Unleashing your unique genius and building a successful learning business requires more than templated experiences and boilerplate copy. You deserve an experience that caters to your needs, reflects your uniqueness, and prioritizes your customers.
Thinkific has always strived to give you the most control over the experience you want to create for your business. The foundational building blocks of that flexibility are powered by the Thinkific API which powers many of the apps and integrations you rely on and offers a suite of other customized experiences.
We are continuing to push the boundaries of what’s possible. Today, we’re unveiling a groundbreaking API experience, designed from the ground up using GraphQL, to open up new ways of customization, flexibility, and unprecedented control over your data.
This new API will unlock a whole new generation of integrations, automations, customizations and apps that will save you time and money and help you take the next step in crafting your vision.
Skip ahead:
- A new approach to building at Thinkific
- Performance benefits at scale
- Cutting-edge technology with GraphQL
- What’s possible today
- Just getting started
A new approach to building at Thinkific
Acknowledging the robust and user-friendly API we offer today, we’ve listened to feedback for a more comprehensive tool that allows for deeper customization across Thinkific. Our solution? An “API-first approach” to product development.
By making some of our internal APIs public, you have access to the same powerful tools we use in Thinkific engineering. This simplifies our API offering and ensures you can fully automate and personalize your Thinkific experience.
This forward-looking approach guarantees that anything you can do on Thinkific can be automated or customized through our API. You will benefit from:
- More access to new data than ever before, across all of Thinkific.
- More regular updates, improvements, and faster bug fixes.
- Improved performance and security.
This is a really exciting step forward, and we can’t wait to see what new possibilities it opens up.
Performance benefits at scale
As we talked to creators looking to scale their business on Thinkific to support hundreds and thousands of students, we discovered that our current API wasn’t well equipped to deliver all the data required in a timely and efficient manner. The New API offers a performance boost by adopting cursor-based pagination, which facilitates efficient navigation through large datasets. Instead of page numbers, it uses identifiers (cursors) to pinpoint positions, enabling creators to swiftly access essential data for their businesses.
We are confident that many of the largest creators will continue to grow and scale effectively on Thinkific!
Cutting-edge technology with GraphQL
Internally, at Thinkific, we build all of our experiences using an API built with GraphQL. First created by Facebook and now at the forefront of modern platform development, GraphQL is the perfect candidate for our needs. It gives more choices for how to gather and manipulate data, letting developers define precisely which data they need. It gives exactly what is needed; nothing more, nothing less, all from one single API endpoint. Instead of making multiple requests to various endpoints, developers can gather all of the data needed in one simple request.
Developers who are used to working with REST APIs will find some differences and many things that remain the same when working with GraphQL. We understand there will be some new things to learn, so we’ve developed in-depth documentation to help your team get up to speed quickly!
What’s possible today
We’ve put this new API into the hands of some early creators and have been inspired by how they’ve used it and what they created! We wanted to share some highlights of how creators continue to enhance their experience with this new API today.
Communities: Take full control of your community experience! Access engagement data from your students by seeing their posts, replies, and actions throughout your community experiences. You can even automate and schedule the creation of new posts and replies!
Access deep insights about Student Progress
Quiz Results: Track your students’ learning outcomes by taking full control of their quiz results data. Pull high-level quiz data like completing grades and number of attempts, or dive deep to see their answers to the questions that you’ve built! And focus on the data that matters by filtering by User, Group, Course, or completion date.
Survey Submissions: Really get to know your students by accessing all of their Survey results. Analyze your students’ answers to key questions in your surveys by accessing question-level detail. Focus on the data that matters by filtering by User, Group, Course, or completion date.
Access Student Assignment Submissions: Access and automate Assignment grading by accessing student assignment submissions and then approving or rejecting their assignment, all through the API! Use this API to leverage AI to help you grade your student assignments!
Product Status: Using the API, users can now toggle a product’s status, close registration at a specific time, publish their products on a schedule, and limit seats for a course.
Just getting started
This is only the beginning. We’ll continuously expand the data and functionalities available through our API, opening up even more opportunities for you to innovate and enhance your learning business.
We invite you to explore the possibilities with our Public Documentation and look forward to seeing the new horizons you’ll discover with Thinkific’s API.
