Become A Teacher Without Going To Teaching School And Make A Fortune With Online Courses

Chris Badgett stresses in this LMScast solo episode that producing a successful online course involves more than simply developing a website, marketing strategies, or technology; it also involves effectively instructing the students.

He describes how he utilizes mind mapping to generate ideas at the beginning of each lecture and then arranges them into an organized spreadsheet template. Course designers may provide lessons that are both powerful and simple to understand by shifting from abstract concepts to tangible examples and adjusting the framework to the requirements of students.

In the end, Chris emphasizes that although course designers have many responsibilities, honing teaching abilities through a framework is frequently the most important and disregarded phase in creating revolutionary online programs.

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Episode Transcript

You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m Chris, and today I’m joined by a special guest, and that’s me. This is another solo episode, and in this episode I’m gonna go over how to become a teacher without going to teaching school so that you can make a fortune, make impact in the world, and create freedom in your life.

So there’s a lot of talk about marketing online courses, selling online courses, the technology like Lifter, LMS, which people build use to build online courses. But in this episode, we’re actually gonna talk about actually teaching in the product, like delivering the online course and how to do that. I’m gonna give you one of the biggest unlocks.

To help you remove what’s known as the experts curse. See, the challenge that happens in our industry is that a lot of aspiring education entrepreneurs, course creators and coaches, they get all excited. They buy some software, they look for marketing tactics and strategies. They started thinking about ads.

They start building the website and, maybe starting some content marketing and putting all the LMS pieces together. But at the end of the day, let’s not forget about the actual product, the online course, which is comprised of lessons. So in this podcast episode, we’re gonna dive into how to remove all the chaos and craziness.

That comes with taking your expertise out of your head and actually packaging it and delivering that in an online course. So the solution here is to actually have a teaching framework and I figured this out on my own and watching other people teach and learning frameworks for business.

But in this episode. I want to really zero in on the lesson content, particularly on video content. Though this is bigger than just video content. It can expand to things like text and on the lesson and quizzes and assignments and things like that. But for the most part, I’m gonna be talking about the teaching framework that you can use to make lesson videos.

And not just to make them, but to make them high quality and effective. So the magic trick here is to go from the abstract to the concrete. And what I mean by that is as a subject matter expert you have all this experience and ideas and theories and tactics and things you want to talk about, stories you want to tell.

Examples, you want to give processes to lay out systems and structures and all these things to teach, but it’s so overwhelming if you’ve never learned how to actually be a teacher or a coach. So part of our whole thing at Lifter LMS is that you have to wear five hats simultaneously, either within yourself or at a team.

We call this the five hats problem of being an education entrepreneur. You have to be a subject matter expert. You have to be a teacher, which is what we’re gonna talk about today. You have to be a technologist. You have to be an entrepreneur, and you have to be a community builder. And the reality is, a lot of those skills and tactics are learnable, but teaching is also learnable, but often overlooked when it shouldn’t be.

What happens if you don’t develop a teaching framework? You’re gonna end up just creating some giant course. You’re gonna ramble. Your students are not going to stay engaged or complete the lesson content. They’re gonna get confused, they’re gonna have lots of questions. So let’s like slow down and back up and talk about it at a high level first, like what is a teaching framework?

It’s basically a structure or an outline of how you deliver your lessons. And this can work if you’re teaching business concepts or you’re teaching health and fitness workouts, or you’re teaching parenting strategies and advice or challenges in that niche anywhere. You can develop your own teaching framework.

And the cool thing is it’s not one size fits all. What you need to do is create your custom teaching framework that works for you and your niche, your market, your personality, your ideal learner style, and what happens when you have a systematic way that you teach each individual lesson. Is that it makes your students relax ’cause they know how to, how it rolls with you, what class is gonna be like, what the lesson is gonna be like.

They’re gonna know your flow, if you will. It also makes your life a million times easier when it comes to creating content. ’cause this is where you marry your expertise, subject matter expert brain with a system that’s designed to pull that out of you in a structured way that’s easy to make.

