In today’s digital world, online learning has become a popular and accessible way for individuals to acquire new skills and knowledge. To enhance the learning experience and foster community building, it’s crucial to provide a platform for discussion and interaction between students and instructors.
That’s where Thinkific and Disqus come into play. In this article, we’ll explore both platforms’ key features and benefits and provide a step-by-step tutorial on integrating them to create an engaging and interactive online learning environment.
If you’re an established creator or a teacher looking to enhance your students’ learning experiences, this article is for you!
What is Thinkific?
Before we show you how exactly to integrate the two platforms, let’s first take a close look at each of them, starting with Thinkific.
Thinkific is an all-in-one platform that enables educators and course creators to design, market, and sell online courses. With Thinkific, anyone can become a teacher and reach a global audience of learners. The platform provides an easy-to-use interface, customizable templates, and powerful tools to create and manage engaging online courses.
With its drag-and-drop course builder, educators can quickly and easily build custom courses, upload videos, add quizzes, and more. The platform also offers a range of customization options, including custom branding and course landing pages, to make each course unique and visually appealing.
Thinkific’s Key Feature Lineup
Thinkific offers a range of features to enhance the online course creation and delivery experience. Some of these include:
- Effective course creation and editing tools
- Comprehensive website-building and high-quality video hosting to ensure better learning delivery to your students
- A diverse range of tools, quizzes, and assessments, including multiple-choice questions, fill-in-the-blank questions, and more
- Detailed analytics and insights on student engagement, course completion rates, and other important metrics
- Excellent student management functions to monitor the progress of your students and provide them with much-needed feedback and support
Benefits of Using Thinkific for Online Course Management
Using Thinkific to create and manage your course content can benefit you.
Thanks to its increased accessibility on a global scale, it’s more than possible to reach a wider audience of learners with its stellar lineup of built-in course creation tools and features. Additionally, when monetizing your courses, you’re free to set the pricing to however you want, as long as it sustains you for years ahead.
So, with those two factors in mind, it’s no wonder Thinkific can be a great place to foster and enhance engagements between you and your student subscribers. With its impressive range of engagement and community tools, Thinkific helps to create a more interactive online learning experience for everyone involved.
Educators like you can easily manage your student base, monitor their progress, and provide feedback and support through Thinkific’s student management tools. And, as a plus, Thinkific’s underrated community-related features, such as comments and discussions within courses, can help you build a community that’s set to grow stronger in the long haul.
While you may choose to be content with what the online learning platform already offers, you can spice things up further with its seamless integration with Disqus.
What is Disqus?
Disqus is a popular online discussion and commenting platform used by websites and online communities worldwide. It enables users to easily engage in discussions, share their opinions, and interact with each other.
With Disqus, online communities can foster meaningful conversations, increase engagement, and build stronger connections with their audience. The platform is cloud-based and can seamlessly integrate with websites and online communities, providing a smooth commenting and discussion experience for internet users anywhere in the world.
Key Features of Disqus
Disqus knows a thing or two when it comes to providing businesses and creators with the right features and tools needed to create a highly-engaged community with users wanting to come back for more. The platform is best recognized for some of its key features:
- Powerful commenting and discussion functions that always update in real time
- Comprehensive moderation tools that can let you approve or reject comments, flag comments for review, and even ban some users if they violate your rules
- Easy sign-in for your students so they can always comment on your content without the fuss
- Detailed analytics and insights on total user engagements, comments, and readability trends
- The ability to earn extra revenue from engagements by running ads within the comments section
- Diverse mobile-friendly interface, providing a seamless and accessible discussion experience for users on any device
Benefits of Using Disqus for In-depth Online Discussions
With Disqus, it’s easier to manage and curate your engagements online at your fingertips.
Thanks to its dynamic offering of commenting tools, you can foster more meaningful conversations and build stronger connections with your audience. Plus, with its jam-packed yet easy-to-use integration and customization options, you’ll get smoother interactive experiences you and your users will enjoy.
