There is much to be said about learning something online.
For starters, you can go at your own pace most of the time, meaning it has far more flexibility in a day and age where increasingly people need to learn new skills constantly but are always short of time.
Among other things, this has made online learning a coveted jewel for the modern person and easily one of the most profitable industries in recent years.
However, with that said, we all know that it is important to see whether the platform you are learning from is any good.
Some are absolutely amazing accredited institutions and others are garbage fires that run their whole office above an abandoned laundromat.
As such, we decided to take a look at one of these online institutions today Docebo review and show you whether it is worth your time at all.
What Is Docebo?
For those who don’t know, let’s dive into exactly what Docebo is and why people are discussing it.
So, Docebo is a learning management system, a type of system that handles the administration, tracking, reporting, documentation, automation, and delivery of educational courses.
This type of platform is the one that most companies will try to use to teach their staff new courses or new training procedures and as such it is vitally important that they operate in a functional, well maintained, and consistent manner, so business is not slowed down.
Docebo was launched in 2005 by Claudio Erba, an IT consultant at the time who was based at the University of Florence.
When he was at this university, he developed a cloud-hosted storage solution that would form the basis for the Docebo learning management system today.
The company initially was a small venture that only worked with Italian business circles, but it caught its first big break in 2012, when it received a round of funding from Principia SGR, an Italian venture capital firm.
Later that year, the company was able to open its first office in Athens, Georgia, thus establishing itself in the Americas.
The company then received a second round of funding in 2016 by Klass Capital, a Canadian firm, which helped to continue its expansion and facilitated its opening of its headquarters in Toronto, Canada.
Is Docebo Any Good?
Today, Docebo is considered one of the most innovative and fastest growing learning management systems in the world, with its platform allowing the companies it services to create incredible e-learning materials and make a social learning culture that benefits your company as a whole.
The way that Docebo is able to do this so well is through the use of an artificial intelligence technology that tweaks and adjusts its output to improve the student experience as a whole and to deliver personalized content to the end user.
The training platform of Docebo is designed for instructor-led teaching or training and online based training, with there being many tools that run on automation and other integrations that can deliver your courses in numerous different formats.
This allows the students of the courses to access these learning experiences anywhere that they would like, including on their phone or in other places with Wi-Fi and the technology to access the internet.
Another fantastic thing that people have noticed with Docebo is that the program is completely scalable.
When something is scalable, it means that the progress or grades of a student can be tracked fully and completely without any problems.
This ties into the tools that are used to create classes easily, allowing you to integrate them into your lessons.
Docebo Features
We have given a brief overview of Docebo and why it appears really good to those who use it and those who want to use it. But in order to really understand why it is so widely beloved, we need to look at its features fully.
The Courses
The primary goal of Docebo is to give you a system that will allow you or those at your company to create an online course that can be used to train your employees in the use of various company equipment or in the application of processes.
This means that it will provide you with the materials that you require to do, including the foundation that you build your course upon.
Docebo provides you with two types of classes to create your course: An e-learning course and an instructor led training course.
The e-learning courses are delivered entirely in the online sphere, without any trainers or instructors being involved whatsoever.
This course lets your students attend when they have time, not all at once, and they can do so remotely from anywhere with an internet connection.
Instructor led training courses use a Docebo webinar and have classroom lectures to go to.
These courses require a trainer or instructor to manage the course online, at the company site, or by using the webinar tool on the Docebo course.
Each course and lesson can be managed from the Docebo Course Management area, with the layout being fully customizable.
Docebo also has a course catalog feature that helps you in designing your own course and teaching or learning plans.
These catalogs can be free – the external ones – and they might have to come with a paid subscription to Docebo – the internal ones – but this allows you to group courses and give students access to these courses without also giving them away to everyone after you create them.
The Reporting
Knowing how well someone is doing with a course is vitally important to seeing whether they will pass.
Normally, this is for personal reasons, but when you work with a company to complete a course, you are doing so with the idea that you will advance through the company as well.
