The Thing That Frustrated Me The Most About Selling Courses Online…
After 13 years of using a Blog to sell courses online my #1 frustration has been “Cheaters”. A course cheater isn’t someone who just steals the video or course content and then cancels a membership or worse yet asks for a refund. (that’s another post) A course cheater is the learner who never completes consuming the course content.
WordPress LMS and additional WordPress Plugins have been developed over the years to help make sure that the students actually take the course. Today you’ll see mandatory steps required before the next lesson can be consumed. Some of these include:
- Assignments
- Timed Lessons
- Quizzes
Unfortunately those are only partially effective as lazy learners are still able to game the system… Until now that is.
Blended Online Learning
During my 18 years online I’ve identified a number of distinct info-marketing cycles. Starting with the ebook and PDF download, followed by mp3 and Flash video tutorials. The next big cycle focused on the curated content and the WordPress powered membership site.
Of course there has always been offline training and seminars available but that market slowed a bit as bandwidth became more available to the average student. You could attend teleclasses and webinars 24 hours a day for a number of years.
As someone wanting to share their experiences these options are all great. For me personally I always got a bit frustrated by the busy entrepreneurs who never seemed to have time to apply what was being learned. Teaching WordPress and Blogging strategies is hard when the topic you teach is constantly changing.
No More Lazy Learners
Today I’m excited to share the latest update to the LearnDash Learning Management Software . LearnDash has done something that I think will change the way info-marketers teach.
… and put a stop to the frustrating lazy learner.
LearnDash has added a made it much harder to game the system. No longer will your students be able to just trying to skip the content in an effort to get it over with because with this latest version you are able to Drip-Feed your courses.
Drip-feeding is a great way to “schedule” course content, and it allows you to deliver your lessons in intervals or on specific dates.
This is especially helpful if you sell an online course, because you can sequentially reveal content to a learner over time. This a great way to help increase the chances that they actually review it.
What’s really exciting though is the ability to now BLEND an online webinar, teleclass or physical classroom. Drip-feeding makes it possible to align live instruction with online course components in a structured manner. It prevents students from jumping too far ahead.
No more cheaters. If you are selling a course, drip-feeding prevents someone from quickly downloading all of the content then requesting their money back. While drip feeding isn’t the answer to every online learning problem it can make the difference in how effective your ability is to transfer your expertise is.
If you have important information that you’re passionate about and a course that is longer in duration, then you should certainly investigate setting up your own WordPress Campus.