Once you integrate Disqus with your Thinkific admin account, you can provide a platform for your students worldwide to easily engage in discussions, share their opinions, and interact with each other. You can even level up the game by allowing them to send media files, particularly GIFs and images.
Suppose you’re otherwise more strict and serious with your content. In that case, you can always shape up whatever experience you want to give them with Disqus’ built-in moderation tools, enabling communities and websites to effectively maintain a positive, productive, and overall safe environment. So, whether you want to stop spam comments from inconveniencing others or ban suspicious users altogether, you can always have them fixed within your reach.
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How to Integrate Disqus and Thinkific
Integrating Thinkific and Disqus can make your interactions with your student subscriber better than without it, ultimately elevating your content to a higher level. This tutorial will walk you through the steps for integrating Disqus with Thinkific.
Before moving forward with the tutorial, we want you to know that you can no longer integrate your Thinkific account directly and seamlessly with Disqus. With that in mind, there are a few possible ways to connect these two platforms without worrying about immersing yourself in ultra-complicated technical jargon.
Of these options, the best possible one is to embed the Disqus comments section into any of your Thinkific-made website pages. Here are the following steps that you should take while integrating Disqus with your Thinkific web page.
Steps for Integrating Disqus Into a Thinkific Page
- Create a Disqus account. If you don’t already have a Disqus account, you’ll need to create one. This simple process can be done in a matter of minutes.
- Set up a Disqus site. Once you’re done registering, you’ll need to set up a Disqus site or forum. This is where your comments and discussions will be hosted. You need to type in the name of your site – you can write the same name that you are using in Thinkific if you prefer – and select the category that best fits your content.
- Select from any of Disqus’ available plans. Disqus offers premium-priced plans plus a custom-priced Business plan that features all the platform’s tools. However, you can also subscribe to a Free plan if you don’t have enough money to spend on its other tiers.
- Get the Disqus Universal Code. After setting up the Disqus forum and choosing the right plan, you’ll need to get the Disqus Universal Code. This JavaScript embed code integrates Disqus into any of your Thinkific site pages. From the platform options page, select “Universal Code.” You will then be given instructions on how to use the code. In this case, you will only need to copy it.
- Add the Disqus Universal Code to Thinkific. With the Disqus Universal Code, you can now integrate Disqus into your Thinkific page. To do this, go to the “Site pages” section under the “Design Your Site” menu in your Thinkific dashboard. Select the “Edit” icon for the page you’ve chosen to integrate Disqus with. Once you enter the Site Builder for your page, add a new “Text & Media” section, click on the “Code View” icon, and paste the Disqus Universal Code into the HTML editor.
- Make a few changes to the Universal Code to make it function properly. You will need to edit some parts of the Universal Code for the Disqus comments section to work within your chosen Thinkific site page. Just so you know, instructions to make these changes are already written into the code, and you will need to follow these steps accordingly. Please take a look at this post here or the video below for more details.
- Preview and save changes to your Thinkific page. Once you finish making necessary adjustments to the Universal Code, click on the “Code View” icon again. Doing this allows you to see the preview of your Thinkific page with the Disqus comments section, ensuring that the integration is working correctly. If everything looks good, you can click “Save” to save changes to the page. Otherwise, you can go back to “Code View” and troubleshoot some problems with the code.
(How to Install Disqus Manually Using the Universal Code)
Other Ways of Integrating Disqus With Thinkific
As previously mentioned, there are a few other possible solutions to consider when connecting Thinkific and Disqus without worrying too much about complicated coding. Apart from integrating the Disqus comment section into your Thinkific website page through the former’s Universal Code, you can also try the following:
- Zapier Integration
You can use Zapier to integrate – and automate – both platforms at once. While you cannot easily find Disqus in the Thinkific App Store anymore, even through a simple search, you can install the Zapier app and manage a few integrations with Thinkific alongside thousands of apps it supports, including Disqus.
So that you know, you need to have a Zapier account to do this. Also, we’d like to point out that you must be careful of the possible errors that may get in the way of successfully integrating Thinkific with Disqus.
