Work out whether bernard suits the way I teach

Teaching online usually means renting a platform: it holds your material, your students and your money, and it changes the terms when it likes. This page is about doing it on your own site instead — the ways that can work, which suits you, and what to look out for.

Which of these sounds like you?

"My courses are stuck somewhere I can't manage them." You already teach, and it works — but the material lives inside a plugin or a platform where changing anything means clicking through screens one at a time. A big library is the worst case: the more you've built, the less workable it gets. What you want is the material somewhere you can actually shape it, and your students somewhere you can actually see them.

"My teaching should bring me work, not fees." The course isn't the product — your expertise is. What you really want is for the teaching to be visible: proof that you know your subject, sitting on your own site where people and AI assistants can find it, ending in an enquiry rather than a checkout. Paying a course platform to hide that behind a login is backwards.

"I have people paying me every month, and I don't really own them." There's a community, a membership, a subscription — and it lives somewhere you don't control. Prices change, features change, and the awkward truth is that your members' habits and saved cards are held by someone else. What you want isn't features. It's ownership.

All three are the same complaint underneath: something is standing between you and your own material, or your own people.

The four ways people teach here

You don't have to pick forever, and you can move between them.

1. Teaching as your shop window. Your material goes up as public proof of what you know — readable, findable, quotable by AI assistants — with no price, no login and no checkout. The enquiry is the point. This is the lightest way to start, and for a lot of consultancies and practices it's the whole answer.

2. Sell where you already sell; teach here. Your checkout stays exactly where it is — the payment plans, the instalments, the links you've already got working. Bernard holds the course and the learners; you enrol people yourself as sales come in (Enrol a student myself — they paid elsewhere). Nothing about how you take money changes.

3. Sell and teach here. Payment runs through your own Stripe account on your own site, and enrolment happens by itself when someone buys (Sell a course from my own website and Where the money goes when someone enrols). Bernard takes none of it.

4. A club people pay for monthly. Rather than selling one thing once, members pay you every month or year for ongoing access to everything you teach, with a members' room to talk in (Run a membership or paid community — people pay monthly for my courses and My community space — where members talk, and how I look after it). It renews itself, and access always runs to the end of what somebody paid for.

You can also give a course away free to build a list (Give a course away free to grow my list), or open one lesson as a taster that sells the rest (Let people watch one lesson free).

What people worry about — and what's actually true

"Will my students have to re-register?" No, because they don't come across at all. Existing students, their enrolments and their progress stay on your old system and finish there. Your course here starts with a clean list, and you decide who joins it and when. That's deliberate: nobody gets an unexpected email because you changed suppliers.

"Will I lose the payment setup that works?" Only if you want to. Option 2 above exists precisely so that the part that isn't broken stays untouched.

"Is it a huge manual job?" If your courses are in LearnDash, no — they come across from an export file, modules, lessons, sub-lessons, worksheets and all (Move my courses off LearnDash or WordPress). Libraries of dozens of courses have moved this way. If you're somewhere without an export, there's a by-hand route too (Move my course off Teachable, Podia or Kajabi).

"Will everything I've built disappear while I set it up?" No. Courses arrive and stay as private drafts — unpriced, unlisted, invisible to learners — until you look at them and decide. That's the same approval gate as everything else on your site.

"Am I just getting locked into somebody else instead?" It's a fair question to ask of anyone. The honest answers: your money goes to your own payment account rather than through us, your custom domain stays yours, and your material stays exportable. We'd rather you stayed because leaving would be a shame than because it would be difficult.

Where we're genuinely strong

Your money is yours. Payments land in your own Stripe account and we take no percentage. Most course platforms take a cut of every sale on their cheaper plans; over a year on a real course business that difference is not small.

We work on your video, not just store it. Once a video is here it gets captions and a full transcript, chapters worked out for it, and its best moments picked out as quotable clips you can post (Use my own teaching material — turn lessons into posts and pages). You can cut a short clip for social, zoom in on the part that matters, and have a course trailer built for you. Storing video is table stakes; doing something useful with it isn't.

You change things by asking. Restructuring a syllabus, renaming a module, splitting one course into two levels — you describe it and it happens, then you approve it. That matters most exactly when your library is biggest (Organise a big course — modules, sub-lessons, many courses).

Everything waits for you. No change reaches a learner until you've seen it and said yes.

What's coming next

We're building towards handing bernard a body of raw material and getting a properly formed course back — the transcribing, the chapter-finding and the best-moment picking already work, and the step that turns those into a finished syllabus for you is what we're building now. Quizzes, assignments and certificates are on the same track: today they hold their place in the syllabus while the teaching around them works normally.

If you're weighing this up, Understand how a course is put together explains what a course is actually made of, and Charge once, or sell a year of access covers pricing and how long access lasts.