And in a way that your students will love. So at the highest level, the way I think about it is as a subject matter expert, you know you have your ideal learner, you have their challenge or their problem, and at the end you have the solution, the learning objective, the transformation that your course promises to create if they go through your course.

And we’re not gonna get into the high levels of curriculum design. That could be a whole other topic. If you want to hear about that, let me know. What we’re gonna talk about is, let’s assume you have a course outline and you figured out who your ideal learner is, and you have the sections and lesson names for your course, but you’re staring at your computer.

Now it’s time to create the lesson content. And this is where a lot of people get stuck. I’ve seen it a million times, and what’s missing in this scenario is a teaching framework. So enough of the buildup I’m gonna go into describing what it looks like and how it works, and how I make one and use one. So first thing I do is I’m a, visual thinker.

So I’ll just start mind mapping and drawing bubbles. If I have a lesson about a certain topic, I’ll start just throwing bubbles and making connections and just getting it outta my brain and getting it on paper in a very disorganized fashion. But the beauty happens when you go from brainstorm to.

Spreadsheet and I’ll explain what I mean in a second. And so I get my brainstorm going oh, stories, I want to tell an example, maybe a worksheet idea. Maybe some challenges people have when they’re in this part of the training and things like that. And I just get it all out there on paper. Even just short words that will jog my brain so I can quickly access that part.

Of what I was gonna talk about. But the teaching framework is essentially an outline for the lesson. It’s a template that you can use over and over again in every lesson. So that you’re efficient and effective. I personally like to do teaching frameworks in a spreadsheet. So I create a te a template for how I deliver my lessons, which we’re gonna talk about in a second.

Then every time I do a new lesson, I just add a tab to the spreadsheet. I copy the template and I do lesson one content. Then I do lesson two content. But before we get into that, what is the actual lesson template? And this is where the magic happens. Like before we get into actual creating content we need to come up with a teaching framework that works for you and your market.

I’m just looking at one I have over here. I’m recently actually as of this recording, tomorrow I’m recording the last lesson in a course I’ve been teaching live called the Perfect Offer Playbook, and I’m on lesson 11, which is the final lesson. And every single lesson I have the same teaching framework, but the content is very different.

So the teaching framework, it just starts with welcome. So this is where I just say hi. And welcome everybody in. I’m doing it live. But if I was doing a prerecorded course. I would do the same thing. Hey, welcome to this lesson on X, Y, and Z. We’re gonna get into this subject matter today.

Remind people of the support systems. If you have questions, feel free to reach out in this way and so on. Then I start with the problem. I get there pretty quick and some people call it a hook. The problem statement is really about getting people interested and also identifying what kind of mini problem within the greater problem of the course are we gonna solve today.

And the hook part of it is making it interesting. So I even did it in the title of this podcast episode. How to become a teacher without going to teaching school. That’s an example of a hook. And the problem we’re solving today is learning how to teach without being a teacher so that you and your students aren’t overwhelmed and everybody’s effective and having fun.

The next thing I like to do is drop into a story. Part of teaching is teaching through stories, examples, case studies. If you look at a famous business school like Harvard Business School, most of the coursework is looking at case studies of examples of things that happened before in big businesses and small businesses and things like that.

So story teaching through example is very powerful. So for you, it could look like this. Like I had this client named Jane. Jane had all this back pain from X, Y, and z. We implemented this protocol. Here’s what happened in week one, week two, week three, so on. I’m like providing an example that’s demonstrating the problem and outcome and the process.

The next thing I like to do is go into the challenge. So here’s the, and then I do three challenges and three promises. This is a challenge I know because I’ve recently overcome it, which was two decades of chronic back pain. So the challenge with chronic back pain is that challenge number one you’ve tried all these things like chiropractor, massage, going to the doctor, stretching, yoga, and nothing provides a permanent solution.

