If you have a great reach on your platforms, if you have a great launch for your course, if people are talking about you but they’re not completing your course, then maybe you’re not teaching. Maybe you’re just selling your brand.
People buy your course to learn. How frustrating as a student, if you find you’re not catching on or engaging with the content.
Failing to teach isn’t acceptable – not just for your students – but also if you want your business to grow.
Let’s look at how to engage your students and TEACH.
Traditionally, online courses have been developed by recording a lot of content – 60 to 90 mins of content – for one lesson, covering everything the creator thinks you need to know on a topic.
But if we take a step back and think about how it is that people actually learn or prefer to learn, then we realise that’s not the way to do it.
What we also saw, in the early online course industry, is that people were focusing on selling on the brand. And instead, what we find is a follow along tutorial where there’s no sharing of knowledge, there’s simply this dependability on watching a video. And that’s not education. That’s not teaching anyone, anything.
What we know and what we understand, about our generations experience in education systems all around the world, is that putting someone into a 90 minute lesson is not the best way to teach them anything. That is not the most efficient way to learn.
It is actually hurting the student by putting them in that position, and we just cannot get them to sustain their focus for all that time.
Those one hour or 90 minute lessons need to be broken up into smaller chunks.
While the research is still out on this, I can tell you this as a qualified teacher of 10 years, and as a course creator – break your lessons up into smaller more manageable pieces for your students.
A really great indicator of this is Teachable – an online course hosting platform. They spoke to top performing schools who used their platform and their report shows that the lesson length for these schools is only 5 to 15 minutes per lesson.
Let that sink in. The top performing schools on Teachable, that generate the most income for the entire platform, have lessons between 5 and 15 minutes in length.
That length perfect for learning, and it’s also perfect for engaging with those who are already time poor. And let’s face it – most of us are.
If you say to someone you need to sit down for 90 mins to learn this – and that’s a lot of content crammed in there – that is overwhelming for a person want to learn who is already time poor. A course simply goes in the too hard basket.
But if you can say to them, you only need 15 minutes at a time, to learn these key skills, then that certainly sounds more manageable.
In my experience, no one is ever in a rush to learn. Your students won’t mind sitting down for more sessions if they are shorter. Because it means they will absorb more – learn more – in that shorter period of time.
They just want their experience to be worthwhile.
Now, you might be thinking, “Paul, how am I supposed to fit in all of this stuff into 5 to 15 minutes?”
Great question. And the answer is – you can’t!
But that is the whole point. You cannot possibly fit in all of that stuff into 5 or 15 minutes, so you have to be strategic. You have to become a teacher.
It’s no longer about how you can jam everything that I think the student needs to know into one lesson. You cannot just talk AT someone for an hour and expect going to teach someone something.
You have to become the teacher. You have to impart your knowledge. You have to demonstrate understanding. You have to be able to analyze and extrapolate all of these fundamental ideas in a chronological way that will allow the student to learn. This is what teachers have been doing for generations.
So, to be the teacher you must consider the following when preparing your course content:
- Your target audience – how do your students want/need to receive your information in order to learn?
- How can I divide my content into more manageable portions?
- Am I teaching over telling?
Keep those lessons nice and short – 5 to 15 minutes.
If you’re still stuck, then reach out and I can send you my lesson structure resource.
Remember, education is key. Be the teacher, not just a brand.
If you want to race ahead to get your programs structured in time for Jan 2020, I’m opening up FREE Strategy Sessions – no catch.
BOOK IN YOUR FREE STRATEGY SESSION HERE
I’ll point you in the right direction so you know exactly what your next steps will be in creating your course.