- Disqus as a Custom Multimedia Lesson in a Thinkific Course
While you may no longer conveniently include Disqus in your course content as a standalone lesson, you can bypass this problem using the URL to your Disqus site/forum or a file with its Universal Code.
To do this, you need to click on “Manage Learning Content” from the left-hand menu of your Thinkific dashboard, then “Courses.” You can select the course to which you want to add the Disqus comments section. Once you click on it, you will be redirected to the Course Builder, where you’ll select “Add Lesson” from any of its Chapters.
Then, from the lesson options, select “Multimedia.” You’ll be given the following two options to integrate your Disqus content:
- Use externally hosted content (URL) – Copy and paste the link to your Disqus site into the provided field. Make sure to follow the proper URL structure and parameters as advised.
- Upload content file (.zip file only) – Upload or drag-and-drop the compressed zip file which contains Disqus elements, including its Universal Embed Code.
Once you’re okay with how it looks, you can click “Save” on top of the screen to save the changes. Please feel free to come back to it anytime in case errors arise.
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Advantages of Integrating Thinkific with Disqus
The Thinkific-Disqus integration offers several advantages to online course creators and students alike. Here are some of the noticeable advantages of using Disqus in conjunction with Thinkific:
Improved student engagement
Disqus provides a platform where you can prompt and encourage your students to ask questions, engage in discussions, and provide feedback on course content. This interaction can help keep students engaged and motivated and provide course creators like you with valuable insights into how their students are responding to the content.
Increased collaboration
By allowing students to interact with one another, the Thinkific-Disqus integration can foster a sense of community among those enrolled in any of your courses. This can help create a more collaborative learning experience, as students can work together to solve problems and share ideas.
Plus, thanks to Disqus’ customization and content moderation tools, you can make that experience more fruitful yet stable.
Enhanced course feedback
While you may already let students leave comments and feedback within any of your courses in Thinkific, Disqus is more centralized regarding hosting feedback. You can only allow them to comment by the end of each chapter. You can also let them suggest away even within your Thinkific site page, thus making it easier to understand how your students respond to the content.
Because of the integration, this feedback can help you, as a creator, make improvements to your courses and ensure they meet the needs of the individuals who have purchased to access your content.
Thinkific and Disqus Integration – Summary
That’s it! With these steps in mind, you’ll have successfully integrated Disqus with Thinkific, providing your students with a customizable and engaging learning experience.
We have proved that this integration can provide a comprehensive solution for cultivating meaningful discussions and helpful feedback within your community. By combining these two platforms, you can effectively experience improvements in delivering your content to those who have signed up for it.
In conclusion, integrating Disqus with Thinkific can help enhance student engagement and interaction by promoting discussion, fostering a sense of community, and encouraging feedback. Although you could be okay with what Thinkific already offers, integrating with a discussion-focused platform as powerful as Disqus can help you in the long run, especially if you’re already established in your own right.
FAQ
Does Thinkific have a native discussion feature?
Yes, Thinkific has a built-in discussion board feature that allows students to interact and engage with each other and the course instructor.
Additionally, it offers a standalone community feature that enables those subscribed to your course content to connect and share their thoughts, experiences, and knowledge.
Why can I no longer integrate Thinkific with Disqus seamlessly?
It is no longer possible to easily integrate your Thinkific with Disqus because Thinkific has already implemented its built-in discussions and community tools indefinitely since 2021.
As of this writing, they are continuously being improved to help creators provide their students with the same powerful engagements as Disqus but within one centralized platform. For this reason, Thinkific has decided to discontinue its partnership with Disqus.
How much does Disqus cost?
Although Disqus offers a free plan, it offers three paid plans starting at $11 per month (annual billing) for the Disqus Plus tier. Its Pro plan costs $105/month, while the Business plan is custom-priced according to the needs of a bigger company.
No matter which paid plan you want to choose, the cost will ultimately depend on the features you require and the size of your audience.