Heights Platform 2022 Year in Review: Our Biggest Course Creation Software Updates

2022 was a busy year for Heights Platform and our creators. Now it's time to look back and see what we have accomplished together!

The online course platform has seen 6 major releases and 263 smaller updates only this year, including our brand new Web Page Builder, new community space, certificates for students and more.

Thanks to all our creators for the lovely feedback and excitement about our new updates!

This year we also launched our podcast, The Creator's Adventure, which led us to sponsor a giveaway worth $6000 in prizes (more about this later in this post).

In addition to the weekly interviews from The Creator's Adventure, in 2022, our content creation team was working hard to create new valuable content and resources to help course creators in their journey.

Heights Platform's team also met up in-person for the first time after working remotely. Learn more about our team trip to Austin, Texas!

So let's see what 2022 was all about for Heights Platform, starting from the biggest updates of the year:

Product Updates

Web Page Builder

Probably one of our biggest updates ever (not only in 2022), the Web Page Builder is the latest addition to Heights Platform.

This new feature is a complete no-code editor for creators to build, edit and publish website pages right inside their platforms.

The Web Page Builder allows creators to build a whole website for their knowledge business, without the hassle of using custom code or paying an extra subscription for a web design tool.

If you are a Heights creator in the Pro or Academy plan, you can use the Web Page Builder to build unlimited web pages and host your entire website.

We created ready-made templates so you can start building stunning websites in minutes!

Building a web page is easy with this new feature: simply pick a template that you like, edit its content or add new sections in the drag-and-drop editor and publish your page.

Creators can use the Web Page Builder for all of their needs: creating sales pages for their courses, building a whole website for their business, or designing a landing page to promote a future launch (and more!).

Since this feature is right inside Heights Platform, all of your data is already linked. This means that you can quickly add content related to your products, and Heights automatically imports the data into the page.

For example, you can decide to add a "product card" to your page (a section showcasing one of your courses), by simply dragging it and dropping it into the editor and choosing between your products in a dropdown menu, as shown below:

Communities

This year we redesigned and optimized our former "discussion board" feature into an overhauled, modern community where creators can interact with students more effectively across multiple channels.

The community feature helps students engage and discover your content, provide feedback, and share new ideas easier.

This feature is built right inside Heights Platform at no addition charge to you, so your online course students can easily access the community area at any time in their learning journey, and you can easily moderate the discussions happening in the space.

You can structure your community as you prefer: create different channels of communication and group them into "channel groups" to keep your community organized and help students find the content they need easily.

As the creator, you get to moderate the community: you always have the option to approve or reject a new post, to keep your community safe and maintain a positive environment.

The community in Heights is a place where students can share their thoughts about your online course, ask questions, provide feedback and interact with you and each other.

Completion Certificates

In 2022 on Heights Platform, you can create, customize and share completion certificates with your students. You can issue certificates manually or automatically whenever a student completes a specific course of your choice.

You can customize the appearance of each certificate, choose a theme you like and edit its design, color and font easily.

This is great because it allows you to design online course certificates aligned with your branding and style: you can change the colors to match your brand and personalize the content of each certificate.

There are no limits on how many certificates you create and how many times you issue them. Plus, you are flexible to structure them as you like: choose which online course to generate certificates for and whether or not you want Heights to automatically create and send certificates to each student that completes your course.

Integrations

At the end of 2022, Heights Platform made it easier for creators to find and install integrations to connect with their favorite tools. We released an integration with ActiveCampaign, making it simple for creators to connect their ActiveCampaign account directly to Heights to create contacts and trigger automations. Along with this update, we also released ReCaptcha v3 support for even greater security (on top of the enterprise Cloudflare service that Heights creators get at no charge).

Project and Assignments Attachments

In Heights Platform, you can create Projects and Assignments.

Projects are a way of showing that students can put the content you've taught them to use in a real-world setting. We believe this approach is much more beneficial to both the student and teacher than a traditional quiz or test.

A Project can be anything you want, an exercise you ask your students to complete at the end of your online course or while they are learning to put their knowledge into practice.

