Welcome to the first monthly summary of what’s happened on the Teachable platform. If this proves to be popular, we may move to a more regular update based around new features or announcements by Teachable themselves. If there’s a particular topic that interests you, let me know in the comments and I can take a deeper dive into that update or new feature. Similarly, if there’s something that I think warrants a longer article, I’ll be sure to link it in the main round-up after I write it.
So, on to March 2023.
Teachable announced several new features and improvements for its users. The platform has updated the language displayed from “Published” to “Online” to increase the visibility of a school’s online status, making all published content visible to new and existing students. In addition, Teachable has integrated with AWeber, allowing creators to add their customers to mailing lists based on various triggers. Teachable has also added coupons to digital download products, enabling product-specific coupons for digital downloads, as well as school-wide coupons. Finally, for school owners in Colorado, United States, Teachable has now automated digital sales tax for purchases, for schools using teachable:pay. These new features are designed to help creators manage and grow their online schools with ease.
Let’s look at each feature one at a time.
On March 8, it was announced that Digital Context Tax Handling in Colorado will be handled by Teachable if your school uses teachable:pay. This is one of the default ways for Teachable to handle taking payments on your behalf for students buying your courses, coaching or digital products. Here’s the link to their support pages. There are select countries that are eligible for using teachable:pay, but if you’re in a country that does not allow it, you can still use their Monthly Payment Gateway. All the details are on their support pages. One thing to note, teachable:pay may not be active on your school by default as it appears it must be ‘set-up’.
The following day on March 9, Teachable announced coupons for Digital Downloads. Coupons are a great way to increase sales by allowing a coupon code to be provided to your visitors in order to get a percentage or fixed currency discount off a product. Initially, only courses or bundles had coupons, now we have digital products too.
Coupons are product specific and school specific. If a coupon for 10%OFF is created as a school specific product, any course, digital download, coaching or bundle will be eligible for this discounted coupon.
School wide coupons can be found in your Admin -> Site -> Coupons.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to select Courses and Coaching for example, it’s All products or one of the individual services.
As a developer, the biggest problem I face is being able to ask your Teachable school, “Hey, what coupons do you have for this course?” As it stands, there’s no way (that I’m aware of) to get the Liquid collection that contains the coupon ID, coupon discount and product it is valid on so I can do some nice pricing tables. Pricing tables with coupons are possible, they just require a bit of URL manipulation.
Check out StudyForFE at https://study-for-fe-electrical.usefedora.com/p/pe-power-exam-preparation-course?coupon_code=FP10. This appends the FP10 code to give 10% discount. This is how Teachable deals with coupon codes and how most services do, however, the table is dynamic and changes the messaging depending on the coupon code. If there’s no valid code, it will show the full prices.
This doesn’t check Teachable for valid coupon codes, it relies on an array of valid codes in the course sales page code block that’s kept up-to-date (by me at the request of the school owner).
Okay, on to AWeber Integration introduced on March 14. It’s fairly straight forward to setup any of these mailing list systems with a code snippet into the <head> of your school but it’s nice to have a native way to just add your API key or OAuth (login to AWeber and authorize Teachable to access or vice-versa).
This has been available for ConvertKit for many years, so it’s nice to see another system added for convenience. The quirk with ConvertKit that I’m not sure will be the same for AWeber is a sale or enrollment must have been completed before the triggers will become available in the mailing lists’ system. I’m not sure if this is still the case but something to look out for.
March 22: As a developer, this next ‘improvement’ is a pain in the butt. School Status – “published” to “online” change. Not the change in the wording, but the big ol’ banner that appears at the top of the school on all your pages. Having to design and develop landing pages often requires pixel perfect alignment and this extra 80px or so at the top of the page can, and does mean being careful placing elements that may exist outside the flow of the normal page. Once the school has been set ‘online’, those elements would move up by 80px.
Other than that, making the offline/online experience more obvious is a good thing. The next step I think for Teachable to tackle is the wording surrounding courses being published and unpublished and visible on the public course page or not. The toggle button down at the very bottom of the course information page is also not the best place for it, in my opinion.
AI-Generated Outlines in Courses
In appreciation of ChatGPT, this next paragraph is an unedited summary of Teachable’s own New announcement on March 29.
Teachable now has an AI-powered tool to help you create an outline for your course. To use it, simply click the "Help me generate a course outline" box when creating a new course. The tool will suggest section and lesson titles based on your course description and add them to Teachable's curriculum builder. You can then customize the outline and add your content.I’m a big fan of ChatGPT, I have a paid Pro plan at $20/month at the moment. It’s like a better version of Duck Duck Go (or Google) which offers real answers instead of a list of places to go look for those answers. The only gripe that I have is the knowledge cutoff date is 2021. The world in general and technology especially changes to quickly these days that code and conversations are often out of date.
Finally, on March 31, Teachable introduced the Enrolment Caps by Date improvement. This is for all products and allows a cap for your signups or enrolments to be based on a specific date rather than a number of signups. In other words, get in while you can.
The screenshot shows that enrolment caps would be displayed on sales pages and at checkout, but I only see them on the checkout page. This was for a coaching product.
A big improvement would be a countdown timer integration that takes your product (which could be different for each course or product) and places a timer top or bottom of the page. Something to add to my ‘brainstorm’ list.
There we have it, our first monthly summary of the changes, deprecations (none this month) and new features on the Teachable platform. If I’ve made any mistakes or missed anything, please let me know in the comments.