Building Full-Stack eLearning Solutions with Robert and Dana from CourseCREEK

Chris Badgett speaks with Robert Lunte and Dana Sleeper from CourseCREEK, a full-service eLearning provider that assists people and businesses in making money out of their knowledge through excellent online courses, in this episode of LMScast.

The customer used CourseCREEK’s assistance to transform their specialized knowledge into a SCORM-compliant course that was posted on an LMS, creating new revenue streams and chances to expand their knowledge. According to Robert, every firm may turn into an educational enterprise since online courses not only produce semi-passive income but also establish credibility, establish client interactions, and leave a lasting impression.

Since the majority of their clients are subject matter experts without teaching experience, Dana continues, it is her responsibility as an instructional designer to turn their knowledge into interesting and useful learning opportunities.

Dana discusses their process from exploration and identifying learning objectives to storyboarding, generating multimedia material, assuring accessibility, and keeping the client’s distinctive brand voice. In order to create courses that both successfully teach and represent the creator’s personality, Dana says that the process of creating courses is collaborative and iterative, combining the client’s vision with instructional design principles.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: 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 LMScast. Today I’m joined by two special guests from CourseCREEK. That’s course creek.com. We have Robert Luty and Dana Sleeper from CourseCREEK, which is a full stack e-learning, production, implementation, instructional design, all the things. And I’m really excited to dive into it with you guys.

But first, welcome to the show. 

Robert Lunte: Thanks for having us. This is Looks fun. I like your setup. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. 

Robert Lunte: Great. Great to be here.

Chris Badgett: Let’s just start with the big question of what is Course Creek? What are you, what are your services? What do you guys do? When I saw you pop up on the radar, I’m like, oh yeah, these are guys that are big picture, but can also zoom out on the components.

But tell us about the offering at CourseCREEK. 

Robert Lunte: That’s true. We’re not only guys, we wrestle get, we’re ladies as well. CourseCREEK is a full service e-learning firm. What we do is we help anybody that wants to monetize their expertise be it e-commerce executive coach types or large l and d departments that need to create content for their staff and their partners.

As we were talking before. The cameras went live. There’s really no project that we’ll say no to. So we’re gonna develop course content and e-learning programs for really anybody that needs a world class job. We’re a boutique company. We don’t have great gobs of people. When you come on board and after we have our needs analysis meetings, the people that you meet in those meetings, such as Dana, will be the people working on your project.

So it’s very high touch. We provide consulting. World class instructional design, which Dana will elaborate on a bit. Development on all the learning man, the learning the leading learning management systems such as LifterLMS, and marketing. So anything that you need, we can provide a full stack or we can do a la carte.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Tell us a like a client story, just as an example. 

Robert Lunte: Okay. Let’s see. How about, gosh, this, all of our clients are super happy. Which one would be really good, which would be a great story. Okay. How about the the horse arena folks? So the horse arena folks, so they came to us and they make, this is an example of how we won’t say no to anything.

They build large. Horse arenas for fluent folks that have horses. So that’s these big shelters. And when you’re doing these horse arenas, a big part of it is what they call the footing, right? So the footing is what the horses run on, all right? So that footing has to be done properly. It’s a science, it’s an art form.

And if it’s not done properly, then you’ll hurt these, very expensive animals. They came on board and knew absolutely were clueless on how to make a course. They just had a budget and they realized they wanted to scale and leverage their expertise and get a course out there, and they wanted to offer something for people that.

Can’t afford them to fly in and provide a hands-on consultation. They needed something that could take care of other folks on how to get the footing right. So off we went to build the, build those courses and we’re doing a really beautiful SCORM development program. And we’re putting them on a, one of these brilliant learning management systems.

So I guess the story is they didn’t know anything except horse arenas. And we took them on our wing and now they’re super happy. We got a five star review from them. That’s great. 

Chris Badgett: I think that’s awesome. I have this belief that every company is a, could be an education company, and particularly what you said with Downselling, if you can’t afford our services, we’ll see, still teach you how to do what you know we do.

That’s much cheaper than hiring us. But it’s the do it yourself model and so many companies could be doing that. That’s awesome. 