In 2022, creators in Heights can now upload resources on their projects for students to download. Up to 10 resources can be added to each project. You can upload zip folders if you need to add more. Students can also upload attachments to their project posts to showcase their work with others and with the creator.

Assignments in Heights Platform are similar exercises for students, but they are located inside a lesson. This way, creators can ask students to perform a specific task, answer a question or show their work after learning the lesson's content inside a course.

We also added the option to upload attachments to students' assignment answers. Any content uploaded by students in projects and assignments is scanned for viruses upon upload to better protect creators and their programs. Creators can also view all answers for a specific lesson assignment from the lesson page.

Challenge Pricing Plan

Back in 2021, one of the biggest updates to Heights Platform was the option to create Challenge courses.

In Heights, a challenge is a type of online course that has a fixed calendar start and end date, with the ability for lessons to lock after a certain period of time.

The difference between challenges and online courses is the way students get access to the lessons. You can schedule the dates when your challenge will be live and available to all enrolled students and set a release date for every single lesson in your challenge.

Differently from a regular online course, each lesson inside a challenge can potentially disappear or expire for students after a set period of time that you can customize (you can also choose not to turn this option on and let students access the lessons over time).

Everyone who purchases your challenge will gain access to the course and new lesson content on the same dates as the other students taking the course.

Once a challenge is completed, creators using Heights Platform have the option to restart it and rerun the challenge again simply with the click of one button. You can set the new launch date, and Heights automatically calculates the launch and expiration dates of every single lesson, based on the settings you had in the previous challenge!

With the success of challenges, we decided to create a brand new pricing tier focused on this type of course.

Meet the Challenge Plan: a more accessible solution for creators getting started with their business but still needing a powerful course platform.

Starting at $19/month, the Challenge Plan lets you create one challenge course, with unlimited lessons, modules, and video uploads.

We packed this plan with everything a creator needs to start out, plus advanced features never available before at such an affordable price! Validate your idea and grow your audience by creating a challenge today!

Drip release your lessons, schedule email sequences and campaigns, offer learners points and badges, and collect payments with 0 transaction fees!

Other minor updates in 2022:

• Localization Updates for Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Traditional Chinese
• Design and UI Improvements throughout the whole platform
• Free .academy Domain - In partnership with Name.com, we're offering all of our customers a free .academy domain for 1 year ($37.99 value).
• Video Uploads - Increased Video upload limit to 2.5GB per video from 2GB. For most lessons, shorter videos work best, but for those cases where it makes sense to upload a longer video, you can now do so easier.
• Editing Improvements - Lessons can now be created directly inside modules in the climb outline and lesson editor. Modules can also be created from the lesson editor directly for an uninterrupted experience.
• Climb Outline - The collapse state of your courses and modules on the climb outline is now saved as you edit, making it much easier for creators with hundreds or thousands of lessons to navigate.
• Virus Scanning of Attachments - Any content uploaded by students is scanned for viruses upon upload to better protect creators and their students

Shows & Events

The Creator's Adventure

2022 saw the creation of Heights Platform's podcast show: The Creator's Adventure.

In this weekly video podcast, our founder and host Bryan McAnulty, interviews creators from all over the world to hear their stories and discover their secrets to success.

The Creator's Adventure uncovers how creative entrepreneurs from all niches transformed their passions into successful online businesses, so you can learn from their entrepreneurial journeys.

Every week the show goes live, and we interview creators who started their adventure from zero and worked their way up to the success of today.

You can listen to the success stories of creators worldwide and learn how they monetized their knowledge online with courses and coaching or how they created a business from the ground up.

The Creator’s Adventure is a place of learning and community: join us live every Tuesday at 9 am (US Central time) on Heights Platform's YouTube channel. The show is also available on Spotify and Apple Podcast.

In 2022, we interviewed more than 45 creatives and entrepreneurs, including many 7-figure and 6-figures earners.

