Acadle – Create, Monetise and Manage Courses

I have something very interesting today. Building courses is an opportunity for many companies and individuals to create an info product. The foundation for you creating your info product is so important and that is why today’s product showcase is Acadle, an intuitive platform to build out an entire course and a lot more. So without further Ado, let’s just dive into Acadle and let me show you.

Moving into the platform of Acadle, this is our dashboard where everything begins. We have our menu up here where we have different options, on the dashboard we’ll just get an overview of the people who have been through our course and what they have done, the rating and so on.

1. Features of Acadle
2. Acadle Pricing
3. Alternatives to Acadle
4. Future of Acadle
5. Pros & Cons using Acadle
6. My experience using Acadle

Features of Acadle

But without further Ado, I will just go straight to the courses menu here. In here you will have an overview of all of your courses, whether they’re in progress or you already set them up and they’re live running. For each of these courses there are a lot of settings which I will show you just in a moment. Over here in the users tab, we can see all of the users who are registered on your Acadle account. This is not necessarily admin users.

This could be course participants, students, and so on. This is just to get you an overview, and you can see different elements and different information about them. You can do user groups, you can check out their course progress and you can, of course, deactivate them if they have done something you didn’t like or they’re just not paying anymore, this, of course does also happen automatically. Last but not least you can remove them completely. In the settings menu here we have some extra elements and this is our design part, so to speak, for our login page, the design, pixels and so on. In here we can completely customise the login page to exactly how we want it to look like, from everywhere, changing the logo to the overall design.

Let’s say you just want the form in the middle of the screen.

Then you change to this design and you can change the button colour, the text colour and the background colour to really match your style. Furthermore, you can also add a description down here where you can write in something that is describing your course or at least your Academy of courses. The last element down here is that you can restrict whether you want people to register or not. And then you can also add additional form elements like phone number, designation, city, and so on. Now the design part over here is the overall design of your course. In here you can change the font size, the font colour for the different elements for the course progress status, for the start, resume, open, notified joined buttons, and so on.

Furthermore, over here in the menu we have the different elements that you can change. And of course you can also change the font so you can really narrow it in, so it looks like it’s your website.They’re still on, even though it’s a different URL. You can also add pixels if you would like to track anything. There is also an SEO element where you can add keywords, which is a bit irrelevant.

You can add a meta description, add a thumbnail and a favicon. This is just for your Academy to look well, if it is that someone shares it on social media, it doesn’t have so much to do with SEO. You can also use a CNAME, which means that you can make a subdomain on your website. Let’s call it academy.phillipstemann.com, then I can add Acadle in there and it will look like it is my own website.

You can also give certificates, so let’s say that a student is done with a specific course, then they will receive a certificate and last but not least they do also have a gamification element where you can give points. You can give batches, levels and the settings for here is whether you want to enable the different elements. Now before we jump into the course editor and how you set up a course. I just want to show you the admin area. In here you can add team members who can help you set up and manage courses and of course, optimise and maintain them.

They do also have API, if you want to integrate completely with Acadle. Then they have web hooks. They have widgets here, which means that you can embed a widget on your web application. If you have like a small survey you want someone to answer, then they have single sign on. They have SMTP to send out emails.

You can give coupons as a discount, and that’s because which I’ll show you in a moment you can integrate with Stripe to monetise your courses. Over here in integrations, they have a lot of great integrations and they are currently adding more integrations they have with Intercom Encharge and so on, which means that you can add an email there around your courses. Then they do also have different languages that you can set up. And here in the pricing is where you price your course or your Academy.

Here you can create plans and you can integrate with Stripe. So a plan could be that they only get access to a certain amount of courses and that will cost a certain amount.

Here you make the groups right here. Then they also have a community tab and configurations at last. And this is where you add stuff like Privacy policy, terms of service, pricing settings, coupon settings, and so on. You can also hide Academy built with Acadle to really whitelabel your solution. Now let’s jump in and set up a course for you to see the workflow.

