Overcoming Challenges in Online Education with Shopify and Tevello

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, online education was a rapidly growing industry.

From 2011 to 2021, the number of online learners reached by digital courses increased from 300,000 to 220 million, and in recent years this number has only grown further. 

With such a vast and growing market, annual revenue is estimated to reach around $185 billion worldwide by the end of 2024. There’s no doubt that for the right online courses and education providers, there’s plenty of money and success to go around.

But the industry is not without its challenges.

Such a large market means endless competition from other providers. Potential students and customers only want the best, most engaging, and most valuable courses.

Digital course providers must grapple with providing helpful content, keeping students engaged, and encouraging course participation. 

This is all alongside managing the back end of your digital learning environment, juggling multiple courses, organizing course content, sorting payment plans, and designing your overall brand.

With so many challenges to overcome, how can striving digital educators best overcome them and enhance their digital platforms?

By combining Shopify’s eCommerce potential with Tevello’s learning management capabilities, you can create an unrivaled online education package. Here’s how.

Understanding the Current Landscape of Online Education

Experiencing significant growth as a market across the 2010s, online education rose to new heights as COVID-19 and following lockdowns restricted in-person education.

Since then, online education has only gotten more popular, becoming the fastest-growing sector within the education industry worldwide and growing by 900% since 2000.

Despite this growth, creating and maintaining an engaging and useful online course is no walk in the park—it requires dedication, expertise, and consistent management to sell courses online.

Some of the most significant challenges facing online educational course creators include:

• Motivating and engaging students
• Designing and delivering quality content
• Building active communities around your course
• Overcoming technology barriers from students
• Providing accurate feedback and useful assessments

Along with these challenges comes the difficulties on the admin side of running a digital education course. 

There’s a lot to think about, from integrating payment systems to hosting your course content across different sites, using multiple apps and tools to provide various features, and advertising, designing, and promoting your course.

This is why using the right digital tools is vital.

Selecting the perfect combination of tools, apps, and platforms when creating, hosting, and delivering your course can be the difference between failure and success.

How Shopify Can Aid Online Educators

Shopify may be first and foremost an eCommerce site, yet it is a remarkably strong platform for hosting digital education products, from courses to learning materials.

This is because of Shopify’s wide array of features that are ideally suited to helping online educators sell and host their courses:

Customization Features

From the fonts and color themes to the overall design of your website, Shopify is highly customizable.

This is especially important for existing and new online educators, as it allows you to precisely align your storefront on Shopify with your digital courses’ branding, design, and color palette, regardless of your branding.

Content Management

From an in-depth tag system to an overall content management dashboard, Shopify has the capacity and features to help you organize and manage various content and digital products.

Perfect for online educators looking to scale, newcomers who want a simple, intuitive approach to managing their products, or those with multiple different types of educational content on sale, Shopify has everything you need.

eCommerce Reach

As one of the world’s leading eCommerce stores, using Shopify is an excellent way to extend your reach to new potential customers and users.

Even better, being hosted on a trusted, world-renowned platform can help increase your perceived reliability and SEO in marketing.

Scalability

As a colossal eCommerce platform, Shopify is perfectly placed to help you handle increasing numbers of visitors, customers, and users as you scale your online education offering.

This means whether it’s using their analytics tools to track your conversion rates, or simply having peace of mind that the platform won’t buckle under the weight of hundreds or thousands of new visitors, Shopify is an excellent platform for any online educator.

App Selection

While there are many options for hosting your digital content, few eCommerce sites offer a better selection of integrable apps than Shopify. 

No matter what you need, from a more efficient Learning Management System (LMS) to better video hosting, Shopify makes adding the apps that provide these features quick and seamless.

Some of the world’s largest education platforms and hosts such as Tevello and Courses Plus are placed on Shopify, signaling just how powerful an aid Shopify is to digital educators. 

A Guide on Integrating Shopify Into Your Online Education Framework

As you get set up on Shopify, you’ll want to do a few things to integrate it into your online education framework.

The first and easiest step is the design. It’s essential that you use Shopify’s customization features to match your storefront’s design to your overall course and brand.