Here are some of our most popular interviews:

Ultimate Creator’s Toolkit Giveaway

In October 2022 Heights Platform ran a huge giveaway with $6000+ worth of prizes, to promote our new podcast show, The Creator's Adventure.

Here is a list of the prizes that were available to win during our giveaway:

• Sony Alpha ZV-E10 Camera and Lens:
• Elgato Camlink 4k
• Dazzne Deskmount Keylights x2
• Lifetime Heights Platform account "Pro Plan”
• T-30 Launch Course
• Strategy Consultation with our Founder, Bryan McAnulty

Total Prize Value: $6000+

The giveaway was a success and a way for creators to gain awesome tools to grow their online knowledge business. It was also a way to promote our podcast show and share our message with the world.

At the beginning of November 2022, we drew the winner and announced it on our podcast. Here is a picture of him with some of the prizes!

Thank you to everyone who participated in the giveaway for supporting Heights Platform and our show, The Creator's Adventure!

Heights Summit

In June 2022, Heights Platform hosted a summit for its new creators who joined during the previous months.

The summit was the perfect opportunity for new creators to learn directly from online course creation experts and others Heights creators who were extremely successful with their online courses!

Topics covered in the summit included training for creators on how to use Heights Platform for their business, SEO tips to promote an online course, strategies to market an online course and increase sales with story-telling, what the creator's journey looks like and how to succeed in the course creation industry.

T-30 Course: Launch Your Online Course in 30 Days

To offer even more helpful resources to our creators, in 2022 the Heights team developed an online course called T-30.

The first launch in May was a huge success, and we helped more than 3000 happy students build and launch their online courses in 30 days.

The T-30 course will soon be available to all Heights Platform's existing customers for free, and new Pro plan customers from 2023.

The course is filled with valuable information that can help not only new creators but also more experienced ones who are already selling courses! Packed with over 35 in-depth lessons, T-30 Launch teaches you how to validate your idea, build a course, set the price, create a business model, and market your brand.

Featured Content

2022 was a year of growth for Heights Platform, partly thanks to our content creation efforts. Every week we strive to create new and helpful content for online course creators across multiple channels.

Most of our content is available for free and is a great resource for new and more experienced creators who want to learn more about how to grow their online knowledge business.

Let's see the most popular and valuable pieces of content from Heights Platform in 2022.

Top YouTube Video You Can't Miss

In the video above, we unveil our recording setup, and what we believe is the best solution for online course creators.

Find out how to produce online course videos that not only look and sound great but are efficient to make. Learn how to choose recording gear that allows you to save your videos and audio directly to your computer, with little to no editing and post-processing needed, so that you can launch your new online course faster.

Don't forget to subscribe to Heights Platform's YouTube channel for more online course creation-related content!

Our Most Popular Blog Posts

In 2022 alone, we published more than 100 blog posts designed to help online course creators with detailed tips and resources. Here are some of our most popular blog posts in 2022 to not miss:

• Is Passive Income Real? How to Create Leveraged Income in Your Online Business
• How to Create the Best Refund Policy for Your Online Course
• A Complete Guide on How to Promote Your Online Course and Boost Sales

A Clip You Loved on Social Media

If you don't already, you can follow Heights Platform on social media to stay up to date with our latest news and access helpful resources in bite-size content.

You can visit our Instagram, Facebook and Tik Tok pages for more course creation tips and tricks. This clip in particular from our interview with Andrew Warner was very popular with over 15,000 likes and counting:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Heights Platform - Online Course Software (@heightsplatform)

What's Next for Heights Platform?

2022 was a great year for Heights Platform and our creators, with many important updates and new resources for creators. But we are not going to stop here, as we have many exciting surprises in store for 2023!

Our online course platform will continue to grow and we will strive to provide helpful content in the upcoming year. Follow some of these updates and vote on what you'd like to see next on the Heights Platform public roadmap.

Among our plans for 2023, we are working on adding live streaming features, more training content for creators, additional integrations and web page templates, workflow changes for advanced creators and more...

To stay in the loop, we suggest subscribing to our newsletter, where we share all of our major platform updates and valuable resources and tips for course creators!