Challenge number two. The first thing you think about when you wake up is My back hurts. And that’s just really sad. And then the third challenge is, you’re willing to do the work, but you just need to know what actually works. So I’ve created my challenge problem statements, and now what I’m gonna do in my lesson is I’m gonna go into the promise and basically do the inverse of things.

I’m gonna show you what actually works to heal chronic back pain permanently and forever. I’m gonna show you how to wake up to get to a place where you wake up and the first thought in your brain is in your conscious mind is not my back hurts. And promise number three is I’m gonna show you what actually works.

And it’s even a lot. Think you is, it is even a lot easier than you think. It will be easier to commit to. You are gonna have to do ongoing work, but I promise you it will work. So as a recap, where we are right now in our lesson about chronic back pain relief is we did a welcome statement, a high level problem statement, a story three challenges, and then three promises in copywriting or marketing.

The challenge part is called agitating the pain in instructional design. This is called enrollment. We are enrolling people and getting them motivated. We want them to see, understand, feel the pain. But also see, feel, and understand the solution and the promise that we’re driving towards. Then the next part is the main meat of the lesson.

Which I call the learning or key principles. Now this is gonna vary wildly about what you call these things, depending upon what niche you’re in, but the key principles, and I like to do five and props to Dan Martel. I learned this trick from Dan. He called them hot principles, and I like Dan’s approach to this.

He essentially said that. The key principles are all about teaching people how to think, not necessarily exactly telling them what to do. However. I’m a big fan of actually telling people exactly what to do as well, which we’ll get to in a little bit. But part of learning is just helping people, change how they think about something or, discover a strategy or have a mindset shift.

So the key principles I like to do five, and then within each principle I get into like subpoints to reinforce it. And I’m not gonna do five principles about back pain relief. But we’ll do one here. So one key principle is that. You have to strengthen your back. So it’s not about stretching, it’s not about massage.

It’s not about cracking and popping. And chiropractic, you’ve been like your body. Connections are all messed up and you’ve been like favoring this back problem and you’ve really got a weak core. So we need to address the strength in your back and your core. And I would get into a bunch of sub principles about that and teaching about how strength and flexibility are different and how to build up strength slowly and so on.

And then my next principle might be around recovery. After exercise. My next principle might be about multi strength, endurance and flexibility and something else like multimodal exercise. My next one. Might be about dealing with setbacks and flare ups. So that would be like my fourth or fifth principle, and you can see how I’m getting my body of work together around how I cured for myself chronic back pain, and that those are, that creates my learning principles.

This is the main meat of teaching people how to think. And then I like to do something called expert story positioning, which is. Where you share your personal story. Like in the beginning, I like to share like a customer story or a client story like Jane and her chronic back pain, but then in the expert story positioning, I’m gonna go into a two to five minute story about my own journey with chronic back pain since I was 19 years old till finally solving it at age 46.

And I’m gonna tell that story, and the reason I’m doing that is, one, to provide another example, but two, I’m also just showing that I know what I’m talking about. This is part of my personal brand. This is part of who I am and a struggle I’ve had. And I’m just showing my leadership and authority in that. I’m not just regurg regurgitating about some topic that I thought would be very successful or.

Going after because it is trending. So this is my expert story positioning. And then the next part is myths. I love this part. So I usually do one to three myths. And a myth is where people go down the wrong rabbit holes. So to stick with our back pain example a myth I might do is that that curing that back pain, chronic back pain is uncurable.

That’s a myth, right? Another myth, which I’ve personally been told by chiropractors is you should really stop running. You should never run again. And I’m, I like running. I’m, and now with my cured back pain, I’m actually an ultra runner. I just ran. 30 miles on Saturday and eight miles on Sunday with zero back pain.

So the myth that the doctor is always right, ’cause sometimes you will get bad advice. So these are myths which is, this is also a part of teaching is uncovering a faulty view or taking a counter view on a topic or challenging common knowledge. The next section is one of my favorites. So after myths I go to pro tips.

