Make Your Online Course Rad
Here are a few simple ways to take your course content from good to great.
Creative Magic
Good, effective online education is not a just a digital textbook. Traditionally, online education is built on what is commonly referred to as left-brained thinking. Logic, facts, data, graphs, ratios and information are being used to communicate course content. For anyone who wants to create courses that are easily understood, memorable and persuasive to the audience, it’s important to remember that stories are the place to start. Emotionally engaging stories affect more areas of the brain than rational, data-driven messages. Each sensory image, sound, texture, color, sensation and emotion provides a hook for our brain as the story draws us in and maintains our attention effortlessly.
Solution: inject some right brain creativity into your course content using engaging imagery, story-like language, and inspiring messages. Don’t just put your pdf or text book up online.
Add An In-Person Component...What?!
Why would you use a fork to eat soup? There are a variety of ways to deliver course content and unfortunately many people are using the wrong delivery methods for the wrong content. Each delivery method should be used for what it delivers best. Theory and concepts can easily be covered online (creatively, of course), and lecturing and discussion can be covered through streaming but what about the in-person experiential part? No online course can effectively deliver the experiential part of a course better than actually being there. A great example is music. You can buy all the songs you want from your favorite artist and enjoy them whenever you please but that will never give you same experience as attending a concert live.
Solution: provide your online students with the option for an experiential component to your content. It doesn’t have to be long or grandiose, it can simply be a time for open discussion, questions, demonstrations, interactive games, and/or practical implementation.
Believe It
The online market is saturated AND the over exaggerated sales pitch is such a turn off. Too many people are overselling and under delivering. The sales pitch doesn’t sell. What if, instead, you truly believed in your course and it’s content? What if you let people experience some of it before they actually purchased it? It would mean that you have to believe in your course and that you would be willing to ‘get the right student’, one in which the course is exactly what they are looking for?
Solution: give your peeps a small taste of your content by giving some of it away for free. Make it a creative, visual collection of your courses’ greatest elements. Sort of like a movie preview, it contains real content from the course, for free. This means there is less focus on course descriptions, presumptuous benefits, or hard sells. People can simply learn a little something and decide for themselves if the course is a fit.
Course Rebel Team
www.courserebel.com
