So you want to create an online class independent of a school

What’s the best service or tool for creating and hosting an online class by oneself?

A client asked me this question last week, and I really didn’t have a solid answer ready to hand, since most of my work to date has involved institutions. So I started asking around, bugging individuals and querying social media. The results fascinated me. They also appeared in different places, so I thought it might be useful to aggregate and share them here, in one spot.

A little background: the person asking me this is not affiliated with an educational institution at the moment, so they can’t relay on campus resources, nor use a .edu email address. They want to create a learning experience to introduce people to a topic they’re passionate about. There may be professional development angles to pursue, too.

So how would one do this, building and rolling out a class on your own? My instinct is to whip up a WordPress instance and go from there, but the client doesn’t necessarily have experience with that platform.

Here are the suggestions which rolled in via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, email, etc.

NB: this post is not meant as an endorsement of any product, nor have I received support from any of the providers below in writing it. This is research and a…