As such, you want to keep track of how well your students are doing, so they can progress in both the learning world and the professional one as well.
The Docebo reporting system not only allows you to do this, but it analyzes your own course as well and shows you how well it is doing.
These reports can be custom-made and can be sent automatically by email.
While you can’t change the type of report, and they can only be accessed by those with a login, you can change the name and description of the report and share them with your students – to download or via a link.
There is also a summary report that can be made about your course. This report tracks the information about a particular course and allows you to view:
– The percentage of users who finished your lesson within the first 30 days of registration.
– The number of total enrolled students.
– The total days since the class was launched.
– The amount of training materials.
– The e-signature label that appears beneath the course title.
– A percentage of the users who have either started the course, have not yet begun the course, are in the middle of the course, or have completed the course.
– A list of your activities on the course in the last 12 months.
– Individual course statistics for those registered in the class.
Additional Features
Apart from all these features, there are also other things that can be added to your course with very little effort. Some of these are included and some can be bought from other places.
For example, there is a content marketplace where you can get learning materials from Docebo and – if you have a subscription – external sources, including LinkedIn Learning and OpenSesame.
However, if you use this content marketplace, you cannot sell the materials or resell them using the Docebo Shopify app.
The Docebo course builder also allows you to use a white label feature. This will cover a few of the Docebo branding elements placed around your course and will only let your students see your brand’s logo.
This may seem like a simple thing, but it allows you to maintain your brand’s integrity, while Docebo quietly works in the background.
Finally, you can create gaming badges to reward your students, like how on a console you would get achievements.
Top learners, top contributors, the best students, they can all get a badge to make them feel better about learning the course.
The Support
Docebo puts a lot of effort into its customer support, with it being entirely online and having 24/7 availability.
It provides two avenues for support on this online sphere, the first is the live chat, which uses a bot system to try and help you with your problems, and the second is an e-mail based help, where you open a ticket or get help from the IT help desk.
Due to the size of Docebo, it can take within 8 to 24 hours to get a response normally, which we have to be honest is not an amazing response time.
However, very few customers have complaints about the support they received from the support itself.
One aspect where the Docebo support does fall down slightly is that it doesn’t have a lot of integration support.
If you are trying to install Docebo and you are struggling, you may not receive as much help as you would like from the company itself.
This is potentially because they have so few problems with installation, but still it would be nice to have just in case.
The Ease
Docebo is a very easy system to use, and in fact many people swear by the ease at which they used the whole thing up and down.
The system has a beautiful interface that lets students easily navigate all through the system with barely any navigation at all, as there are specific widgets and devices installed on the menu that guide them straight to your lessons on your own customized landing page.
You can publish a course on the page in any format that you so desire, with various bots, resources, and tools there to help you achieve this in a manner you want.
You don’t need to know learning management systems well-to-do this, the Docebo system will help to guide you through this with no problems.
In fact, they include a few different tutorial videos to aid in this course creation.
Now, with that said, there is a limited widget use per page when you are designing your course.
We put this under ease of use, as it not only limits the ease with which you can design a course, but it limits how easily your students can get to your course.
However, this is a minor thing, and they do still offer a lot of widget use per page.
The Price
Currently, there is no set price for using Docebo or a set pricing plan based on tiers.
This is because each Docebo usage is unique to the company and course builder, meaning that they have to set the price per buyer.
Once you fill out a form, you will be connected to a Docebo expert using an e-mail, who will discuss this further with you.
The price is normally attributed to the number of active users you will have on your course, and since this can vary, you may be in constant discussion with Docebo about upgrading or downgrading plans.
Since you only pay for the number of active users on your course, then you may want to buy a big course plan in anticipation, but this could well change over time.
Docebo does offer a 14-day free trial to test the software before committing to it, however once you have paid for a plan it will run to the end of the plan, regardless of canceled subscription.
Conclusion
In our opinion, Docebo is fantastic software to use for providing a learning course for students from your company or others to learn from.
It is intuitive, consistent, customizable, and well-supported. If you were planning to buy a learning management software subscription, then this might be the one for you.