Verified purchaser
Good deal but room for improvement
The AppSumo deal is good, particularly the $9 per month flat rate for video hosting. I am unaware of an alternative that will give you the same video hosting capabilities for a commercial product restricted to paying members. I believe Vimeo starts at $20 (for commercial use) and Wistia at $100 per month.
What I dislike about Heights Platform:
- As has been said many times: no quizzes or surveys
- The project features seems out of place to me. Example: In my setup I have free enrollment in the program. The program has 1 or more free courses and 1 or more paid courses that can be bought whenever the student wants. Now, in order to be able to do the project the student has to finish all courses in the program, including the paid ones. This practically turns the project feature into a paid one.
In my view what's needed is a project per course. If not per lesson (I've seen this in a course I took myself and it made perfect sense).
- The badges can get annoying. For example: when a student has finished a course and wants to do it again she is greeted again and again by the same old badge. And when she klicks on the wrong button to close it (it's a modal popup) she will be sent back to the all courses overview page.
Actually I want to just be allowed to disable badges completely or make it less intrusive (did I miss that option?). This shouldn't be something imposed upon me by the creator of the software.
- The video player seems good, yet it doesn't have the thumbnail preview when you hover over the timeline like Youtube, Thinkific or Teachable have. Not a big one, but if you're going to charge the same price of roughly $80 per month (outside of the AppSumo deal) then why have fewer features?
- The UI is not up to par with Teachable or Thinkific. E.g. the project edit page for students. Seems to me that this was never touched by a professional designer. Also the table of contents on the left, the color combinations etc. Not a deal breaker, just not as polished as what the others have.
- Group Discussions: As a student I appreciate the option to post right underneath a lessen. So I don't have to explain to the world what I am referring to. And people who read my message have probably also just done the lesson (...they are on the same page), so they are emotionally involved like I am and more likely to engage in a conversation.
In Heights Platform the message board feels like a separate app, unrelated to courses. Also students seem to be able to see all boards at all time. (It did say somewhere that they won't see boards that belong to paid courses they are not a member of, but I didn't find the option to tie a board to a course).
To sum it up: very good AppSumo deal. As it stands right now I would not pay the same price as for the competition though. But I appreciate how engaged the Heights team is in the conversation here so maybe they will give us more in that regard in the future.
Bryan_HeightsPlatform
May 9, 2024Thank you for the review and feedback!
- We have plans for the projects feature to be able to have customizable unlock points very soon. We do see this feature as a very big value add to your students though so we'd want to encourage you to use it for students who are paying versus free ones. You can create assignment type lessons to ask private questions on individual lessons.
Projects are meant to lead up to the student implementing the final result of what your program provides. I completely agree though that we need to have a customizable unlock point for projects and make this available on a per-project basis!
- The course completion modal is actually not a badge, but that is a very good point that it is acting like one. We will offer the ability to turn this off along with the rest of the badges for those who don't want to use it.
- We might implement a thumbnail preview on the video player, but for most creators we think it is better to not have this option because ideally your videos are digestible enough that students don't have to skip around so much in a single video, and also because we want to encourage students to watch your entire video. Still, we will keep this in consideration.
- I've mentioned before and we agree that the admin side UI could be improved especially now that our feature set has increased so much in the past year. We have significant improvements for our UI planned this year!
- We want to have the best social features of any learning platform, but in order to implement a lesson comments system, we want to do it in a way that provides more value when more students go through it, rather than less. The problem with traditional comment lists is that over time students experience more noise and less signal in the content they consume.
- We plan to add more granular forum permissions, and have put this feature up for voting on our public roadmap: http://bit.ly/2G3fAGp (towards the bottom of the backlog column at the moment)
We just had our first big feature update since this deal launched and there is definitely much more to come!
Thanks again!