AcademyOcean is truly an ocean of learning opportunities, in which it is easy for an independent player to drown. If you’re looking for a good platform to launch your own school and are hesitant to choose AcademyOcean, here’s a brief overview.

Academy Ocean: overview, features, pros, cons and reviews

AcademyOcean is a business training platform from Netpeak Group.

According to the website, it is used by companies from twenty-five countries. The company positions itself as a smart system for training employees, customers, and partners.

Its website claims that AcademyOcean reinvented the LMS by focusing on three things:

• selected the most important functions for the business
• made them simple and convenient
• added unique functionality to improve the learning process

Let’s move on to the analysis of LMS elements.

Training portal

The platform operates in two modes – administrator and student, and offers learning portals that can be used to:

• training of employees
• customer training
• training of partners
• creating and selling courses

The list also includes corporate training, remote work, franchise training, and employee onboarding. But let’s focus on the training platform, as these options can generally be attributed to one or another global employee relations point.

The employee training portal is designed for corporate work of client companies and HR managers. It can be used to conduct onboarding and adaptive activities for newly hired employees, regularly inform all team members about changes and innovations, provide briefings, and train and develop them..

A customer education portal is aimed at helping companies collect all the materials about their product and turn them into a clear story about how to use it. Serves as an interactive way to demonstrate all the benefits of the product and encourage customers to quickly upgrade from the trial to the paid version.

The partner training portal is aimed at companies, who have an affiliate program and want to expand and automate it. 

The portal for creating and selling courses helps experts to organize professional knowledge into ready-made courses and sell and conduct them to anyone who wants to.

Course builder of these portals has an intuitive interface for creating and editing content. Lessons can be filled with text and text files, audio and video, add presentations, and uploaded as PDFs. An interesting feature is dynamic content, which allows you to personalize lessons. You can also create libraries or knowledge bases on the platform for sharing.

Analytics

A separate subsection of the platform that allows users in the role of administrator to track students’ progress in real time. All reports and achievements are displayed in the form of dashboards. The platform also has a separate section called “Statistics” that displays student performance. Visualization of funnels helps to identify areas for improvement in courses.

Exams and tests

In any course, you can create interactive polls and tests to reinforce the material. The quiz editor offers 2 levels: basic and recommended with variations of answers to questions, such as rating, reaction, file upload, etc. Comprehensive assessments and exams are available to test your knowledge. Information about the tests passed is available in the form of reports with detailed indicators. There are also statistics on student performance, which can be tracked and checked in individual areas and in general.

Certificates

A section where you can find certificate templates or an editor to create your own. These certificates can be used to recognize students’ achievements and as a motivation tool.

Additional features

• Welcome page. You can create a learning portal in AcademyOcean in two versions – with a standard welcome page and with a branded page that will display only the branded visual elements of the company that owns the learning portal. The second option offers complete personalization of the portal – from the login page to the favicon.
• Mobile version. The training portal is available to users in a mobile version. It can be embedded in the user’s corporate application.
• Additional modules. The list of these modules includes a content editor, where you can create your own academy from scratch or use available templates. You can also synchronize and edit ready-made lesson content. Using the API, the academy created on the AcademyOcean platform can be connected to the company’s business processes – from registration to data import and export. To inform about the events that take place in the academy, the platform has a news feed and personalized notifications for users via email or messengers. Ready-made courses and content in the academy can be personalized for students and adjusted to individual needs. Academy owners can organize students into teams and assign them separate courses and specific tasks for professional development, as well as provide access to certain materials. Large companies and corporations can submit individual requests and receive solutions from AcademyOcean specialists.

Advantages of AcademyOcean

The platform does not require installation because it uses a cloud-based solution. The mobile version of the platform is one of the biggest advantages that increases the accessibility of online academies for users. Other interesting benefits include corporate training with separate portals for employees, partners, and customers, and several dozen features that can be added to the Pro and Premium tariffs. These features include individual academy design, gamification, a dedicated server, a custom profile for students, content creation, and design.

Disadvantages of AcademyOcean

The main disadvantage of AcademyOcean is the lack of free trial access. To see how the platform looks like and get acquainted with its functionality, you need to order a demo and wait for a company representative to contact you and demonstrate its work.

Another disadvantage is the rather high rates. It is immediately clear that AcademyOcean is focused on providing services to companies and corporations, not independent experts who want to launch their own school and sell and deliver online courses.

Despite the claimed ease of use and intuitive interface, the platform still provides access to a closed “Academy about the Academy” that should tell users how to launch the first course.

The cost of using AcademyOcean

AcademyOcean offers annual and monthly subscriptions. The website states that the annual subscription is 25% cheaper. So, there are 4 types of tariffs:

• Standart
• Pro
• Premium
• Enterprise

Tariff «Standart» costs $300 per month and has the smallest list of features: unlimited materials; unlimited number of courses; full statistics; visual dashboard; client domain; branding; certification; tests and exams; Zapier integration; mobile version; teams of students; SSL certificate (for annual subscription only); one academy; 5 administrators and up to 1000 students per month.

Tariff «Pro» costs $800 per month and includes everything that is available in the Standard tariff, as well as: smart teams; multilingualism; custom interface; synchronization module; UI personalization; adaptive (dynamic) content; personal consultation; AcademyOcean API; webinars and ILT (Basic); 100 GB of video storage; security settings cabinet (basic); additional modules for individual tasks.

Tariff «Premium» costs $2,800 per month and includes everything included in the Pro plan, as well as: webinars and ILT; 1 TB of video storage; security settings cabinet (advanced); white-label solutions; individual certificate design; single sign-on (SSO); priority access to new functionality; increased priority in requesting functionality; personal adaptation; additional modules for individual tasks.

On «Enterprise» tariff no price is indicated because it is positioned as a solution to complex requests for companies and corporations.

Reviews about AcademyOcean

It is somewhat suspicious that the AcademyOcean platform developed by a well-known IT company does not have many reviews on third-party websites, even though it has been in existence since 2016. All we could find was the company’s YouTube channel with three video reviews praising technical support, functionality, interface, and additional features.

Twelve more reviews were found on Capterra’s website. The most recent review was left four months ago, and the oldest one was left six years ago. Some of the reviews of these customers are available on the AcademyOcean website.

Of course, the limited number of reviews may indicate that satisfied customers forget to share their impressions, and corporate customers do not pay attention to it unless asked. But their presence only on the AcademyOcean website and absence on other sites raises questions.

In general, AcademyOcean is a platform that focuses on helping companies and corporations in the process of developing their staff and marketing tools. Independent experts who are their own team and are looking for platforms to launch their own courses and online schools should look for simpler and more democratic platforms.