Top 13 educational platforms (2024 Updated)

The continuous development in the field of education has made the move to online platforms by major university and school programs inevitable. So, we’ve provided some of the top educational platforms below to help you, your business, or your institution maximize the power of learning.

What are educational platforms?

Educational platforms are all digital tools created to facilitate, enhance, and streamline learning, teaching, and training experiences. While many educational platforms cater primarily to students, schools, and universities, they also offer features for a wide range of users, including professionals looking to develop new skills and individuals exploring diverse topics.

In fact, many companies have made the switch to digital solutions when it comes to workplace training. Today, more and more businesses are recognizing, such as Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), benefit and revolutionize how teams train.

In this list, we'll explore the best learning platforms for every purpose, featuring their prices and key features to help you make informed decisions.

1. SC Training (formerly EdApp)

SC Training is a highly regarded, award-winning educational platform used by both large and small institutions globally. Accessible to all users, it gives easy-to-use design solutions and templates to make elearning content creation as easy and effective as possible.

If you're looking to spruce up your curriculum, SC Training makes it easy to incorporate ready-to-learn courses that were built by top-notch experts from around the globe. It has a vast library that contains over 1,000 highly customizable courses.

Another cool thing about the platform is that it focuses on microlearning, so its courses are designed to be mobile-friendly, making it super easy for anyone to study anytime, anywhere. And guess what? This educational platform even has games and quizzes in between courses to make learning more effective and interesting for learners. How awesome is that?

On top of offering a wide variety of courses, SC Training also offers an intuitive Creator Tool that you can use to create your own online learning courses. You can either create the courses manually or opt for the platform's AI-powered content generator tool. Say goodbye to complicated authoring methods and hello to a quick and easy process instead.

Also, if you don’t have the time to build your own courses from scratch, you can opt to take advantage of SC Training’s Course Creation Services. Through this add-on feature, their team of expert instructional designers can design and launch your courses for you along with additional onboarding and account support.

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2. Google Classroom

The educational tool proposed by the software giant is more than a decent solution for schools, which suddenly had to switch to online learning. Although not entirely free, it offers a fully functional free tier, which allows for conducting distant teaching and giving assignments. Google Classroom uses well-known G Suite tools, such as Google Docs, calculations’ sheets, online presentation tools, and video call tools (Google Hangouts). Its simple and well-known design, basic functionalities available for free, and high accessibility rates, all make Google Classroom a straightforward choice for school and university courses and examples of educational programs, where there’s no need for high-end supplementary options and tools.

3. Udemy School

Udemy is one of the most well-known educational platforms offering a number of peer-reviewed courses taught by instructors from around the world. Udemy offers many standard designing tools for course creators: videos, calculation sheets, documents, and presentations. Unfortunately, on the downside, this k-12 online education platform doesn’t allow for a seamless exchange between the teacher and the students. Additionally, there’s almost no quality control for the courses which are being published in Udemy. Therefore, a good peer-review rating is a crucial element when choosing a class at Udemy. As it is geared towards personalized learning and self-paced learning mode, there’s no big community support and neither is the possibility of feedback from the teacher.

4. WizIQ

While it’s dedicated to traditional classroom learning rather than professional training and development, this k-12 online learning platforms for adults allows teachers to create their own unique, instructor-led training online courses. WizIQ is an award-winning educational platform, which delivers interactive learning experiences. Online courses created with WizIQ can also be offered for sale and with the possibility to turn them into MOOCs (massive open online courses), they can easily be made into a source of revenue. WizIQ also offers digital tutoring software for those interested in giving personal instruction on a chosen subject. WizIQ doesn’t have a very transparent pricing policy – for every potential client is given an individual quota after contacting the sales team.

5. edX

Together with Coursera, edX is two holy grails among the LMS focused on delivering college-quality education. Created by Harvard and MIT graduates, edX is a higher-education-oriented platform hosting online courses from different universities. While it isn’t quite suited for professional training in the workplace, you can attend a Yale business program or Harvard physics class for free. EdX’s interest lies in improving the global accessibility to top-class resources and educators. However, the choice offered by edX is way smaller than on other computer platform types and limited to very specialized fields. EdX also doesn’t support microlearning and its policy still advocated traditional teaching methods, with listening to lectures and writing essays. Its focus is chiefly on natural sciences, leaving humanities and arts in the last position. It’s therefore clear, that not necessarily everyone will be satisfied with what they’ll find on this platform.

6. Blackboard Learn

BlackBoard Learn is aimed at higher-education teachers and students, who need to be able to store and share the materials in the cloud or a course management system. Apart from teaching, it can be used for corporate and governmental training programs, although there are other LMS that offer more built-in features for less. It’s mobile-friendly, which caters to the younger users’ habits, as it enables then to attend classes anywhere. Blackboard delivers content without fuss but takes away some of the fun other LMS provide along with great functionality. Blackboard is not free, however, there’s no clear pricing on their website and one has to request a quote.

7. Coursera

Coursera is an educational platform, which like edX, aims at delivering college-level education and quality training globally. It offers online degrees, specialized courses, and one-off activities, delivered by renowned partner universities from all over the world. Most of the courses at Coursera require active participation, feedback, writing tasks, and attending lectures. The effort pays off, as after completing a course, one can apply for a certificate with a relevant stamp on it. Coursera is free for university students (except for degree courses) but requires an admission fee from everyone else.

