Glossary

The words that come up when you teach online and sell what you teach — defined plainly, with what each one means in practice for an academy in India.

Teaching

Learning management system (LMS): Software that hosts course content, enrols students, tracks their progress and records results. It is the system of record for teaching, as opposed to a website that merely sells a course.
Cohort-based course: A course taught to a group who start and finish together on a fixed schedule, usually with live sessions, rather than a recording each student works through alone whenever they like.
Drip content: Releasing a course's lessons on a schedule instead of all at once — for example one module a week after enrolment, or on fixed calendar dates for a cohort.
Live class: A scheduled teaching session held in real time over video, with the teacher able to present, write, question and answer — as opposed to a recording watched later.

White-label: Running a product under your own brand, with the vendor's name removed. For a course platform it means your logo, your domain, and no "powered by" line anywhere a student can see.
Custom domain: Serving your academy from a web address you own (school.com) instead of the platform's (school.platform.com). The pages are the same; who they appear to belong to is not.
Storefront: The public, buyable face of an academy: the pages where a visitor browses courses and other products, and pays, without logging in first.

Zero commission: A pricing model where the platform charges a flat subscription and takes no percentage of sales. The payment gateway's own fee still applies, because that is charged by the gateway, not the platform.
Payment gateway: The service that collects a payment from a buyer and settles it to a business's bank account, handling cards, UPI, netbanking and wallets — Razorpay, Stripe, PayU and Cashfree are examples.
UPI Autopay: An NPCI feature that lets a payer approve a recurring UPI debit once, so later instalments are collected automatically up to an agreed limit, without them approving each one.
Payment plan: Letting a student pay a course fee in several scheduled charges instead of one. The headline price does not change; the timing does.
GST invoice: A tax invoice issued under India's Goods and Services Tax, carrying the seller's GSTIN, the tax rate and the tax amount shown separately. A business buyer needs one to claim input credit.

Student record: Everything an academy knows about one learner in one place: enrolments, payments, attendance, submissions, results and credentials.
Completion rate: The share of enrolled students who finish a course. It is the honest measure of whether a course works, and it is usually far lower than course pages imply.
Certificate verification: A public page that confirms a certificate is genuine, showing who issued it, to whom, for what, and when — so an employer can check a credential without contacting the issuer.
Attendance: The record of who was present in a class, for how long. Online, it is derived from join and leave times rather than a register being called.

Recording retention: How long a platform keeps a class recording before deleting it. It is a storage-cost decision by the platform, and usually a plan limit.
Content protection: Measures that make paid course material harder to copy or redistribute: signed video links, watermarking, download blocking, device limits and, at the strict end, DRM.
Proctoring: Supervising an online exam to deter and detect cheating — through camera and screen monitoring, tab-switch detection, or a live invigilator watching.