Some course builders have website-based limitations.
They only let you create so much, but it never feels like it’s independent or yours. That’s usually just a trade-off of most standalone LMS systems that are not WordPress plugins, but Academy of Mine is different.
Unlike other LMS systems, they offer some creative solutions that make it feel like you coded, designed, and built the website 100% from scratch on your own. It feels authentic and fresh without a cookie-cutter solution.
In our Academy of Mine review, we’ll discuss the unique benefits that AOM offers, the setbacks you should know about before hopping in, quiz building, fees, pricing, and all that good stuff as compared to other Academy of Mine reviews.
It’s time to look under the hood at what makes AOM tick.
What is the Academy of Mine?
Academy of Mine is an LMS, or learning management system that entrepreneurs and educators can use to display their courses, and learning materials, and build websites from the ground up.
The goal of using Academy of Mine is to provide a safe, secure portal for students to learn from your courses through a variety of ways while ensuring that nobody is getting through without their membership.
Host memberships, pricing, and control everything about how your students learn online, and more importantly, how you teach them, all with Academy of Mine.
Who Should Use Academy of Mine?
Experienced or seasoned online educators and entrepreneurs for professional development. AoM is definitely not a first-time user type of LMS.
While you have the option to stick to templates and pre-built assets, for the most part, there is a skill ceiling that you have to work towards.
On the one note, this makes AoM a versatile and intuitive online course platform where the sky’s the limit, but if you’re looking for an easier approach, you’ll have difficulty here.
AoM is designed for large-scale use, as well. If you don’t have a lot of students yet, it may be hard to justify the pricing, which we’ll get into in a few moments here. We would suggest that medium-scale to large-scale users that have more than one course and are either porting students over to AoM, or influencers who already have a viable audience who are likely to purchase your course would be the best fits.
If you’re developing a course more as a hobby or to get your feet wet, AoM might not be the fit for you. Large companies such as HarperCollins, APUS, and Allied Behavioral use AoM to train their staff and employees, which is another fantastic use.
Academy of Mine Ease of Use
Academy of Mine is easy to use at first, but as you find out just what it can do, you’ll encounter plateaus where a higher skill set is required to make the most out of your experience.
Without the time to learn how to use AoM, you will be limited. That being said, the entire UI is easy to navigate and understand, and many functions (such as starting a new course from scratch) are accessible and clear.
Academy of Mine has been able to do something that few LMS systems can: incorporate tons of options without making it feel overwhelming to the user. AoM can do so many things, but it doesn’t force you to learn those things until you’re ready.
Setup
Getting started is simple enough. AoM breaks everything up into small, manageable steps that don’t leave you feeling overwhelmed. Begin with the website, then start your course, and you’ll be fed information every step of the way.
They’ve done a fantastic job of making this intuitive and quick for any new user. Overall, it’s very easy to start, it just gets more difficult as time goes on if you want to make a from-scratch, top-of-the-line website.
Hosting
This might be one of the best hosting options for any LSM out there. AoM builds a demo site that includes your landing page, promotions, the course itself, and everything in between.
They host the site and all the pages to not only make it easy to get started, and it’s all wrapped up in your annual subscription cost. To contact support multiple choice of users tests, we’ve seen that the sites they host almost never go down (so yours will be available on a constant basis).
Academy of Mine Pricing
This is where things get tricky. WordPress plugins and full-scale LMS systems can be found from about $300 per year up to $3,000 per year, depending on what you choose.
Academy of Mine is very different from that. You can only choose the annual pricing plan, and while it includes 100% of everything they offer and more than you might even need, it is $9,997.00 per year.
Is that a lot? Yes, but that’s a full year of the best customer service imaginable, and it gives you absolutely no cap on the number of students you can have or courses that you can host. It’s an unlimited package that gives you advanced reporting, live webinar access, and all the bells and whistles. It’s worth it, but it’s pricey.
🚨 Academy Of Mine Discount Codes
Academy of Mine Templates
For the most part, AoM simply builds pages for you and from there you can customize them as you see fit.
The amount of templates is limited, which can be a bummer, but AoM promotes learning how to customize what’s available, and there’s no shortage of options.
While still being easy to use, you can navigate through all the different options to build your website in an intuitive, clean way that will positively reflect what you’re trying to accomplish. There isn’t as much of a need for templates because they do a lot of the legwork for you.
How to Use Academy of Mine
It’s simple to access the E-learning platform and get started. You have five main points that appeal to most online educators and business owners that want to make responsive online learning materials.
Course Builders
This is where it all started. Learning Management Platform leveraged Building courses is the entire point of going with an LMS in the first place. With so many course-building options, you can customize how your students get access to certain information.
If you’ve ever used just the online courses in the past for yourself, you’ll admire how AoM makes it a streamlined process for you, and a clutter-free process for your students to access learning materials.
Website Builders
As a white-label LMS service, AoM makes it easy to have your own URL, and email handle, and build your website from the ground up.
Actually, they do a lot of that legwork for you by building landing pages, website homepages, pricing pages, and more, and letting you customize it as you see fit. They’ll even help you out with building the website (within reason).
Quiz Builders
Quizzes help to test your students on what they just learned or help them catch up on the last couple hours of courses by summarizing everything they’ve learned.
They’re like little checkpoints. Not only does AoM make it easy to build quizzes, but they make it extremely fast. Most of the design is done for you, so you just have to input the necessary aspects of your quiz and let it rip.
