Create and sell mobile-friendly video courses
AccessAlly includes everything you need to create compelling online video courses in WordPress.
From selling memberships and taking payments to video view tracking and integrations with your favorite video hosts, AccessAlly will create a robust learning experience for your students.
We make creating online video courses easy
The world of online learning hinges on your ability to easily create video rich courses, that your students love to watch.
With AccessAlly, your workflow is simple:
- Design your online course structure with modules, lessons, and any combination of pages in the drag and drop course wizard
- Upload your video content to your preferred video host (YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, or Amazon S3)
- Use AccessAlly’s Media Player to insert your video content onto your course pages
- Start tracking video views, create video bookmarks, and see your students’ progress in real-time
AccessAlly is a WordPress membership and LMS plugin that gives you a ton of power and flexibility to create online video courses that meet your specific needs. (If LMS is a new term to you, you can learn more it in our article on What is an LMS.)
Best of all, you don’t need to be a developer or a designer to start uploading your videos and creating engaging courses online.
How to make online video courses stand out!
Video bookmarks
When students click on a video bookmark, it immediately starts playing at the right spot. Save time and increase video consumption!
Mobile Friendly
With everyone learning on the their mobile devices, having responsive video courses is key. AccessAlly makes it easy from the start.
Organize Videos
Use the course creation wizard to structure your video courses, and take advantage of built-in previous and next navigation buttons.
Trigger Automations
When someone completes a video or stops watching midway, AccessAlly can apply a tag and trigger an automation to congratulate or remind them.
Unlock Bonuses
Use progress tracking inside your videos to unlock bonuses and reward students with gamification points when they complete video lessons.
Resume Button
Have people re-start the video course where they left off with a “resume button” that takes them back to the last page they were on.
What AccessAlly Customers Are Saying...
"Here's another vote for AccessAlly!
I needed specifics like quizzing and certificates but I have been most excited about how custom I can make everything.
I am not super tech savvy but I find it easy to use and the support is amazing.”
-Martha Johnson
"Fewer integrations are needed to make it all work
I literally purchased and asked for refunds to 4 other membership/course options because I couldn’t get them to do what I wanted. I knew that AccessAlly would be amazing but I did not realize how amazing. It’s hard to explain but it’s all in the details.
For example it serves as both a membership site and a course plugin. When I tried to use a membership plugin, I had to figure out how to integrate with the course plugin.”
-Ana-Maria Janes
How video course creation works with AccessAlly
As with any video content you create, you’ll want to record your videos using your favorite hardware and software. For example, you might record a talking-head video on your phone, or record a screencast video using something like Camtasia or Screenflow. Then you might edit your video using something like OpenShot, iMovie, Camtasia, Final Cut Pro, or Adobe Premier. Once you’ve recorded and edited your video content, you’ll export it to a web-friendly format. From there you can upload to one of AccessAlly’s supported video hosting providers (more on each one and how to choose the right one for you below):
- YouTube: free and easy to get started with
- Vimeo: provides a great viewing experience
- Wistia: has advanced analytics tracking tools
- Amazon S3: practically free, and gives you a lot of flexibility
Once your videos are uploaded, it’s time to embed them inside your course and members area.
If you’re just looking to add a plain video to a page, you can do that by grabbing the HTML embed code directly from the video hosting provider. This is the exact same method you’d use for adding a video to a blog post.
But if you want to take advantage of AccessAlly’s powerful video tracking and bookmark features, then you’ll use the AccessAlly media player to insert your video.
All you need is the URL or ID of your video. From there AccessAlly gives you the ability to specify things like your video thumbnail, the dimension and size of your video player on the page.
Then you’ll be able to insert your video through a block or shortcode.
Decide on the best way to track your video views: you can set up video bookmarks for students to skip or return to a section of a longer video, or jump to a different video on a page.
You can also have AccessAlly keep track of what section of a video people get to, and kick start automations based on their behavior with your video content.
This gives you the ability to unlock bonus content when a student completes a video, or to remind people to come back and finish a module or lesson if they didn’t get to the end of a video.
Turn your multi-media lessons into powerful online video courses with AccessAlly
See AccessAlly Plans and Pricing4 Robust Options for Hosting your Videos
There’s a reason you don’t want to host your videos on the same server as your WordPress website: by having large video files on your web host can slow down the responsiveness of your membership site.
That’s why most online course creators use a dedicated video hosting provider. AccessAlly gives you a lot of integrated options for hosting your videos. Here are the pros and cons of each of the video hosting options.
YouTube
When considering which video hosting option and video player to use for your online courses, YouTube is a solid choice if you’re on a budget.
