It’s a New Year, and a New Thinkific! We’ve been buckling down over the past few weeks to ship some exciting new product updates and additions to you to help you make 2017 your best year ever (and they’re available on all plans).
Along with the new year, we wanted to give a fresh new look to the platform you use and trust to grow your online business. We’ve listened to your feedback, and since you all seem to have ended up on the “Nice” (actually “Awesome”!) list last year, we can’t wait for you to log in and see what we’ve been cooking up in our workshop. We aren’t quite as far up as the elves in the North Pole, but we’re pretty close in Canada 😉
Here’s what we’ve been busy building just for you:
New Course Player (BETA)
First up is a new look for our Course Player (what your students see when taking your courses). We’re currently releasing this as a beta test and looking for as many course creators as possible to help us perfect this release! If you choose to participate in our beta program, you’ll see these main differences:
- An overall faster application
- An updated look and feel (content header, icons, and more customization coming soon)
- Content title search (you can now use a search box in the player to find specific lessons)
- Updated text field editor
- Improved Discussions experience
- Improved HTML code editing experience
- Upgraded Wistia video player (see more details below)
- Lessons can be printed out by students in a much nicer layout
And this has just laid the framework for many more improvements to come!
Course Builder Upgrades
We couldn’t do all that work to the Course Player and leave the Course Builder behind! This is one of our biggest changes in the last year and the best! If you’ve spent time perfecting how your sales page and course materials look, you’ll appreciate some of the shiny new upgrades we’ve made:
- Get instant visual landing page previews as you edit (no more second guessing)
- Select your banner text color (branding power!)
- Select your overlay color
- Be able to preview your course cards instantly as you edit them
- Options will be much more organized (so you save time when building)
- Add different text to your:
- Course Landing Page Title (not just the name of the course)
- Course Card Description (not just the subtitle of the course)
We’ve really done our best to improve the overall experience for you as a course creator—we’re hoping for many more smiles and high fives (and quicker launches for everyone)!
Advanced Video Settings
Whether you’re teaching others to bake or how to leave their 9-to-5 job, it’s no secret that video is one of the most popular forms of content used in online courses. We invested some time in improving our bulk video uploader so you’re now able to manage your assets in even finer detail! You’ll now have the ability to:
- Choose thumbnails (no more silly faces or black screens, yay!)
- Add Closed Captions (more accessibility for students around the world)
- Adjust the player color (your videos will be sleeker than even)
- Display or hide the play bar (for the minimalists out there)
- View video analytics (easily measure your number of page loads, visitors, plays, visitor play percentages, and average percent watched)
The more control you have, the more you can fine tune your content to better resonate with the students you’re teaching.
You’ve Been Our Greatest Gift of All
Looking back over the last year, we’ve been able to provide you with custom pages for your site, subscription-based coupons, better built-in themes, snappy integrations and a ton of different languages for your students. We launched the Experts Marketplace and are so proud to have made a difference by enabling donations to imagine1day. And there are plenty of other big announcements to come!
But that’s not all. We’ve also received just as much back from you:
Thank you to all of our loyal and hard-working course creators—2016 was a huge success and it’s all because of you! You’re the reason we love coming in to work every morning, and whenever we hear just one story or comment about how Thinkific has been able to help change your life, we each do a happy dance.
We’re looking forward to serving you in 2017 and well beyond!
PS – Don’t have an account with Thinkific? Sign up for free and create your course site in minutes –