Robert Lunte: It’s so true. An online course opens up doors not only to some. Semi-passive revenue, which is a great thing. Maybe we’ll start there, but it opens up all kinds of opportunities.

It’s a, it’s an introduction before you go on a speaking tour. It’s a leave behind. After you do a public speaking tour. It opens up opportunities and the customer journey. It opens up opportunities for the customer to potentially, if they want more of you and more information, you could do like a VIP retreat.

So it sits in that, it sits in that purchase journey. Somewhere in the middle, which is super important. It it opens doors and it makes you an authority in the space. The other thing I like to mention is that people don’t mention very often is for a lot of folks, like the thought leader types, it also leaves a legacy.

All right? So when all is said and done your teachings go on and people can continue to learn from you. And it can do a lot for folks. 

Chris Badgett: I love the legacy aspect. There’s a concept we talk about a lot on this show that you have to wear five hats to really make it in this industry. Whether you could be a unique unicorn that can do all these things, or you can hire a team or hire an organization like Course Creek to fill in the gaps.

But the five hats problem, as I describe it, is you have to be like a subject matter expertise. Whether that’s like. Horse running surface. That’s the expertise. You have to be able to teach effectively or coach or design instruction. You have to be an entrepreneur. Like you have to build a education company, you gotta do marketing, you gotta do sales, you gotta do operations.

You have to be a community builder. Who are all these people that have, horse tracks? Like how do we reach these people? How do we, I mesh in their community or. Find them to begin with. And then you gotta be a technologist. We’re talking video, cameras, websites marketing automation, CRMs, LMS, all these things.

And that’s a tall order for one person to be able to do. Yep. But since Dana is here, I want to really dig in on instructional design. ’cause this is such a huge problem because there are so many. People who have expertise, but they’re not trained as teachers. Even college professors, many of them did not go to teaching school or in private education.

So it’s a much needed thing that’s not very well understood of how to create engaging e-learning content and to pass along information without overwhelming people. But Dana, take us to school on some top tips of instructional design and how you think about it, particularly with a subject matter expert without a teaching background.

Dana Sleeper: Yeah, sure. Happy to. And I’d say that’s predominantly who we work with, right? Is me subject matter experts who don’t have teaching backgrounds, but they know something, whether it’s about horse arenas or it’s about. Running a restaurant or a youth mentorship program and anything and everything in between, they have some knowledge that would be beneficial for other folks to have.

And so what we do is we sit down with those knees and we try to better understand the content. That’s our first step, right? Is this discovery and analysis phase. We identify what knowledge they have. How it might be useful to other folks, what our objectives are to get that information across.

So essentially, what do we want the learners to walk away with? Once we understand what we want them to take away or what we want them to be able to do once they’ve completed a course then we can go into the design and storyboarding aspect. And that’s where we map the flow of the learning.

We think about interactions, engagement. Assessments to ensure that there’s instructional strategy alignment as well as brand voice integrated, because that’s also something that’s very important in this is making sure that whoever that creator is, whoever that me, is their voice and the unique way that they tell the story comes across.

And that can be something as simple as having their brand colors in there, but it could also be the tone of the course. Some folks really like to interject. Humor into their courses and be really playful Other folks, like more of a corporate serious tone. It just depends on who they are and who their audience is.

So we have a lot of conversations around that. We iterate a lot on different versions of content in order to ensure that we are ultimately developing something that reflects for them and for their audience. And then we go into that development and production phase. So we use tools like Articulate, rise, storyline Beyond and other tools in order to bring the courses to life.

So we integrate multimedia animation. We also think about accessibility best practices. So if we’re acknowledging that our audiences may need to use e-readers or things of that nature, we need to think about those aspects to ensure that they’re SCORM compliant ready for the learning management system.

And then there’s a whole review and iterations process where we share that draft with them, get their feedback. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes they’re like, this is exactly what I wanted. And other times they say oh no, this is so far from what we were expecting. And then we just. Keep going.

It is a creative process and I do think that’s something that a lot of me, the first time they go through this process, they don’t realize that they really need to lean in and be a partner, especially for that first course we developed together. There’s a lot of time investment on both sides to figure out.

