upcoach

Upcoach is no Kajabi or Thinkific killer. It was not designed to be. We will have to move past the Alternative to 'Kajabi, Teachable, Wordpress' copy here - Upcoach is on a completely different vertical as well as level.

And I love it.

I am a faculty at a medical school as well as the director of education technology at a high-ranked University and we have experimented with every platform out there. We currently use Canvas LMS (and Moodle for some).

Current LMSs on the market are geared towards enrolling huge numbers of students and as much as possible, automating the process so that the students are delivered lessons, assignments and assessments towards completion.

Here is a statistic that does not get discussed outside academia much: Hardly 3-5% complete courses. And there are tons of free courses available - top quality too. Most sites require payment only for certification and not for the courses themselves.

Imagine if you are a teacher and wish to monetise your teaching. You need to offer good value that people will actually. pay you for and your course needs to be engaging enough that they complete it.

Enter: Mentoring mode. Instead of capturing videos and creating a course that 'drips content' or set on auto-pilot mode, closer interactions, community building and hand-holding are gaining importance.

Here is where Upcoach shines. Not only does it have fantastic course editor / content authoring tools better than most LMS - Kajabi has a VERY POOR Course Editor, upcoach is designed to bring in the human element - that of mentoring and coaching, personalised attention, habits-building, etc.

Its clean interface, habits tracker, smart docs set it apart and the potential uses of these, combined with good quality content excite me with possibilities. I am personally looking to use Upcoach to help students requiring additional academic support in certain challenging areas where this platform will help me 'coach' the students individually till they overcome their academic impediments.

I also have acquired heartbeat - It looks fantastic to create learning communities. But upcoach is what I will use to deliver tailor-made, individualised, highly personalised, closely monitored, progress-oriented, habit-forming lessons.

Hope this helps.

What I would love to see:
1. Motivational tools: Gamification, Leadership Board, Badges (credly or badgr, etc) - experiencify.com does this nicely
2. Nicknames (Anonymous autogenerated ones like 'Green Unicorn' like in Kahoot, etc) will easily solve privacy issues at a lower level. Plenty of nickname generators are available, even powered by GPT-3 AI.
3. Some kind of Outcomes and Objectives matrix so that learners can see and track their progress. Rubrics might be a longer goal. E.g. We agree and set certain targets with the learners and define the milestones so that the coach-trainee can both see the progress.
4. Reminders and Countdowns, especially in the mobile app.

(Written on mobile)