Anyone can sign up for a free account and start uploading videos in minutes. YouTube also offers some built-in video editing tools, great analytics, and the ability to add closed captions to videos.
The downside of YouTube videos for paid online courses is that you can’t control the permissions on YouTube videos like you can on other paid services.
For example, if you use the default YouTube settings and publish your videos as “public” then anyone can find them through the YouTube search engine. Why would people pay for your courses if they can get all of your videos content for free?
There are other video permission settings that you can use too: Unlisted and Private. Private videos won’t work on a course membership site, because you cannot embed a Private video and show it to anyone. Instead, Private videos need to be explicitly shared with specific YouTube user accounts.
That leaves us with the Unlisted YouTube video option, which is the one we recommend for online video courses. Your videos won’t show up in the YouTube search results, but anyone who purchases your course will be able to get the link to the video and share it publicly for anyone else to watch.
It’s not the perfect solution, but it’s great for when you’re just getting started and works if your content doesn’t need to be exclusive to your paid online courses, too.
Vimeo
Vimeo is another great option for hosting your online course content, and it offers a lot of bandwidth for most online course creators.
You must purchase Vimeo Pro if you’re using your hosted videos inside of a paid members area for online courses, as per their terms of service.
In recent years, Vimeo has started keep tracking of customers who exceed their video view bandwidth limits and are putting their videos behind a paywall outside of Vimeo’s payment system.
If you’re a small business owner hosting your videos on Vimeo Pro and you have a handful of videos or students watching videos every week, then you won’t run into any issues.
However, if you have hundreds of videos or thousands of customers watching videos on a daily basis, then Vimeo will likely ask you to upgrade to their highest paid tier.
AccessAlly has been recommending Vimeo for years, and it’s a great solution for most online course creators.
You won’t run into any permission or video sharing issues, because with Vimeo you can specify which domain a video can be embedded on and it won’t be visible or shareable beyond that domain.
Wistia
Wistia is a marketing-focused video hosting platform, and as such it includes features like A/B split testing and advanced analytics.
With that in mind, Wistia does tend to be on the pricier side for video hosting because it only offers 10 videos with the Pro plan and from there additional videos cost more.
Many people have been hosting their videos on Wistia for years and have amassed a ton of useful data on the watching habits of their students. You can easily integrate your Wistia videos with AccessAlly.
However, with AccessAlly’s built-in video progress tracking you don’t need to rely solely on Wistia for analytics.
It’s a great option if you want nuanced information about your students’ video viewing habits, and you have the budget to invest in a quality video host.
Amazon S3 Videos
Amazon S3 is a service provided by Amazon, and it offers some of the most affordable video hosting options on the market. We’re talking an order of magnitude of savings.
For example, if you have one Gigabyte of videos hosted on Amazon S3 and you have 100 members who watch all of these videos, it will only cost you $1.27 for this type of bandwidth.
Amazon S3 is also available globally, and because it hosts a number of different types of files you can include audio in your online courses, as well as PDFs and so much more.
AccessAlly takes care of the permission side of things, so that no one can share your videos or stream them on another site.
If Amazon S3 videos are so affordable as a hosting provider, why don’t more course creators use them? Because up until now, there weren’t a lot of good options for playing videos on a course website. AccessAlly’s Media Player is what makes a huge difference, here.
Compare Video Hosting Options
| Cost | Free | $240/year for Pro | $99/month for 10 videos | $5/month on average |
| Video Embedding & Permissions | Unlisted, can still be shared publicly | Protected Videos | Protected Videos | Protected Videos |
| Video Limits | Unlimited | Approx. 10-20 new videos per week, 20GB/week in uploads | 10 free videos on Pro plan, additional videos cost more | Unlimited, pennies per video |
| Worldwide Availability | Blocked in China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, South Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan | Blocked in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and China | Partially blocked in China | Available globally |
| Additional Pros & Cons | YouTube branding required | Limits on video view bandwidth | Additional tracking and A/B testing included | Flexible and easy to move, you control your files |
| Features | Youtube | Vimeo | Wistia | Amazon S3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | $240/year for Pro | $99/month for 10 videos | $5/month on average |
| Video Embedding & Permissions | Unlisted, can still be shared publicly | Protected Videos | Protected Videos | Protected Videos |
| Video Limits | Unlimited | Approx. 10-20 new videos per week, 20GB/week in uploads | 10 free videos on Pro plan, additional videos cost more | Unlimited, pennies per video |
| Worldwide Availability | Blocked in China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, South Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan | Blocked in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and China | Partially blocked in China | Available globally |
| Additional Pros & Cons | YouTube branding required | Limits on video view bandwidth | Additional tracking and A/B testing included | Flexible and easy to move, you control your files |