What that brand voice is, what they like, what they don’t like, what resonates with them. Because as much as I can provide expertise on adult learning and, interactions and what I think will be most effective, ultimately they are also a client. And if their expectation isn’t met we’re not gonna end up with a product they’re happy with.

So we need to find a good balance to that before we reach the end of our development process. 

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about tools a little bit, and I’m really fascinated by this challenge of understanding between sort of instructional design and e-learning authoring tools versus using something like WordPress, which is a content management system.

And you can put all kinds of different things, not just videos and lessons. How do you think about the tools for the job, and let’s just leave the LMS off the table, but there’s so many, there’s 500 LMSs out there. There’s tons of different ways to make e-learning content. How do you choose without getting overwhelmed what your tech stack’s gonna be to create effective training?

Dana Sleeper: It’s a good question. So a lot of times when we’re thinking about that end audience in those ver very first phases, that’s what we will figure that out. Because if we ask them, Hey, are you yours? Yours gonna be on a mobile device, right? That is one item that’ll help us determine what software is gonna be best articulate.

Rise is mobile responsive. There’s a reason why folks use it for courses that they know folks are gonna be looking at on their phones. In contrast, storyline. Higher interactivity, but designing it for mobile use can be much more challenging, particularly for S who wanna put all the content on screen and folks don’t wanna see things in size eight font on their phones.

So we can think through what the right tool will be and then provide those recommendations. Oftentimes we do a compilation, so we’ll say, okay, we think the best option for you is articulate, rise with. Custom beyond animations and storyline blocks integrated for enhanced interactivity. So that way we’re actually using three tools to develop their course, but ultimately delivering something that’s best for say, mobile experience.

Other times, we need to take a look at their existing. Catalog of content. So they might say, we need to match our other courses, and maybe they work with a developer who did exclusive storyline work previously, and that would make more sense than to use Storyline. Or maybe they need a really complex branching scenario that would lead us to storyline as opposed to rise.

So it’s in those discovery conversations when we’re helping them map out their content that we can identify what tools you need to use 

Chris Badgett: our instructional design. Question for you, Dana, when. Subject matter expert has the expert’s curse and they’re like, I have 40 years of experience, but I don’t, I’m trying to create this one course, and they’re just overwhelmed and they’ve lost touch with beginner’s mind.

Like, how would you help that person? Get focused and become an essentialist basically, and teach effectively. You mentioned storyboarding and like kind of milestones and stuff, but how does, how do you work with an expert who’s really lost in a sea of experience? 

Dana Sleeper: Yeah, so a lot of times what I will default to in that case is talking to them about learner attention span.

How much time do we reasonably think someone can sit down? Go through their course and digest and then retain that information and maybe we’re looking at 15 minutes. So what fif, what can we teach in 15 minutes effectively that will really change what they do on a day-to-day basis, or help them accomplish those learning objectives we talked about earlier?

Another great visualization of this, which is helpful for some folks is to describe folks’ brains as buckets, right? And we say, you have this much water. In your barrel, right? This is all your expertise, but your learner’s bucket is only this big, so we can only pour in this much water. So what is it that’s essential needs to go in there.

The rest of it is just gonna overflow, and it’s not gonna stay in there. It’s not gonna stay in their cup or in their bucket. So I quite literally have drawn that during calls before, just on a PowerPoint slide to help them understand that. I also have an animation of it that sometimes I send to folks to remind them.

So there’s all sorts of little kind of tips and tools on how I help folks understand that. But generally speaking, thinking about learner attention span is really one important way too. Coalesce and limit the amount of content that we’re putting into that first course, acknowledging that they could have a whole series.

That’s a great opportunity. You have all that expertise. We won’t lose it, but we are gonna make it so the learners can actually digest and retain that information. 

Robert Lunte: That’s Chris. Chris, I wanna add to that real quick, and this, she’s great. I told you we had great instructional designers.

From a management perspective, while Dana’s working all on all that, on my end I’m getting the tough job of, but I’ve been doing this for 40 years. Nobody knows this better than me. And how is Dana, I know she’s great and we enjoy working with her and our but how are they gonna get it?