So pro tips are like, let’s say somebody’s like really doing well in your course or they’re advanced, like maybe they’re already on the strength training journey or training smartly and so on for their back pain. I might drop a pro tip. Which would be, Hey, you need to go way lighter than you are capable of when, if you do any weight training, which is something I learned.

And I would get into how I had to learn how to train much with much lighter weights than what I was physically capable of picking up and particularly certain motions like bending over to pick something off the ground or anything with a arch back. I had to. Learn, and even still to this day, do those exercises, body weight only to avoid flaring up my back.

So that’s an example of a pro tip. Another pro tip is, Hey, I got back into running, but I got the thickest fattest cushions on my shoes to limit the pounding on my back and it, that’s worked for me. So those, these are examples of pro tips. The next part is probably my absolute favorite part of the teaching framework, which is the model.

So the model is, this is a unique to Chris thing and there’s other people that do it on the internet, but I actually go off video and share my iPad screen with an Apple pencil and actually create a visual model to teach some core ideas or concepts. Now, this is hard to explain in a podcast episode.

If you ever go check out the perfect offer playbook. I have a whole training on visual communication and how to do models and how they work and all the shapes and all the stuff to do. But think of it in the traditional classroom as a teacher’s aide. It depends how old you are. People. You used to see teachers draw a Venn diagram on the chalkboard or on the overhead projector.

Or you’d get a worksheet with an a diagram or a model, A visual representation of an idea or a concept. Models are really powerful teaching tools, especially for visual learners, of which I am, I’m particularly strong and visual learning and auditory learning. The other, by the way, from the.

The theory of multiple learning styles is kinesthetic, which we’re actually gonna get into in a second. So part of this teaching framework is to give all, make all learning styles happy because people are not robots and different people learn in different ways. So I do a visual model and I actually draw in front of the person.

One of the best people in the world of visual models is a guy in Australia named Simon Bowen. So go check that guy out. He’s where once I learned this visual communication and models from Simon Bowen, my brain just exploded. And the reason it exploded was because I learned how to take. Abstract concepts are just my head, swimming in information and data and put it into a visual model that makes sense.

And there’s a lot of cool things about visual communication, which we’re not gonna get into in this episode. But having a diagram, like if you think about it this way there’s a famous productivity book called Good to Great, but jim Allen, I believe his name is, and the whole thing is built on one Eisenhower Matrix or four box model where, on one line is importance and the other is urgency.

So there’s four boxes, like important, urgent, important, not urgent not important. Urgent not important. Not urgent. Anyways, he built a whole like empire off of one model. That’s how powerful these are. The next thing I personally like to do is a worksheet. So this is for the kinesthetic learners, the doers, and even if you’re teaching ideas like you’re not teaching worksheets, like if I was a fitness instructor, I would be this part.

We would go into the workout, like here is the workout. But I like to use worksheets to further deify everything I’ve been teaching in the lesson. And I love to create worksheets in a spreadsheet like Google Sheets. The reason I like to do this is because of the challenge of there’s no abstraction.

There’s like a label and a cell or a box or a checkbox or something to write in or fill out. And what this does is it takes the training like the key principles, the stories and everything, and helps the learner apply it to their life and their situation. In the perfect offer, playbook. I just actually before recording this, I completed the last worksheet, which was about how to launch a brand new offer and we talked about all kinds of like efficient early course marketing, launching and how to do it, and examples and stories and the whole framework I’ve just told you.

But then I created a worksheet. I’m like, this is exactly what to do. Like these, put in these three things here. Build this list of people right here. Contact them with this message. You need to write about X, Y, and Z. Here’s a checkbox to check when it’s done, and so on. So that’s worksheets are all about getting learners taking action.

So that’s a worksheet. And then the last part is a review. All that, all the review is I like to just go really quickly through the five key learning principles again, and that’s it. And then at the end of a lesson is your call to action. So this is where you can thank people for coming and spending their time with you today, but more importantly, you can tell them like, now go do the worksheet.

