🚀 Sensational Online Courses

Learn how to turn your video presentations into sensational, interactive and easily monetizable online courses that can be taken anywhere. We’ll help you easily take your recordings – from webinars, to interviews, or even your newest promotional video – and convert them into captivating, interactive learning experiences that are perfect for our distracted world. I’ll show you step by step how to motivate sensational online courses today!

Welcome to AI Parenting, our motto is don’t sedate, relate to create. Did they were talking about Sensational Online Courses that compel people to action. Even if you are not a parent, this blog will give you practical steps to take your existing videos and turn them into an engaging and sensational online course. 

I’m Dr Ed, I’ve been working in educational technology for over 15 years and I’m excited to share with you some of the recent work that I have been doing with WordPress and LearnDash for the Ai Parenting website. Now when I refer to learners I’m not just referring to kids, I believe that in an every changing world we all need to be lifelong learners. 

This work has motivated me to reflect on the state of online learning today. John Dewey said “we don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience” [2]. I’ve always been a fan of the Socratic method and I’m more and more convinced that the purpose of online courses today is to compel people to action and reflection [1]. If they aren’t taking action then you’re not helping them. If they are not reflecting then they’re not going to remember what they learned long term. 

When I spoke about video funnel secrets I provided practical tools to convert attention into a list of prospects that are consistently taking action even if it’s just watching your videos. This is really the first step for any idea or product so if you haven’t watched the video I’d recommend going to AiParenting.live to watch the replay or take the course.

Today we’ll focus on the next step of creating a sensational online course and motivating them to take action. Your creativity will be wasted if you do not have an audience. There are three main points that I feel don’t get covered when speaking about online courses.

  1. Motivate Signup: how to use your existing video previews to speak to a cold audience.
  2. Motivate Action: how to get learners to actively reflect rather than passively watch videos. 
  3. Motivate Proof: how to address objections and build and educational brand. 

Let’s jump into it.

Motivate Sign Up

When it comes to a cold audience for your sensational online courses, people always start at a very low level of interest and our job is to move them to a high level of interest. Our job is to build that interest by removing any objections that they might have. The objection might be: I’m never going to use this in my life, I don’t need to learn this now, or it takes too much time. To answer these objections we can borrow a lesson from great marketing Copywriters like Dan Kennedy who wrote about the Pain Agitate Solve formula [3].

Pain: I’m never going to use this

Dan said “When you understand that people are more likely to act to avoid pain than to get gain, you’ll understand how powerful this first formula is. (…) It may be the most reliable sales formula ever invented.” ~ Dan Kennedy 

Have you already created a course on Coursera or Udacity that didn’t get a lot of purchases? 

Dan writes “There’s a story about legendary copywriter Gary Halbert, who once asked a room of aspiring writers, “Imagine you’re opening a hamburger stand on the beach—what do you need most to succeed?” Answers included, “secret sauce,” and “great location” and “quality meat.” Halbert replied, “You missed the most important thing—A STARVING CROWD.” Your job is to find that “starving crowd” who can’t live without what it is you have to offer. What we want to do in terms of targeting is to find good, prospective customers for our business that can be reached affordably, that are likely to buy, that are able to buy, and preferably who already know of us, or are likely to trust us.”  

So the first step is finding your audience that you can target, this solves the objection of the Course is boring because they can’t see how they are going to practically use this information in their lives today. So both this is boring and I’m never going to use this in my life are the same objection.

Agitate: I don’t need it now

Another common objection is that I don’t need to learn this now. The now is referring to the urgency of learning this today. If the course is always available on the Internet why not wait until I’m actually going to use the materials in the course first. I’m already overwhelmed with the amount of things that I have to do right now I can’t take on another course.

We need to ask what happens if this problem doesn’t get solved? What happens if things stay the same? If not now then when? The key thing to remember is that if they do not take action the current pains will just get worse. The only way to resolve the issue is to deal with the pains directly.

We don’t need to be creative here, research the reviews of existing products. Interview some of the people who watched your videos and ask them about their pains. Our goal here is to paint a picture of what the ideal future looks like compared to the dark reality of today.

For example, with a Ai Parenting I describe a fork in the road where we must either choose Ai controlled learning and working or we can choose to move towards creativity and authenticity. The only way that we can give creativity a fighting chance is to give creative best practices an unfair advantage in the marketplace. There are billions of dollars of made every year by big tech companies pushing towards an AI proctored future. 

Solution: It takes too long

The last objection is that this course will take too much effort or too much time. This is why I don’t recommend having the course outline in the sales page, people look at all of the things that they have to learn and they feel overwhelmed and don’t start. You need to position the solution as easy and step-by-step process, sometimes a shorter course that is more focused on a very specific niche topic will do better than a longer one on a broader range of topics.

Another way to address the two much time objection is to provide certificates or badges that come with your course. For example, I have a Video Funnel Secrets course that offers a certificate and a badge. This means that you will be rewarded for the amount of effort that you put in. The badge is awarded when you finish watching all of the videos and the certificate is awarded when you complete the quiz. 

Which leads me to my next point.

Motivate Action

With our sensational online courses do we want people to just watch the videos or do we want to transform their lives? If our goal is to change their lives then they must take action. There different levels of action that will result in different levels of learning, the level of action usually corresponds to their willingness to invest and the price they are willing to pay: 

Observe: watch more

Will typically watch if the course is available for free. They might be curious about a topic, but they may not have immediate plans to use that information. Perhaps the course will give them some new ideas for their business.