How are they gonna know how to do this? And so the customers oftentimes as the reality of, oh, I invested in this. Oh, this is what’s really gonna happen. As that reality begins to seep in, they begin to, sometimes they begin to panic a little bit. I’m like, oh my God, what did I sign up for? How are they gonna ever get this done?

But one of the things that they need to know that I help with sometimes is it’s not about you. Really, it is, you’re the subject matter expert, but the course is about somebody else, a different ICP. We’re not making a course to sell to you. Okay? If we made a course to sell to you, the storyboard would be completely different.

It’d be more advanced and that sort of thing. We’re making a course to sell to who you may have been 20 years ago, so let’s get that straight. The other thing is this is what we do. We do this five days a week. Eight hours a day for 20 years, and I myself have nine courses and five languages in another life.

So we’ve done this before. Trust, trust me, trust Dana. Trust our platform people. We will give you everything that you need. We’ll capture everything that has to be said. And more. And if it’s one thing that these instructional designers are really good at is picking up on business models real quick and removing, that’s not necessary with, that’s necessary and they know what they’re doing.

So the customers have to be, the clients need to be managed sometimes in that regard. They need to let go and let I call. It’s a joke with my clients. I say, just let go. Let Uncle Bob take care of it. Uncle Bob and his superhero team will take care of it. And we get done.

That’s why this is a plug. We have nothing but a hundred percent, five star reviews on trusts pilot. So that’s awesome. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Robert, you mentioned nine courses in some in different languages. I always find people’s path into the course space or the e-learning industry is always interesting.

Tell us about the genesis Of Course Creek. Where did it come from? How’d it start? Why’d you do it?

Robert Lunte: I’m gonna make a long story very short because I’m, because we wanna get back to instructional design in Course Creek, but in another life I’m a recognized voice coach, father-in-law, sing a song. 

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

Robert Lunte: All right. So I’ve been doing that for 30 years. A company’s called the Vocalist Studio. We’re sitting on Kajabi, which is a great platform for that kind of teaching.

And, I wrote a book and have nine courses in five languages that teaches people a methodology for physically training the voice to build the motor skills and the strength and endurance of the voice so that you can sing amazing, and it tends to lean into rockers and heavy metal people so they can scream notes without hurting themselves and that sort of thing.

Lots of fun, really great. Still sell the courses. Don’t do the one-on-ones anymore because it’s not scalable. I took that business as far as I can possibly go, that industry can sustain. The industry just in itself doesn’t have a lot of money. So there’s not a lot to trip down, even if you’re one of the best in the business.

So I just, one day I went through a lot of misery for about six years as a voice coach thinking, what the hell am I gonna do when I grow up? What else can I do? And I realized the only other thing I can do is make courses and help people make courses. So off we went. We created Course Creek seven years ago.

And and and it’s really mostly about people like Dana. It’s about the talent that I surround myself with. Yeah, I just got tired of working with musicians. They don’t have any money. Awesome. And they’re flaky.

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I love our industry. We’ve talked about horse running surfaces and voice coaches.

Which is awesome. But in, in terms of the perfect customer for course Creek, like what are some of the qualities they have? Because you mentioned that thing where they have to be open and trust the process and some people just kinda wanna steamroll through and go alone. But how do you really identify or seek out a perfect fit client?

Robert Lunte: The client that does his homework and follows that lead that point that I made earlier, the client that signs up and says. I’m ready to go to work and joins the team and follows our lead and gets their stuff in on time. We do a Slack, a client Slack channel and Dana and the rest of the team will engage with them.

So that’s active, involved, removes their ego and just lets us lead and lets us get it done. That’s the best kind of client and, clients that are. When we execute and we always execute great. When they’re happy about that they share that with us and they share that with the world.

And so that’s big part of our payback is that we like to know that they’re happy and we like, and we want people to know about that. Dana probably has a, an instructional design perspective on that. No doubt Dana. 

Dana Sleeper: I would say that clients who are communicative, so using the Slack channel and, making sure that they stay up to date with those communications as well as responding to us.