To get started with a course it is very simple. You just need to enter a course name. Give a short course description and a course duration. For now we’ll just call this one YouTube video and I have entered a description.

Be aware that this description is very short. You cannot write a lot of text here. I would like to see that I could write a little bit more or just somewhere that I could write a more text describing the overall course, but for now this is fine. The option you have is that you can upload an image.

If you do not, then Acadle will just choose an image for you. Who should have access to this course as we just saw before via the Stripe element. Then we can really restrict here to say that only people on the premium plan should have access to this course. We can also hide duration. We can enable a free flow and we can say that this course should be enabled in X amount of days. Let’s say you want to set out the course as a teaser for people to get into the course.

Then you can do this and say it should be unlocked in seven days, for instance. You can also say that this course locks in a certain amount of days. Let’s say that the course has been out for 10, 15 months, something like that. And you want this course to come to an end because you have built a new course, then you can lock it in in a certain amount of days and people will still get the notification that if you need this course then you really need to move on it now.

You can also show a lock time here to really highlighted for your students. Then you can choose whether it should be highlighted as a new course, a featured or none at all. And then you can add tags, which is great for search, if you do have a lot of courses. For now, I’ll just keep it as it is and I’ll create the course. Here we are inside the course called YouTube Video and down here is where we add our lessons.

We can also create quizzes and a group. Let’s say that you have a group of lessons you want to group together because they have something to do with each other. Then create a group and then create the lessons within the group. It is very simple. I will just create a lesson right now, and I will call this one lesson one.

Here you can choose whether this one should be available right away or it should be unlocked in a certain amount of days. For now. I’ll just say that it should be available right away and I’ll press save. Now, in here is where we build out our course.

We have our lesson, lesson one here, and then we can add different elements. In the plus sign out here, we can choose whether it should be text, it should be a heading or if you want to add a video or an image. This is also possible within the editor. You can also add code and a lot more. I would say that the limitations are not found right here.

It is really great to see so many options. If you do want text, you can also just start writing. I will now press save for this lesson, and it’s very important that you always press save. Otherwise you will lose your changes. Now I think I will add a quiz to this element right here.

We will call this quiz something simple. The quiz is now created, and I will now create a question within the quiz. Here when I did test it out, I always wrote my question here, but this is just the order. I would like to see a drag and drop instead because it works better from a UX perspective. But I just write one here because this is the first question.

And then how many lessons does this course have. Down here we give the answers and then of course we need to choose the right answer, which is one. And that’s why we have our little checkmark right here. Over here we can say whether this question should give a score. Let’s say it should be, you get 40 points if you get this one right. And then I’ll add another question, do be aware here that if I change the settings or to results without saving my changes, I will lose my changes.

So remember to press save here. Now it’s asking me for a score, down here just to show you. I will say I will say two and then I’ll say question two, then I’ll press settings, go back to questions and then you can see my question is gone. So just be aware of this. I now have two questions set up in my quiz.

So I have a lesson up here, and I have a quiz right here after the lesson. If you do want to do a group of lessons, it’s very easy. We can call this one group one and then in here we can set up lessons right now. It’s just added the untitled. We can say group lesson one right here and then that is part of the group.

Then of course we can add more lessons within the group. Now everything we’ve done within our course here is actually just a draft. Over here you can see we have our publish button for each lesson individually, so you need to remember to publish them before your students or your visitors and readers can see them. But now it is done my course, and I’ll now show you how it looks from a student perspective. So when I come in as a student, you can see we have two courses here.

The first one I have already completed 75%, and it’s estimated to take 8 hours and 20 minutes. Now in the second one, which is the one we just set up. I will go into this course for you to see how it looks like. So you can see it looks exactly like it did in the back end, just with some minor changes. Instead of us setting up new lessons, we can down here, go back to the courses. Other than that, we can press next lesson here, and then we come to our quiz which is set a duration of 1 minute.