8. Skillshare

Skillshare counts among well-known educational platforms focused on delivering practical skill-oriented courses for its dynamic range of students. It is primarily limited to an educational video platform, where teachers and educators explain the topic in a series of clips. Skillshare is a community-based platform, meaning everyone can potentially become a teacher and it’s easy to gain feedback and support at the community forum. Contrary to EdX or Coursera, Skillshare focuses on teaching pragmatic skills helping with building an online presence (useful in the era of social media marketing and email marketing), supporting small businesses or simply for entertainment purposes. Skillshare offers free two-month trial and after the access is based on a monthly subscription.

9. Thinkific

As a well-designed LMS platform system that makes creating your training courses feasible and easy, Thinkific offers a variety of templates and graphics to facilitate the design of your course. It’s mostly aimed at entrepreneurs, online educators, coaches, and trainers, who wish to expand their reach and perhaps update their educational tools. Unfortunately, Thinkific is not free, and to access the full range of design and marketing tools, a monthly subscription plan is required.

10. LinkedIn Learning

LinkedIn Learning is an educational platform and SAAS that chiefly focuses on business and technology-related fields. The platform’s courses are delivered in video form in seven different languages which makes it adequately accessible, depending on your geographical location. LinkedIn Learning comes as a premium feature for LinkedIn users with upgraded profiles and aims at providing new, better qualifications for those searching for new opportunities in the job market. LinkedIn Learning is a good place to learn, more difficult to teach as becoming a coach there requires a lot of effort. The quality of the courses is not always easy to assess beforehand and requires some research.

11. GoToTraining

GoToTraining is a highly adaptable educational platform packed with reliable features that you can use to create learning materials and manage online training sessions. Through its unique, built-in tools, organizations can easily customize registration processes, manage training materials, as well as share and publish courses. Learners can also collaborate during live training sessions through small group activities, collaborations, discussions, and polls. 

As a trainer or L&D professional, you can opt to send your course catalogs directly to your learners to encourage self-paced learning and adaptive learning, or you can host an online conference to ensure direct communication with your team. Another great feature is that GoToTraining allows trainers to host a content library, where they can upload, store, organize, and reuse learning materials like courses, tests, and class recordings. These can then be accessed by workers at their best convenience. 

12. Trainual

Trainual is another educational platform that can help you onboard or train employees with a learning program. It allows you to customize elearning courses in just a few clicks. Simply choose from the platform’s 150+ free templates, embed your images or videos, add your training content, and deploy it to your learners. Your workers can then access their course materials through multiple online platforms such as iOS, Android, Chrome extension, and other web browsers. It’s important to highlight, however, that this platform doesn’t support SCORM files or other elearning formats. This can be a huge deal-breaker for those with existing content on other online learning software. Apart from this disadvantage, you’ll also have to spend 9 USD to access all of Trainual’s basic features.

Alternative option: If you don’t want to use a readymade learning management platform, you could create your own eLearning website. It’s a lot more work to set up and run, but it can be a fulfilling experience. Platforms like WordPress are completely free to use. There are lots of WordPress LMS themes, especially at Templatemonster, to make your website look the part, and plenty of plugins to help you create an engaging student experience. It is a lot more effort than SC Training (formerly EdApp), but could deliver a great learning resource!

13. FutureLearn

FutureLearn is another educational platform that can be used to gain new knowledge and skills. More than 2,000 distinct courses are available on this platform, covering a wide range of topics like business management, healthcare, creative arts, and much more. These courses, like those on Coursera and edX, are created by top universities and industry experts and distributed through videos, articles, discussions, quizzes, and other exercises.

One of its best features is that it provides distinctive microdentials and programs designed to offer in-depth courses in a specific field. Some of these even come with academic credit that may be applied toward a professional degree, and they are supported by independent certificate management software. Additionally, the courses here are 100% online and can be completed for up to 15 weeks.

14. 360learning

As a digital learning platform, 360learning highlights the importance of collaboration. It's an AI-powered LMS with automated user management that lets you assign permissions, roles, and groups to learner segments with a click. It also houses an intuitive authoring tool that allows you to easily create courses with readily available templates.

360learning has multilingual support suited for global training. Plus, it has an automated enrollment feature that lets you quickly assign training to learners in no time. It also offers instructor-led training, blended learning, and integration capabilities to streamline workflows.

15. Masterclass

Masterclass takes the last spot on this list of the top online learning platforms. Here, you can gain access to a library with more than 200+ classes that you can take regardless of time and location. They carry audio-only lessons that you can listen to on the go. You can also download lessons to watch offline and uninterrupted.

Their courses come in video format and are led or hosted by industry leaders and experts. Some popular examples include Hillary Clinton teaching the power of resilience, Thomas Keller on cooking techniques, and Corey Damen Jenkins on interior design.

Takeaway:

Educational platform systems have become ubiquitous and continuously gain more customers: both teachers and students. From highly specialized university-degree platforms like Coursera to practical skill-oriented ones like Skillshare, each of them targets a special audience.

Variety of tools, video-based teaching, peer-support system and user experience opinion ratings make elearning an attractive environment to further one’s knowledge and gain new skills easily. With platforms like SC Training (formerly EdApp), designing beautiful online courses has never been more accessible.