only. All other features come with the package without any secretive in-app purchases. For Thinkific, pricing works around the features.

This can be a problem for creators who don't have not many students but wish to white-label the learning page. In Thinkfic, this option is only available for the Premium account for $499/Mo. Whereas, Teachfloor, it is available for all accounts. Moreover, Teachfloor includes multiple Admins and Instructors in all of their packages. For Thinkfic, to be able to have 2 admins it is necessary to subscribe to their Pro account for $99/Mo. Also, from a pricing point of view, it is clear that the two softwares are designed to serve different kinds of customers with different needs. 

Pricing for Teachfloor starts from $99/mo up to hundred active students inclusive of all features.

So, if you wish to publish several self-paced courses, don't want to brand your page, and expect to have a huge number of students per month with a low ticket price, Thinkfic could be a good choice.  Instead, if you do care to customize your page, have multiple admins and instructors, and run cohort-based and collaborative courses, Teachfloor is the right choice.

Consclusion

Both solutions are very good. Thinkfic in my personal opinion is the best solution for self-paced courses. It has been on the market for quite a long time and serves many users. With that being said, it is a good option for independent creators or solo business owners that want to publish fully asynchronous courses. The platform has been designed and launched in 2012, the golden era of on-demand video courses like Udemy. Hence, it caters to such thoughts and does a great job at that.

Teachfloor is more suited for companies such as online trade schools, corporate training consultants, training agencies, online bootcamps, and even companies in need of an internal tool for delivering effective training. For this type of customer branding, the course ticket price is higher due to a completely different learning experience. One needs to provide access to several people such as admins, instructors, and facilitators, and they need a suite of different features such as Community assignment peer review and so on. For this kind of buyer persona, every single student has a high value not only for what concerns monetary matters but also for providing more customized service. 

To conclude, based on your need and goal you should now have all the instruments to be able to make a good choice that will have a positive impact on your business.

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