Streaming Content
You can stream and basically make a webinar so that you can teach your students head-on. If students have questions about content, you can use these live-streaming moments to help make sure they’re up to date on course material.
If you’re getting this to help train employees or members of a business, you could hire someone and set up a specific day of the week when live professional training support is active. The possibilities are endless, but the fact of the matter is, AoM makes live streaming extremely easy.
Connections are secure and your content isn’t accessible to anyone outside of your site, although you do have to be careful that people aren’t screen-capping the entire video.
Certification Templates
Whether it’s for internal documentation, or you want your students to have something to remember from their time learning your course, you can take advantage of Academy of Mine’s certificate templates.
There’s plenty to choose from, and with little to no help at all, you can make a stunning certificate that automatically inputs the name and accomplishments of the student upon course completion so that you don’t have to do it manually.
How to Sell and Market Your Courses Via Academy of Mine?
According to this Academy of Mine case study, it can take about four to six weeks to get your course set up, even with AoM staff help.
That’s okay; this isn’t an overnight success kind of business you’re getting into. But the thing is, after those four to six weeks are done, you’re not going to magically get sales just because your course is live. You have to market it.
You have to treat your course like it’s a product launch you’ve been waiting on for years. Technically, it is a product launch. Traditional marketing solutions tend to work well for getting the word out about your course.
You could use social media outlets, pay influencers by sponsoring their videos, and try to find non-competitive partners that you can guest post with.
AoM doesn’t have too many integrated marketing features, because, in a sense, they’re helping you get the most important part of your marketing done already, which is the white-label site. That’s what any advertisements or endorsements will lead back to.
What Makes Academy of Mine Stand Out From the Competition?
Apart from their unusually high price? The fact that they truly are an all-in-one white-label LMS.
So far, few compare to the number of features they offer. There are more website customizable options, unique code injection, and more learning material options than most of the competition.
When you compare it to a site like Kajabi, which is more about content paywalls than specific learning (or at least it can be), you’ll appreciate how Academy of Mine really puts the emphasis on the learning experience (How To Sell Your Courses On Academy Of Mine).
AoM makes a distraction-free learning environment, and trying to get back on track after distractions is a nightmare. Your students will feel like they’ve learned more because they used a focus-heavy portal to learn through as opposed to competition services.
Entirely White Label
Most of the time, a white label means that someone else makes it, and you slap your name, logo, or brand onto it. It’s like buying a product just to rebrand it.
White label is a term used in SEO all the time, where companies will white label their services to allow other SEO companies to use them for their clients. In LMS systems, the white label simply means that you don’t have to worry about domain extensions.
You have fully customizable URLs, email handles, and basically everything that you need so nobody knows that Academy of Mine is the LMS behind the scenes. It looks like you built it from scratch.
AoM is 100% white-label. Some LMS systems will claim this, but then put “Built with X” on the bottom of your webpage and only allow it to be removed via custom coding. AoM leaves all that BS at the door; your site is completely yours.
Academy of Mine Analytics
Business is driven by data, and if you want to be in control of where your business ends up, you need to make accurate market predictions based on the information you’ve accumulated.
AoM analytics is by no means a miracle, but they do help with one thing: overload. Too much data is a bad thing. According to Inc. Magazine, 73% of collected analytical data is never even used (and it’s estimated to be higher than that by other sources).
AoM displays critical analytical data while giving you the option to access more, but you’ll basically be able to prioritize specific data that you need right now, and the interface for accessing it is smooth as well. Get in, get what you need, and get out: it’s as simple as that.
Academy of Mine Review: Customer Service
If we had an awareness system on EdWize for outstanding customer service, it would go to the Academy of Mine.
The AoM customer support team simply knows everything they need to help you out, and as we’ve all dealt with varying degrees of customer service competence over the years, this is a breath of fresh air.
The AoM team has been known to assist in custom coding, provide detailed, step-by-step assistance, and everything you would normally assume a customer service team should be capable of. Hats off to them.
Pros and Cons of Academy of Mine
Academy of Mine isn’t short on flaws, but now that we’ve come to a close on this review, it’s time to see which ones you can and can’t live within your full learning management system.
Pros
- So Many Course Authoring Possibilities: Teach your students through audio and video learning, interactive material, built-in testing tools, skill assessments, and gamification, all of which is SCORM compliant. There are no limits to how you can teach with AoM.
- More Options: Through custom coding and its numerous features, you can make a one-of-a-kind site that doesn’t follow the cookie-cutter mold that we’ve all seen. You can’t tell that an online learning site or course site is an AoM site just by looking at it.
- Top-Notch Customer Support: In your early stages of learning how AoM works, this reliable, fast-acting outstanding tech support and customer service implementation team is critical to your success and getting your setup going. They do an excellent job of accurately answering questions.
Cons
- High Upfront Cost: This isn’t exactly a beginner’s program. If you’re beginning your courses with a base or a ton of money for marketing, you can justify the near-five-figure price tag, but it’s just not in everyone’s budgets.
- Limited Supply of Templates: While Academy of Mine is constantly adding new features to its system, the current number of templates at the time of writing this review isn’t exactly a lot. To build a more customized, refined site, you need to work around some restrictions.
- Steep Learning Curve: Getting used to how AoM works is tricky and takes a while to get used to. Not ideal for first-time LMS users for this reason.
Is it an Academy of Yours?
Think of Academy of Mine to be a course builder with an eCommerce background.
It’s like making your own online store where you sell course packages, and while they definitely have that shop-heavy focus, they’re great if you ever get in the business of helping others make their own courses as well.