If you need help, use this support system to reach out. And it’s also an opportunity to drop in like what’s coming next. If you wanna keep the anticipation high, particularly in cohort-based courses where you need people or want people to show up next week so you can plant the seed for what’s coming next.

So that’s the call to action, close to a lesson. Now think about how awesome that template is. So when you go through your lessons, if you use the same template over and over again, as the learner is progressing through the learner journey, it gets very comfortable and efficient for you as the course creator.

It’s also very comfortable and efficient for the learner to they know what to expect. They know your flow. They’re like, okay, we’re gonna do the principles now. Okay, we’re gonna do the worksheet now. Okay, here’s the model. Let me pay attention. ’cause this is really important if the instructor created a model around this and it seers the model in your brain.

So that’s an example. Now not all teaching frameworks are need to be exactly the same, but that’s just an example of one I’ve just used to create an awesome 11 lesson course called the Perfect Offer Playbook. Which one of the benefits of all this here’s a pro tip for you is when you create a new online course project and you do the work and you figure out your offer and you get the course outlined together, but you haven’t created anything yet, you can pre-sell that.

Give it a start date one month from now and start selling it and people can look at it. They can see your well-written sales page and they can see the course outline. Okay, this looks interesting. I know where this guy’s going. But then you give yourself permission, if you create one lesson a week, with a live cohort that you deliver it to and record it, turn it into an evergreen course, that’s a really efficient, fun way of doing things.

When you are a subject matter expert on the topic, once you have a teaching framework, creating the content goes pretty fast. So for me, it probably takes at, for this course as an example it would take me about three hours to put together a, one of those lesson outlines that I would use to teach from on camera.

And also another pro tip for you is once you have the your template, you can also create a slide template that follows the flow. So in our case welcome problem story, challenge, promises, learning principles. Expert story myth, pro tips model worksheet review, and then the call to action. So you have a slide template.

So if you’re gonna teach from slides or talking head, you can structure all these and templatize all these things. And so anyways, like for me, it took about probably about four hours to prepare a lesson. One hour to deliver it, 30 minutes to turn it into evergreen asset, put it in lifter LMS in a course, the video link up the worksheet for download and so on.

And then it’s done. And just keep in mind, this is not new. Teachers have been doing this forever. So new teachers’ lives are harder because they don’t necessarily have the curriculum yet. Or they’re using some curriculum that they just obtained from somewhere else, but they haven’t really internalized it and taught it, so it’s harder.

But then what happens over time is a classroom teacher will deliver the same curriculum semester after semester, year after year, decade after decade and so on. Hopefully improving it some along the way. But the beauty of online courses is you can. You can evergreen it and automate everything with a online course and LMS website powered by lifter LMSI am a fan though of if you can like at least the first time teach it live, you don’t have to do that, but you can.

And I’m also another pro tip as I am a really big fan of revisiting your course, making it better over time. Maybe reshooting the videos, update the worksheets. Maybe insert some new, more relevant stories and so on. But that is how you keep, you create a teaching framework for your lessons. And I hope you found this helpful.

One final thing that I just want to tell you that’ll blow your mind, hopefully you can do this too with marketing content. You come up with a content template for the content marketing you do, it’s likely gonna be a slim down version of what you would do in an actual lesson. If you get really advanced, and I’ve done this before, you can actually structure your teaching template for your actual paid course in such a way that it’s perfectly set up, so that when you’re done with the recording video.

There’s a piece of it that you can cut out and move right over to your marketing. If you have a YouTube channel as an example where you’re not giving away everything, but let’s say you’re doing the problems, the challenges and the principles, but you’re not getting into like the model and the worksheet and the action steps and all the support and everything that’s offered in your paid training.

So you, you can actually double dip and do marketing and education at the same time. That’s next level pro stuff. That’s it for this episode of LMS Cast on how to create your teaching framework. Smash the like button. Tell your friends, lemme know. If you like this video, drop a comment down below and I wish you all the best on creating impact, income, and freedom in your life with online courses.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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