Courses Archives - Cosmic Whispers Design

E-Course Tools

Now that we’ve gotten the really important stuff out of the way (the plan and the funnel structure), we can get to the spiffy electronic tools to support your course.

I will go over three course management options for you. This is a general overview; if you want to see them in detail, follow the links in the titles.

Course Management on Their Site

There are two basic approaches to online course management: On their site, or on your site. The difference is important in terms of data storage. If you work with a system that’s on their site, you don’t have to deal with the page loading drag and potential extra cost of needing more storage from your own web host.

Thinkific

I went ahead and signed up for Thinkific. It was also recommended by a friend. Cool interface. Free forever in terms of annual or monthly fees, but they have restrictions on number of courses at the free level. They also seem to have their own integrated membership feature, so you can create discussion groups within Thinkific. It doesn’t look like they charge transaction fees, but for me the fact that they don’t use Square as a payment gateway is a bit of a bummer. They do use Stripe and Paypal.

Teachable

Teachable also has a free version, although you have to scroll down their site a bit to find it. Their subscription prices are a little cheaper than Thinkific, but they also charge for each payment transaction (it looks like it’s just to cover their cost). There are no limits on number of students for the paid plans, but a limit of 10 on the free one (makes sense). They have a nice feature comparison chart that gives you all the information you need to choose a plan. I didn’t see a specific membership feature at Teachable. Teachable also uses just Stripe and Paypal as payment gateways.

Both systems seem to have features to support the funnel I wrote about, starting with dripping email content and going on through to more formal course designs with lessons, quizzes, graded tests, etc.

For branding purposes, for both systems, you do start with a subdomain of the course management provider (e.g., joannecourse.thinkific.com), and have to pay to get a custom domain name. But it looks like Teachable may be easier to link up to your own site.

Course Management on Your Site

The advantage of hosting your courses yourself is freedom and control. Freedom to integrate into all your branding easily, freedom to take advantage of lots of third-party add-ons. Control over your security provider choices, membership groups, etc.

LearnDash seems to be the power player in this space. If you use LearnDash, though, you have to deal with hosting it on your site and therefore with your web host. As course content and enrollments grow, you may have to pay more for storage at your web host, in addition to any charges from LearnDash itself. They also charge significantly more than Thinkific and Teachable. In addition, there is no free option, although if you try it and don’t like it, you can get a refund.

My thought after looking at the features and integrations (I can use Square as a payment gateway!) is that LearnDash may be something to grow into after using the cheaper on-their-site options at Thinkific or Teachable. There are lots of add-ons to customize and expand your course system with LearnDash. But just starting out, I don’t think I’d go there.

So, a quick overview. At least I got us down to three options! Please do go and check out the details on each of these based on where you think you want to go with e-courses. I think I’ll try Thinkific first and see how it goes.

Meanwhile, I’m totally open to comments from your experience with theses course management systems. 🙂

E-Course Structures

Courses

Let’s get into the shape of your course now. If you want to see the overview on planning a course, check out my article from earlier this week.

The Funnel

After you’ve written up an outline of your e-course content, think about the funnel idea. I’ve seen it work really well for a writing course I participated in. The funnel allows people to access your content at different price points and at different levels of involvement by you personally.

The funnel goes something like this:

A sequence of emails you send out automatically
A larger group with, say, weekly sessions with you for an hour each over a month’s time
Small group lessons involving more detail, homework, and more feedback from you (once a week for two hours each, more often for less time, etc.)
One-on-one mentoring sessions (meeting up to daily for a set period of time, with homework and structured exercises/practice)

The Plenty in the Funnel

Or, where your content goes and what its structure is. You’ll need the following “fruits” for your funnel of course-plenty.

Email Drip Course

A lesson plan with theory, instructions, and practices. Think of it as the story of something you’ve learned that you are passing on. Go through the process yourself and write down what you do to make something (book, painting, sweater, ring, website design, changing your brain). Make the first iteration really basic, but don’t just tell people stuff; give them exercises to practice with. Break it up into individual lessons, and then you can use a tool like Mailchimp or one of the course tools I’ll go through later to send out those “drip” emails to your students.

Large Group Sessions

Then put your microphone on and get your calendar and teleconference tools ready. After you get all those people from your email course to sign up to your expanded course with group sessions, you’ll need to schedule those sessions. Have at least your computer microphone available and a way for people to call or log in. I suggest audio rather than video for this level. More than 10 to 12 people in a group can be overwhelming on video. Video is better, though, if you need to demonstrate something. Your call.