Probably the most important thing. Everything else we can work through if you at least talk to us, right? It’s really hard to make progress on a course if you can’t get client input or you can’t get them to review a course. So that engagement that Robert mentioned in the Slack channel is really key.

And it also streamlines things so that all of our communications are in one place. Shs, who works on the manages, all of the LMS platform work for clients on our end. He can see my communications. Client, I can tag him and let him know, Hey, there’s four courses that are gonna be coming your way soon to upload to the LMS.

Or, I had this conversation with the client and they mentioned gamification, and I wanna make sure you’re thinking about that when you do the LMS setup. So it keeps the entire team really engaged and informed throughout the process. Besides that, in terms of clientele, I think, I would say communication’s number one.

And number two is, like Robert said, doing your homework, right? Some folks show up and they have no content, like they haven’t actually written anything down. And so we then have to have the conversation about okay, you need to do your homework to take your expertise and put it on paper, or put it in PowerPoint slides or put it on something.

Or literally voice record yourself. I don’t care what format it is, but give me your knowledge. Yeah. And so that’s really important because if we. Don’t have that information, then all we can do is Google search, right? Or use AI to try to generate content and that’s not gonna result in the same end product as something that’s coming from a subject matter expert.

So those two things are really what I look for. Again, everything else I can work with 

Chris Badgett: you guys also help with, or I’m sorry you guys and gals also help with marketing automation or marketing funnels. So like one of the main questions we wanna solve with this podcast. Is helping people get clients like we want their courses and membership sites and e-learning projects to be successful.

And of course there’s other kinds of courses, like internal trainings at companies, but if we think about the subject matter expert selling expertise. What kind of marketing funnels or marketing advice do you have? I know Robert, you had your own experience with being a voice coach and finding leads for that, but how do you, how did you do that and how do you help clients set up, a lead system or get their own clients?

Robert Lunte: So we have four phases in the client journey, consulting, instructional design LMS, working with your platform and marketing. So it’s like phase four in this journey. We have. An inbound director, an inbound marketing director, and an outbound marketing director. Inbound is paid media, social media, writing blogs, that sort of thing.

So the traditional stuff, and the outbound director does outreach sequencing on LinkedIn where it applies, and outreach sequencing on email, cold and warm email campaigns. Now, the cold and warm email campaigns is interesting in that. In order to do that properly, you have to have somebody who is an expert in commercial class.

Outbound email tech stack, which is stuff that I’m still learning about, and we happen to have a fellow like that. His name is Matt Armstrong. He’s a total geek. He just, he builds on clay and Apollo and instantly, and all these systems that are all designed to make sure you don’t go in the spam folders and don’t get in trouble, that sort of thing.

Personally, I prefer the outbound stuff because you get the most return for the investment. It’s a great value. Now, if I had more money than God and I don’t, I’d probably do paid media, right? So paid media can be very effective, but it’s a rich man’s luxury. All right? So if you’re not one of those folks, and we got a great guy that handled that for you, but if that’s not you, I lean towards outbound initially to try to get leads in.

Now, the other thing that you should do is go to work. That means get in front of a camera. So as far as the vocalist studio is concerned, it’s, it is 15, 20 years of YouTube. I think I was the very first voice coach to do a singing technique video on YouTube before Google even bought them.

So you gotta do that if you, if it’s relevant to your business. I understand that l and d departments at a hospital might not be doing that, but if you’re like, a thought leader Filipino kind of dude, you need to get in front of the camera. Then the underlying point in that is just because you have the beautiful product and we’ve delivered you beautiful product, that’s when the sounds cliche, but that’s when the work really starts.

You gotta get involved. You gotta make a little bit of investment in marketing. We’re talking about e-commerce people and you gotta get in front of a camera if you can make noise. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Robert Lunte: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Just 

Robert Lunte: What you’re doing, Chris. You gotta do what you’re doing right now. You gotta make content.

Chris Badgett: I appreciate that. I think my first YouTube video was in 2007, something like that. But anyways I’m just guessing, but some, sometimes, like migrations are super important in this industry because, and I’m guessing that you guys deal with a lot of. Migrations, there’s this perfect client’s, open-minded subject matter expert, coachable, blank slate, canvas, and you just go with all the best practices.

