A couple of weeks ago I published a video and blog post about how to create a professional development series in Gmail. The method that I outlined in that post works well if you use Gmail, use Google Forms, and aren’t particularly interested in the aesthetics of what you publish. But if you don’t use Gmail and or you want to create an email-based course that looks nicer than the standard options in Google Workspace, then ConvertKit could be a good option for you. 

ConvertKit is an email management tool that you can use for free (up to 1,000 contacts in your database) to create and distribute an email-based course. As you’ll see in my video that is embedded below, ConvertKit provides great sign-up page templates and tools for sending automatically personalized emails to participants in your course.

Watch this short video to see a demonstration of how to create an online course by using ConvertKit’s free plan.

Applications for Education

Using ConvertKit could be a great way to create a series of emails that contain directions on how to use features of new software that your school is implementing over the summer for the next school year. The series might start with the basics and then each subsequent email would build upon that. Each email could contain a written overview, a video overview, and a “do now” practice activity. One of the nice things about ConvertKit is that you can see which recipients have opened your emails and which ones haven’t. You can then resend the messages to those who have not opened the messages the first time you sent them.