You can work a closed or secret Facebook group with scheduled Lives for an easy way to work this (membership group and teleconference in one). I don’t like to work off a platform owned by somebody else, though. A membership group of some kind is a great resource for your group so they can support each other. I’ll cover e-course tools and membership elements in another post.

You can use these sessions for Q&A, or you can do visual demos, or lead a meditation, or just discuss ideas. If you have more than 10 to 15 people, though, don’t try to have everyone do anything too involved. Time limits are important for them and for you. With more people it will always take more time to do a single task together.

Small Group Sessions

When you are done working with the larger group, you can invite them to join you for an intensive in the subject in a small group setting (no more than 15 people and more like 10 for, say, an hour and a half). When you get really popular, you can have more than one small group going with meetings on different days. Most of the time though, only a small percentage from the large group will be willing to pay a premium to work with you in a small group. The tools are the same as the large group setting, but you can be available more often to teach at a more advanced level. You can provide an advanced lesson plan and exercises, etc. You can offer to give individual feedback, too.

One-on-One Mentoring

The ideal is to then have some of the small-group folks decide to work with you on a one-to-one mentoring basis. For this level, you will offer a program to fine-tune what they’ve done already or go further in their process of changing themselves or whatever it is they are learning. It will be a coaching type of experience, likely with a mix of written materials, homework, frequent sessions (couple of hours each, usually) to talk about progress. It’s up to you how involved you want to make this.

The Money Thing

Think of the monetary exchange on this as a way for others to express their understanding of the value of what you are offering. Know that your pricing should reflect the amount of both talent and time you dedicate to each level in the funnel. Wait. Read that again. Talent and time. Not just time. And I’m not calling it expertise, either. You know where your wisdom central is with whatever it is you want to teach. Other people will only value you based on how you value yourself.

Actual pricing is up to you and to a certain degree the “going rate” for whatever it is you are teaching. But the email drip level should be very affordable (usually less than $30USD or free, even). Large group can start at around $150USD and up, with small group creating a big jump to several hundred or over a thousand. One on one could be at least several thousand. All depends on you. 🙂

Thanks for coming along for the ride, and if you need a one-on-one tutorial on starting an e-course or using a specific software tool, just let me know and we can figure it out together.

The E-Course Plan

Courses

Let’s learn more about e-courses together through this blog post series.

Most people get caught up in looking for software tools to run their course. The only tool I’ve used so far is something called Moodle, which is a control panel for running academic-style courses. It includes features like the ability to grade tests, set up discussion forums, upload textbooks, etc. It’s quite formal and probably a bit much for most folks who just want to send some emails in sequence (the drip thing) or collect people in smaller or larger groups on audio or video.

Before Tools: Content & Structure

Before you choose a software tool or tools, though, you have to figure out what you want to do. In the software engineering book I’ve been indexing this past week, it’s called modeling. This modeling process includes all the processes that a customer wants to do with the computer’s help (like tracking inventory).

So, first, you need to outline your requirements for creating a course before you can pick a tool to help you. Ask yourself some questions like these:

What content do you want to teach? Really need an outline of that first and foremost, with objectives for the student. Otherwise, it’s just a book.
How many people do you want to work with at one time? Large group, small group, individual interactions, all three eventually?
How much access do you want to give to people? Email connection, documents, audio, video, and how much interactivity with you?
What do you want them to do? Read, write, meditate, make a video, ride a bike?
Do you want them to interact with each other? In small groups or everyone together in a forum atmosphere?
Do you want to have them turn in stuff and have you comment on or grade it, or are they just doing it for themselves?
Do you want feedback from them about the content?
Do you want to provide an endorsement or certification, and if so, how will you measure their competence—quizzes, tests, live performance?

I know, that’s a lot. But when you take your wisdom and move from a passively consumed object like a book to an interactive course, lots more layers show up.

Homework

So, your homework for this blog post series is to do up an outline, with student objectives, for the subject you want to teach. It can be from a book you’ve already written, or it can turn into a book you will write to support the course.

Thanks for coming along for the ride, and if you need a one-on-one tutorial on starting an e-course or using a specific software tool, just let me know and we’ll figure it out together.