The goal with Observers is to get them to watch more videos. This is where I have found that shorter 2-5 minute videos tend to result in this feeling of accomplishment that motivates them to watch more videos. It also makes it easier to go back to a particular spot in the course itself. So instead of searching back through 15 or 30 minutes of content they can just jump back into the last 2 to 5 minutes.

You can also connect courses to a drip campaign, which means that new content is offered on a schedule rather than everything being released at once. This is a really great way to motivate learners who have paid but not yet started the course. It’s possible to automate these actions as you can find out who clicked on a link using email automation tools like Mail Chimp.

Another way to extrinsically motivate observers is to offer them a reward such as a badge if they complete all of the videos. In my Video Funnel Secrets course I offer a badge to anyone who completes all of the videos. This is something that could be included in a résumé or LinkedIn profile but it isn’t personalized.

Reflect: Test your understanding

even if they are not going to use what they learned in this course immediately people will remember way more if they reflect on what they just learned. During a livestream we can ask “how would you solve this problem? What would you do if you were in this situation?” but what can you do if your course is not offered live? 

There are many ways to use a multiple-choice question but I have found that negative answers tend to require more thinking. For example, I created a question that required the audience to look at a picture and tell me what is not something that could be improved in this video image?

I think the key is to make the total number of questions short. People don’t need to know everything in order to be able to act on what they learned. If they missed something they can go back and learn it again. We want ideally one question per topic usually that’s 10-15 minutes of video for me. I love creating scenarios and asking them to think about the best solution and providing an explanation for why that is the best solution.

I know this is more effort on the part of the lesson creator and on the part of the learner but I do think that they will get a lot more out of the course if they do this work. Typically I motivate this work by providing a personalized certificate for everyone who is able to answer above a certain threshold. 

I like the approach used by Duolingo where you can go directly to the quiz to test your knowledge first. Then you can go back and watch only the videos that you don’t understand yet. Every learner starts with a different level of prior knowledge so why not start with only the videos that cover the gaps in what you already know. 

Create: a community of peers

The best way to learn is to create something from what you learn. If you were to offer assignments I’d recommend that every assignment is something that the learner would have to do anyways to achieve their goal. 

Learners may not have to do assignments specific to an online course but if you make it clear that these are the exact steps you’ll need to follow in order to achieve your goal it will help to movtivate those who are serious about transformation. 

For example, I am a huge fan of peer learning. When learning about sales and closing from Dan Lok I have found that role-plays with other students especially those who are more advanced in the skill than you are is massively beneficial to know where you currently stand and how you need to improve [4]. Similar to sparring with a higher belt level in a dojo I want to practice the skill before going out and using it in real life.

For creative work I encourage creating a safe and welcoming community for celebrating creative work and encouraging one another. I found that social media such as Facebook groups are powerful because people don’t need to change their habits in order to be a part of your community.

Sometimes a live critique of creative work by the instructor can be very powerful for learning about what you can improve. For example, ask learners to submit their LinkedIn profile and provide them with feedback. This house has quickly skip all the initial steps in on the deal with the parts that manners do not know yet.

Motivate Proof

Feedback should not only be for the students, the instructor needs feedback about their course. If this is negative or constructive feedback it can be used to create a new version of the course that is even better and if this is positive feedback then it can be used as a testimonial to talk about how this course has transformed peoples lives.

As instructors we are often self-conscious about the feedback that is provided but in the spirit of lifelong learning The online world is very different from a traditional face-to-face learning environment. We need to learn about search engine optimization for our sensational online courses as much as we need to learn the materials that we are teaching.

Feedback from our customers is gold, this could be strong motivation for putting your course onto something like Coursera just so that you can collect customer feedback. If you have an independent online course it may be beneficial to offer those who give you a video testimonial of how this course has been helpful for them. 

Offering them swag from your store or maybe even a discount on the next course that they take with you can be a good way of building that relationship. Remember, it’s not what you learn but it’s who you learn from that is important. You are building an educational brand and you want repeat customers. So anything that can help the learning experience it’s going to be beneficial for every student that you teach.

In the end learners do not remember what you taught them but I remember how you made them feel. What are you doing to make sure that the experience that they have when they finish the course is a positive one? If we aren’t getting positive reviews on our sensational online courses what do we need to do to improve it? 

Instructor can never know what will benefit their students the most without constant iteration. A good place to start is to look at the feedback of other courses, what are the things that the nurse wanted to know but they didn’t find out in that course? Start by offering those items. What did the course cover that others already knew maybe those are things that need to be removed from the course. 

By doing this constant optimization you are adding more value to every student that takes your course. You’re removing the things that they already know and you are adding in new things that they wish they knew but didn’t have time to cover.

From the bottom of our hearts we are humbled that you chose to join us today. Next week I want to dive deeper into how to advertise courses on social media to a cold audience.  

References

  1. Socratic Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method 
  2. John Dewey Quote https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-source-of-this-famous-quote-attributed-to-John-Dewey-We-do-not-learn-from-an-experience-We-learn-from-reflecting-on-an-experience 
  3. Dan Kennedy Magnetic Marketing https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07KGDQWLY/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i4
  4. Dan Lok High Ticket Closer https://www.highticketcloser.com/

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