A New and Easy Way to do Online Courses

I’m thrilled to announce that my partner and I (co-founders at Ristretto Apps), have launched our new side project, and things seem to be taking off!

The project is called Owwlish, and it’s a software platform that allows course creators to build and add beautiful courses to just about any website or page builder on the internet.

Online Courses are the Future of Education

As course creators ourselves for over a decade, we’ve found online courses to be one of the most exciting developments in both education and the creator economy ever. Think of it. In the old days, if you knew something others did not – especially something unlikely to be taught in academia – you either taught in-person classes to individuals in your local community, or if you wanted to reach more learners, you wrote a book and hoped it did well enough to be printed en-mass and sold at bookstores across the country or the world.

I certainly don’t mean to downplay the significance of books. Books are the reason human civilization has progressed as far as it has. Nonetheless, books don’t convey technical information as well as a comprehensive pedagogical approach that includes presenting instructional content with audio, video, as well as text. While blogs were and still are a new way to teach and learn, they often are limited by the same issues as books have in getting information conveyed from teacher to student: text and 2D images fail to convey the nuances that in-person teaching can.

circular library shelves filled with books
Books alone are the reason human civilization has made it this far

This is something that my business partner, Alyssa, and I learned early on with our online course business. By making the bold decision to teach very complex dental techniques over the internet via video and text, we saw that learners were indeed able to learn extremely nuanced concepts online that were previously only able to taught in person, all across the globe.

Why did you build this?

a whiteboard with complex workflows written on it
Complex workflows

Overall, we felt like there was something missing in the online course world. While we loved many of the platforms out there, we consistently found ourselves being forced to choose WordPress because it offered the most flexibility for the types of online courses we wanted to offer. For us, it was very important to build custom workflows and experiences for our learners to benefit from. This would often include utilizing extremely powerful and robust WordPress plugins that had unique functionality we needed to make our courses better. For example, our courses often included their own online community, member to member messaging, complex forms with automations, booking and scheduling systems, and even a custom grading system just for evaluating dental techniques. As you can imagine, choosing one of the big online course platforms would have been to limiting for our needs, so we just built our own.

Enter Owwlish

Owwlish is our dream online course platform. It allows course creators to leverage the beauty and power of their existing website platform, be that WordPress, Weebly, Wix, Webflow, or even Duda. In our minds, if you’ve spent thousands of dollars building your perfect website to sell your courses, why shouldn’t you be able to teach your courses from your website too? And while you’re at it, why not take advantage of all the cool complex features your website already has baked in (features most online teaching platforms still lack).

laptop with a beautiful website loaded in the screen

If that sounds interesting to you, please check out Owwlish. We offer a free trial and will go out of our way to support you and help you get started in any way we can!

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