Live Learning and Course Design
My notes from the session by Gwen Elliot (Sr. course designer at Shopify)
I attended a session by Gwen Elliot on live learning and course design.
She designed over 70 courses with best selling authors and world class experts with our 600,000 students who have taken the course.
The following is my understanding of the highly intriguing session.
What does it entail to create a course?
1) Finding your audience
2) Content for your audience
3) Production of your content
4) Choose your platform to run it
5) Pricing
The best way to start a course is to find the path of least resistance like the “Food truck” method. If you want to start a restaurant, its best to start with a food truck and test it out. Same is for courses.
Steps to design your course:
1) Who is your ideal learner?
Jot down your knowledge and theme of learning, conduct customer research interviews. If you have an audience, take a poll, get on a call and understand who is your ideal learner. For example a health coach gets most queries about digestive issues and from the 40+ age group. Although she teaches about holistic health, this particular problem bearer is her ideal learner.
2) Identify desired results:
What is the outcome you want in your learners? What should they be able to do or have achieved after your course? For example a health coach can help create a lifestyle for learners which mitigates the digestive problem.
3) Get milestones in place:
Set your milestones. If you need recorded videos, text content, group activities tested or case studies finalized. Set a milestone for each. This gives a clear picture for your progress towards building a course.
4) Design learning experience:
Weave together the content you put together in step 3 towards a transformational learning experience.
Note: It is an iterative process. ‘Understanding by Design’ by grant wiggins and jay mctighe is an excellent resource for course creators.
What are some benefits of live learning over per-recorded videos?
1) Getting feedback in fun and engaging way is one of the key component of live learning as compared to any other. Although other format of learning do provide forums, email etc. But it is not how we are wired to engage.
2) Live learning is the best setup for a Q&A, especially in a group as we learn from each other.
3) Gaining “Relationship equity” with the educator is a big positive with live learning. Just being able to converse with a subject matter expert is why some people are excite to enroll for a course.
How do you design a curriculum?
“Words don’t teach, taking action creates transformation”. This should be a huge factor in designing a curriculum.
Having a gamified experience is very effective for learning outcome. But the games have to be relevant and provide a learning in context of the course.
Case studies are very effective, either reading real life examples or inviting experts for live interviews. It gives a relatable experience to students.
In order to decide how much component of recorded videos or live videos should one put in a course, one must look at oneself as an educator and decide what are you best at? Are you good at impromptu conversations and engagement or creating production videos in front of camera. It also depends on what you are teaching.
What is the ideal time for a cohort based course?
3 weeks is the current trend by stalwarts in the industry to squeeze years of their knowledge. But it is not possible to do so.
Start with the question: What is the result you want? And be realistic about reaching that result.
What is your customer like? does a want a boot-camp type of course or he can commit to a longer 8 weeks. Depending on the course this could differ wildly.
How to price a cohort based course?
“Honor your value”
You can take a hybrid approach by having asynchronous content at an affordable price and a premium for live courses with educator for that experience.
Your first cohort can be priced lower and you can be transparent about it in your communication. But it shouldn’t be free as you also want to attract the right people who will show up for the course.
The length of the course should not be co-related with the value of it. You can give value in a short period of time and the course can be priced higher as you are also saving time of the learner.
What is the ideal cohort size?
It is best to start small with 10-30 people and then look forward from there. There are courses with 1000s of people and they still provide incredible value. So, scale is possible, depends on the learning outcome you decide and your team.
AltMBA by Seth Godin is one such course which is scaling without him being present in all the sessions.
How to market your course?
Start marketing in your own network. It is usually the best for first cohort.
Where is your customer? Where does he hang out? Linked IN, Instagram, telegram, reddit? Go there and share about your course.
Word of mouth is the best marketing as you grow. Having a wait-list in place through word of mouth marketing is ideal.
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