But a lot of times you’ll probably get somebody they don’t like their LMS, their course isn’t working and it’s current form and you’re, they wanna move somewhere else on the tech stack side point or the content creations point and. They’re just, they need to migrate, they need to go to version two or version three or version four.

Robert Lunte: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: What’s your experience and advice for people that are in that migration or reset mindset? I. 

Robert Lunte: I’m gonna, I wanna give Dana some airtime on this. I’ll start with that. And then Dana. I’d like to get the instructional designer’s perspective on that as well. I, compatibility and that sort of thing.

Early on at the agency, we recognized that migrations was heavy lifting, dirty, no fun work that no, that our competitors didn’t want do. All right. They waived those opportunities down the path, but we stepped up and embraced it and wrote SOPs for it. So in fact it’s a piece of work. It’s a kind of work that we do enough that it’s made our main nav bar to go out our websites is migrations is right at the top.

And we’re real good at it. Your question is, we typically are migrating to, to best class WordPress platforms. Okay. And SaaS platforms. The way we do it is we migrate content. We’re focusing on content and data, client data. This is a great question for Shaban. Chattery, our senior director of platforms, but it’s a lot about SOPs and being really super tight on those SOPs, bringing stuff over.

It’s gotta be really super organized. I’ll mention this, then we’ll pass it off to Dana. If you’re gonna migrate, you gotta get, you’ll get all of your content and your data in nicely, neatly titled folders and ready for us to migrate. Okay. One thing we can’t do is go in and go into a big, huge mess and figure out how to do it.

You gotta work with us and you, so you gotta prepare for it. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. One quick question before Dana goes. In terms of migration, there’s a lot of noise in the space. And what I mean is like some LMS companies have slick good marketing, and the client may be saying, Hey, I really want to go to Brand X.

But you all, you guys also do LMS recommendations where you’re like, based on you, you might disagree, you might think oh, this person is a great fit for. Kajabi or a WordPress solution or talent, LMS or something else based on their unique needs. Indeed. So how do you let’s say you had a client who’s sold on brand y, but you really think Brand Z is a better fit for them?

Robert Lunte: We are the trusted advisors. So we’ll go back to the other point that I made. If you’re. Gonna hire us to do the business, let us do our work. So we’re gonna make sure you get on the right platform. And frankly the first most critical decision is that platform is that LMS. So we do work with a lot of LMS platforms, and they’re all brilliant.

They’re all brilliant. They all do something a little different, a little better than the next guy. And they got strengths and weaknesses, but they’re all pretty much mostly brilliant, including yours. It just, we take a look at their needs and we just align the needs to the platform and make a recommendation.

That’s pretty straightforward, but they have to trust us on that. Dana? 

Dana Sleeper: Yeah. I would say on the content migration side, there can be a. There’s a whole slew of reasons why folks come to us and say, Hey, we did version one and we’re looking to make some changes. It could be that their content was developed internally by someone who maybe doesn’t have learning design expertise.

Maybe they don’t have software to make it interactive. So it could be something that’s pretty bland, like PowerPoint deck, or it could literally be PDFs with texts and image. And so they’re not seeing a lot of engagement in their content. Maybe if they’re selling it. They’re not selling a lot of courses because folks aren’t giving them rave reviews.

Whatever the reason might be. They wanna upgrade their content. And so in those instances, we’re often looking from converting from those base files into SCORM compliant content, in articulate, rise, or articulate storyline to increase engagement. I would also say that one of the other areas that we see some desire.

Is when we need to use squirm content because they’re looking to expand their reach. So having items packaged in as squirm files makes it easier for them to sell across multiple platforms, right? If that’s something they’re interested in doing, but their content is currently is set up in some format where they cannot do that easily and they would have to manually recreate the content in another system.

That can be another reason for folks coming and saying, Hey, we’ve decided we’re gonna go full S score so we can package our content and sell it. We need you to migrate it. We’ve had a lot of clients do that. And I would say, Robert thinking recently of Boss Academy, they actually set up all of their content in their LMS and it’s YouTube videos, text and images, and now we’re moving it into Squirm compliant content and articulate rise and storyline and using beyond animations and the video elements that they provided.