We’ll press start and see the different questions here. I’ll just press A for this one which is correct, and then I’ll Press B this one which is incorrect. Now here I get my score. And what I’m really missing here is to see what questions did I get right and what questions did I get wrong so I can improve in the future. Right now I just get my score and I have no idea what questions were correct or not. Because as a student, I don’t know how many points the different questions give.

So an improvement I would like to see is that I could get an overview of the different questions with my answers showing whether it was correct or not. Now the next lesson here is our group lesson one. This is just a simple, and it looks exactly like lesson one. It would be great if I could enter some description into group One to give an introduction to this group telling what it is about, and if it’s even for me otherwise, of course I could skip it, but that’s it.

I can now press finish, and I’m now done with the course.

I can then rate the course and that’s great for the admin of the course to see whether they should improve or not. It would also be great if I could enter some feedback saying the different questions were maybe too tough, or I didn’t get enough information about a certain subject, so I can either build that into the course, or I can build an entire new course on that subject.

Acadle pricing

Moving on to the pricing structure of Acadle. It consists of three plans and it is so important that you look very thoroughly through these three plans, because they differ a lot on the functionality. So depending on your need, you really need to choose the right plan. You can, of course, test it out completely free for seven days.

Alternatives to Acadle

Now, moving on to the competitors of Acadle.

As I see it, it is Talent LMS and SAP Litmos. The way I see Acadle being a bit better than those, is definitely on the design side. Of course, Talent LMS does also have a great design, but I still feel that Acadle still wins that part, especially when it is you build out your course. And when we talk about Acadle, their agility and everything around Acadle is just so great to work with, and they have so many possibilities that we do also see in Talent LMS and SAP Litmos.

So it really depends on your need for me design this very important, which is why I will always go with Acadle.

Future of Acadle

Moving on to the future of Acadle, it looks very exciting. They have a full roadmap of a lot of functionality. For instance, they’re working on extensive functionality so we can really utilise the way we build our courses from everywhere, where we can upload multiple files via a folder to we get a more notification system with more features and so much more usability within all of this, and especially the editor. When it is we build out the course will be even more extensive in the future. We will also see more integrations.

For instance. Now they have a lot of integrations and especially one integration that I like is to Emcharge. But this integration can be even taken further and it can be taken further by, we can send out emails when a user are in specific states of the course, so let’s say that they are stuck in a specific place in the course. We can send an encouraging email telling them:

Hey, you need to continue now because otherwise you will lose this course sooner or later. They are also working on more integrations to different platforms. For instance, Paddle right now they are integrated with Stripe so you can take payment for your courses. But integrating with Paddle with just expand the features and the functionality within. Now the last thing I want to highlight is that they’re working on adding a blog module.

This clearly shows the direction that they are going. I would really love to see that I could take Acadle and integrate on my website, but by them making a blog module on Acadle and within the entire environment just shows that they are not going to work on being able to integrate your course on your website, at least not for now because they are building all the modules you need within the platform.

Pros & Cons using Acadle

Moving on to the pros and cons of Acadle. Starting with the pros, the design is up to date.

They are very agile down to every detail.

You can manage multiple courses within one software, and they have a lot of great integrations. Whereas for the cons you can’t integrate it with WordPress, which loses you SEO value, and they do still have some bugs they need to sort out.

My Experience using Acadle

Using Acadle, I can easily build out courses and monetise them. This is an easy way for you to create an info product and via an info product. You can really earn an extra amount of money for your company or if you’re just an individual.

I really do like that Acadle doesn’t have any limitations and it is so agile. Overall I will give Acadle four and a half stars. I’m extremely amazed by the functionality, the agility and the overall design.

But yea that is my review of Acadle. I hope that you like the video and if you did, please give it a thumbs up. If you have any questions to Acadle or other products you would like me to review, please leave a comment down below.

Thank you so much for watching. Let’s catch up on the next one.