Teach Your Gift

1. Online courses revolutionized education and entrepreneurship

Online courses have become so ubiquitous that it's easy to forget how new of a phenomenon they really are.

Democratizing education. Online courses have transformed the landscape of education and entrepreneurship. They've made it possible for experts to share their knowledge with a global audience, breaking down barriers of geography and cost. This democratization of education has created opportunities for both learners and teachers, allowing anyone with valuable skills or knowledge to potentially build a thriving business around sharing that expertise.

Impact and income. For course creators, online courses offer the potential for:

• Financial freedom
• Flexibility in work hours and location
• The ability to scale impact beyond one-on-one interactions
• Opportunity to focus on meaningful work

2. The evolution of online courses: From gold rush to mainstream

Remember, we're talking about internet years here, and things have changed a lot recently!

Three phases of evolution. The online course industry has rapidly evolved through three distinct phases:

1. Innovator's Gold Rush (2000-2014): Early adopters found massive success with minimal competition
2. Early Adopters and Polarization (2015-2019): Market matured, splitting into low-cost information and premium education
3. Mainstream Adoption (2020 onward): Increased competition and higher quality standards

Changing landscape. Today's online course market is characterized by:

• Higher expectations for course quality and outcomes
• Increased competition across niches
• Greater emphasis on true expertise and credentials
• Shift from passive income dreams to building sustainable businesses

3. Leverage and freedom through transformative online courses

Courses that transform tend to go further than just delivering information ("teaching about"), and focus on real transformation ("teaching to").

Beyond passive income. While the dream of passive income through online courses is largely unrealistic for most, there's still enormous potential for creating leverage and freedom. Transformative courses that deliver real results for students can command premium prices and create sustainable businesses.

Three roles of courses:

1. Support: Enhancing existing products or services
2. Augment: Adding additional revenue streams to a business
3. Transform: Creating high-value, premium educational experiences

Transformative courses typically involve more than just information delivery. They often include coaching, interactivity, and a focus on measurable student outcomes. This approach can lead to courses generating hundreds of thousands or millions in revenue, providing both impact and financial rewards for course creators.

4. Piloting: The key to creating successful courses

The only way to know for sure is to test.

Start small and iterate. Piloting is crucial for validating course ideas and refining the learning experience. Instead of spending months creating a comprehensive course, start with a minimum viable version to test key assumptions quickly and inexpensively.

Piloting process:

1. Validate demand
2. Identify minimum viable scope
3. Plan your pilot (one-page outline)
4. Pre-sell your course
5. Deliver the pilot
6. Evaluate and decide: Pivot, iterate, or scale

This approach allows course creators to gather real-world feedback, refine their offering, and build confidence before investing significant time and resources into a full-scale course.

5. Co-creation: Engaging students in course development

That's the power of co-creating with your prospects and pre-selling your pilot; it makes your audience part of the creation of your pilot course, which gives you an advantage even stronger than a list of paying customers.

Harnessing the IKEA effect. Co-creation leverages the psychological principle that people value things they help create more highly. By involving potential students in the course development process, you create a sense of ownership and investment in the final product.

Benefits of co-creation:

• Increased student engagement and satisfaction
• Better alignment between course content and student needs
• Built-in marketing as participants become advocates
• Valuable feedback for iterative improvement

Implement co-creation by soliciting input on course topics, structure, and delivery methods from your target audience throughout the development process.

6. Building a scalable marketing machine for your course

The co-creation process is great for enrolling your first few dozen students, and the experimentation with lead sources and conversion mechanisms will bring in your next few hundred. Once you've passed those stages, you have everything you need to build the system that attracts the next several thousand students (and more), with less and less effort on your part.

Three stages of course marketing:

1. Co-creation and personal outreach (first few dozen students)
2. Experimentation with lead sources and conversion mechanisms (next few hundred)
3. Building a scalable and automated marketing system (thousands of students)

Key components of a scalable system:

• Identifying and reaching your ideal students
• Developing effective lead generation strategies
• Creating conversion mechanisms (e.g., email sequences, webinars, sales pages)
• Implementing systems for automation and delegation

As your marketing efforts mature, focus on creating a "flywheel" effect where momentum builds upon itself, allowing for greater scale with less direct effort.

7. Designing world-class courses: Beyond the traditional classroom

Online courses have the potential to be dramatically more effective and impactful than their in-person alternatives, but not if we start with an in-person learning experience as the paradigm that we try to model.

Reimagining education. To create truly exceptional online courses, we must break free from the constraints of traditional classroom models. Online learning offers unique opportunities to enhance the educational experience in ways that aren't possible in physical classrooms.

Innovative approaches:

• Adaptive learning paths based on individual student progress
• Flexible lesson lengths tailored to content needs
• Mastery-based advancement
• Peer learning and evaluation systems
• Gamification to increase engagement

By leveraging technology and rethinking educational paradigms, course creators can design learning experiences that are more effective, engaging, and tailored to individual student needs.

8. The six layers of effective online learning experiences

Every learning experience is the product of six different components, each layered on top of the next: content, success behaviors, delivery, user experience, accountability, and support.

Building comprehensive courses. To create truly effective online courses, consider all six layers of the learning experience:

1. Content: What will be taught (using the 3 S's: Small Wins, Scaffolding, Stories)
2. Success Behaviors: Habits and actions students need to succeed
3. Delivery: How the learning is presented and shared
4. User Experience: The interface and technology supporting the course
5. Accountability: Systems to keep students on track
6. Support: Resources and assistance available to students

By addressing each layer thoughtfully, course creators can design holistic learning experiences that maximize student success and satisfaction.

9. Overcoming friction and maintaining momentum in online education

As course creators, our jobs are to plot the course from start to finish (meaning the transformation that comes from the successful application of whatever we're teaching) and find where along the way friction is breaking momentum.

Understanding obstacles. Three main sources of friction in online learning:

1. The Rider (cognitive challenges)
2. The Elephant (emotional challenges)
3. The Path (environmental challenges)

Maintaining momentum. To keep students engaged and progressing:

• Identify potential points of friction throughout the course
• Design strategies to reduce cognitive load and confusion
• Provide emotional support and preparation for challenging tasks
• Optimize the learning environment and user experience
• Incorporate regular "small wins" to build confidence and motivation

By proactively addressing these areas of friction, course creators can significantly improve completion rates and student outcomes.

Last updated: July 21, 2024