Beyond this, you’ll also want to organize your course offerings, set up secure payment options, and ensure your course is optimized for mobile users.

To level up your Shopify store, consider implementing marketing tools to bring in new customers and integrating Shopify apps such as a Learning Management System like Tevello to help you manage your courses more easily.

Leveraging Tevello for Enhanced Learning Experiences

Tevello is a leading Learning Management System that can be integrated with Shopify. This gives you a range of useful features designed to help you manage and grow your course and surrounding communities.

From a single intuitive course management dashboard to community discussion hosting and customizable certificate creation, Tevello has everything you need.

How Tevello Helps Online Educators Succeed and Grow

Two of the major challenges facing online educators are retaining and engaging their students and growing and managing course content.

Tevello tackles these challenges head-on, providing a centralized dashboard to help you organize and manage all your courses and relevant content.

To encourage participation, discussion, and engagement, Tevello focuses on providing community forums. These forums help spark debate and keep students active within your course.

This is something Smart D’sign Embroidery discovered when they switched to Tevello:

“I can highly recommend this app. It has all the features that I used on the previous learning platform so for me this is the perfect app to have my courses and my shop website under one umbrella without constantly switching windows and login in to my admin areas.”

Combining Shopify and Tevello for Comprehensive Solutions

Combined, Tevello and Shopify provide online educators with everything they need to create, manage, and grow their online courses.

Hosting your digital education on Shopify gives you all the front-end benefits, helping you with marketing, analytics, store design, and more secure, seamless payment options.

Meanwhile, Tevello helps you behind the scenes, giving you the tools to effectively manage your courses in one place, spark discussions within your community, and create the engaging and interactive content you want to provide.

How To Integrate Both Platforms

To integrate both platforms, here’s what you need to do.

Shopify (if you already host on Shopify, you can skip this):

1. Sign up for a Shopify account using your email
2. Select the plan that best fits your needs
3. Begin creating your storefront using Shopify’s customization tools
4. Search for Tevello on the Shopify App Store

Tevello:

1. With Shopify set up, install the Tevello app from the Shopify App Store
2. Next, select either the free trial plan or the unlimited plan
3. Once selected, you can access your new Tevello account
4. Begin adding new courses, setting up courses for sale, and organizing your content

If you need help getting started, you can contact Tevello’s developer directly via the in-app chat, or visit the Tevello help center for guides and tips. 

Using both Shopify and Tevello gives you everything you need to create and manage your digital education content, as Tevello user Satoru describes:

“I have used other apps on Shopify for my courses and they do not compare to the ease of use of Tevello; it is well-designed, intuitive and reliable.

On the back end, it is so easy to use, adjust and work with. The customer support is absolutely wonderful, helpful and FAST.

Much love to Tevello and their team.”

Future Trends in Online Education

Online education has grown incredibly popular over the last decade, and all the signs point to even more growth and development in the near future.

As more learners seek out digital education, the challenges of gaining and retaining them will only grow harder, as will the hurdle of managing ever-growing catalogs of course content.

Luckily, new technologies such as AI will allow online education providers to promote more personalized learning, while strategies such as microlearning will help increase attention spans and extend engagement.

Through it all, Tevello and Shopify will be there to help you navigate it all. 

Both Tevello and Shopify constantly adapt and evolve, giving you security and stability in hosting, creating, and managing your educational content while adding new useful features as the technology develops.

How Tevello Brings Your Online Education Offering Into the Future

From learners who struggle to engage to managing a mountain of class content across multiple courses, the online education space faces various challenges as it grows and expands.

Yet, with the right tools, you can be well placed to easily overcome these challenges and create the perfect digital learning environments for your new students.

With the combination of Shopify and Tevello you have the key to unlocking every door.

Whether it be marketing and hosting challenges, Shopify’s intuitive customization features, analytics, and secure payment options make selling your courses easy.

On the other side, Tevello brings all your courses and tools into one centralized hub, helping you manage your courses and communities easily while gaining access to useful tools to increase engagement and spark discussions amongst your students.Sign up for a free trial today to see how Tevello can bring together your online education services.