Why Host Your Own LMS?
Welcome to LMStutorials.com! Hear our case for self-hosting your online course materials: save money, gain flexibility, and teach more effectively. This site has all of the resources that you need to get up and running and to take control of your teaching. Also, it's all free!
Dear fellow online educator,
I spent quite a while learning the hard way how to offer my courses on my own self-hosted LMS. I’m hoping that this site can help others out there who are reluctant to use the go-to commercial marketplace options (Udemy, Teachable, Skillshare, etc.). Let’s start by talking about why you would want to self-host educational content in the first place (if you’re reading this, I imagine that you already have some reasons from first-hand experience though). Platforms like Udemy, Teachable, and Skillshare, etc., are middlemen connecting instructors and students. However, more and more, these companies take advantage of their intermediary role to position themselves as gatekeepers, imposing restrictive course formats and keeping the lion’s share of the money that students pay for your course. It doesn’t really matter how knowledgeable and innovative you are as an instructor, or how organized and effective your course materials are –you are fighting a losing battle for visibility and revenue. Self-hosting was an attractive solution for me, mainly because it offered complete flexibility over how I designed, marketed, and priced my courses, and was much more affordable than third-party hosting solutions. However, there was the technological hurdle that I needed to overcome first. Like most online instructors out there, I simply lacked the technical know-how to host my own LMS. Fast forward and I’m now comfortably running my own Moodle and Open edX instances on my own servers. If you’re looking to embark on a similar journey, I’d like to save you some of the confusion and wrong turns that I took. The purpose of LMStutorials.com is to lend you the knowledge and confidence to create, market and monetize your courses independently… and for free!
In case you were not aware of the appeal of self-hosting, let’s discuss some of the obstacles you face in online course marketplaces today:
Online course marketplaces can impose many hurdles!
Problem 1: Low Revenue
First, and most glaringly, publishing content on Udemy, Teachable, Skillshare, etc. does not pay well anymore. You’ve probably noticed that these companies take a huge percentage of your sales. For example, unless you are marketing your courses and providing promo codes yourself, you only receive 37% of the revenue Udemy generates from sales of your course. Personally, I think the idea of only receiving 37% of revenues from your own course material is outrageous! These services may claim that these commissions are necessary to cover their overhead and that, by partnering with them, instructors will make more than publishing their course content independently. This is hard to believe though. Also, take-home pay is low and gets lower and lower every year. Take, for example, this Udemy instructor who only made $1000 in the first six months of a Azure development course with nine hours of video content. New instructors make even less! One study found that, “ the average Udemy earnings are down to just $2.1K/year for the new instructors, compared to $5.4K/year for instructors who joined before 2020. In fact, 50% of Udemy courses created since 2020 have less than 100 lifetime enrollments.” In fact, 1% of Udemy instructors make 50% of total earnings, while the bottom 50% of instructors only make 1% of total earnings. It’s not that this ever really becomes passive income either: you still have to regularly engage with students in order to keep up sales. All of this is due to the intense competition on saturated marketplaces. There are now more than 64,000 instructors on Udemy. Search results for course on data science turn up 10,000 results (of which 6000+ are free)! This is definitely bad news for instructors, but for students as well. Selecting a course is usually overwhelming given the sheer number of options. You increasingly face similar issues on other content marketplaces, as well.
A weary online course instructor
This image, entitled Trace, by MTayibb,
is licensed under a CC BY-ND 3.0 licence.
By the way, if you are curious about teaching with Coursera, EdX, or Udacity, it’s probably not worth even bothering. If you are not affiliated with a partner institution, they likely will not entertain hosting your course (Coursera used to have "community guided projects," but this has been phased out).
Problem 2: Lack of Instructor Control
Another issue is that you have little control over pricing and marketing when you use these marketplace services. You might wonder if gaining access to Udemy’s prospective student pool is worth giving up control over pricing options. Often it is not. For example, to take advantage of publicity from Udemy, you need be part of their “deals” program, in which you agree to allow Udemy price your courses. Typically, this results in your courses being offered at a 90% discount (or more!). Check out this Udemy community forum where instructors complain about sticker prices being slashed from $114.99 to less than $10 or from $129 to $7.99. Also, you are not able to charge students periodically with a subscription package. Finally, if you do bring outside prospective student traffic to your Udemy course page through your own marketing, you have also encouraged them to view hundreds of competing courses before they ultimately choose (or don’t choose!) to purchase your course.
Online marketplaces come with many restrictions
Problem 3: Pedagogical Inflexibility
Online course marketplaces are also quite pedagogically restrictive for teachers. Their pricing models do not really incentivize creating good courses. The prioritize quantity of video materials produced and/or quantity of students enrolled. For example, Skillshare income is based on number of minutes watched, rather than pedagogical outcomes that you determine as the instructor. While most marketplaces allow students to rate your course, students are rating according to the quality of other MOOCs that they are familiar with. Instructional tools like assessments, projects, organized group discussions, etc. are limited. Assessment options are limited. For example, Udemy only supports narrow multiple choice and short answer quizzes . Community spaces are typically limited to general forums. Meaningful instructor-student and student-to-student interaction is simply not part of the MOOC pedagogical model –a severe limitation for many teaching approaches. For example, Udemy has no designtated community spaces instructors are not able to send emails to students, and general course announcements are restricted to four per month and “should only feature free resources related to your course material (Udemy links are not allowed)." Furthermore, instructors are not allowed to email students. All in all, many instructors who seek to practice effective and modern educational theoretical approaches will feel these limitations.
A lack of features can keep you from doing your best teaching!
The Appeal of Self-hosting
If you start to look around a little bit, you’ll see that people who choose the self-hosting route generally don’t regret it, both in terms of pricing and marketing flexibility (e.g., the ability to market future courses to existing students) as well as pedagogical flexibility:
"I really like the freedom of being my own administrator and deciding myself what features I want and don't want”
- Moodle.org forum post
For example, I make great use of collective content authoring plugins on Moodle like glossaries and wikis.
The case for running your own LMS is pretty clear, however, why self-host rather than go through a third-party hosting provider? Of course, the latter is a viable option for many, but it can pose a considerable expense for individual instructors (they mainly target institutional clients). For example, if you look around, rates can be pretty steep, even for basic hosting! Also, these services come with their own sets of limitations. Moodle offers hosting solutions, but impose restrictions such as the maximum number of students. Also, self-hosting allows you to scale to your specific needs.
Do not despair! Freedom is within reach!
Why LMStutorials.com?
So, why isn’t everyone self-hosting? Well, there is a technological barrier for most instructors: in particular, setting up a server, installing LMS software, and basic platform maintenance. However, in my personal experience, this is a hurdle that instructors like you and me can overcome (indeed, I am instructor, not an IT professional!) I found that the modest time investment was certainly worth it, and it also allowed be to expand my EdTech skill set and add LMS administration to my resume. I found that one of the biggest challenges was the fact that LMS documentation is not always the clearest and is typically written for an audience with considerable web development experience. Also, most resources out there for instructors like you and me are one-off tutorial articles. Therefore, the purpose of LMStutorials.com is to provide a more comprehensive and curated set of resources to help you learn the ropes of administering your own LMS administration –the resources that I wished I had been available to me. So, let’s help you take the first step towards taking control of your online teaching!
Enjoy,
Dr. Jonathan Downey
LMStutorials.com is here for you!