So that’s one where we’ve really repackaged it in a way that’s much more engaging. And frankly, like it looks prettier, right? So there’s the marketing element there. And other folks in similar cases, maybe they provide us a PowerPoint deck, something that they’ve been training folks with for, years in person.

And now they’re saying, okay, we need global reach to do this training. Let’s take this PowerPoint deck and turn it into something in the e-learning space. All sorts of reasons to migrate content from one format to another. And we’ve certainly found the gamut on doing that. 

Chris Badgett: You folks have been in the industry for a long time.

It’s a funny industry because some things never change. Like the internet was literally invented in the seventies or whatever for college professors to communicate in military or whatever. But like online education has been around forever and some things don’t change, but sometimes things do change the market, the industry, the macroeconomics change. 

What do you, when you two look into the future, what do you see as like emerging trends or opportunities or how to think about e-learning in an AI world? Or what do you see when you look into your crystal ball of what’s coming or what’s here and maybe not readily recognized? Dana, 

Dana Sleeper: yeah. Happy to start on the content side there.

So I would say you mentioned ai, right? So that obviously has a big role, assuming that AI stays around and there’s not some like global worldwide crash like AWS services going out yesterday. Thank you very much for that, my friends. Yeah, my software not work. But using AI tools as a way to really make our processes more efficient.

So I think that a lot of learning designers are headed in this direction, and it’s only going to happen more where basically ai co-pilots are going to handle 70, 80% of the build work in e-learning, meaning that. They are going to develop the storyboards, they’re going to do the initial drafting of narration content.

And that really allows instructional designers to focus on strategy and pedagogy, creativity with the interactions, because that’s something that the AI can’t build, right? Those are individual triggers and JavaScripts and things that we’re doing on the backend. So AI definitely has a big role. I would also say that AI is going to help in terms of personalization.

So something we’re seeing, particularly for larger corporate clients is that adaptive learning paths or real-time feedback maybe some automated content generation is really gonna redefine how quickly training can be created and tailored to an individual learner based off of the assessment information we’re getting back from a course.

I would also say there’s a shift in general, we’ve seen this over time, but I think it’s still occurring from these larger courses that are hours long to continuous learning ecosystems. So moving away from one-off training to more of an integrated learning experience embedded in your daily workflows.

So let’s say on teams, you have an AI copilot who’s also reading your email, and they see that you are having. An issue with a coworker on one topic or you’re struggling in one area, they might suggest to you, Hey, take this five minute micro learning on X, Y, z, maybe very timely, very flexible, mobile compatible and really support the learner where they’re at in that moment of time.

So I see AI and those changes occurring in terms of how folks are structuring their learning content. I think most of the other. Shifts are not new items, right? We’re in a hybrid workforce environment, so we need more e-learning, more distributed learning. Up-skilling and re-skilling is important as generations age out in the workforce and retaining information.

That’s been a struggle for a long time. Storytelling scenario-based and experiential learning has for a long time been something that folks have focused on, but integrating that into e-learning format has obviously been more of a challenge and more possible as we advance our tools. So I’ll pause there ’cause I could talk about this for a long time.

Robert, what do you wanna add? 

Robert Lunte: That’s brilliant. I’m not sure I can best that, but from my perspective where we’re recommending tech stacks, that sort of thing on the early on and say AI for the heavy lifting, micro learning, multi-tenancy, continuous gamification, adaptive learning, and copilots.

That’s awesome. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s I love what you said about, I’ve heard it called just in time learning versus just in case, and that AI can help. Hey, you might be ready right now for this one, micro training on this one topic. That’s really cool. Let’s talk about Course Creek. If somebody’s watching this or listening to this and they’re like, these guys and gals sound pretty awesome.

How like what’s it like to get started working with you? What should they do? Yeah, like how do they get in touch and how, what is the beginning of the process? Pretty simple. 

Robert Lunte: Thanks for asking. Go to course creek.com course as an online course Creek as an little river one word, course creek.com.

Go to the top left, top right corner of our website. You see the happy button? It says Book a meeting and we will meet with you. And it won’t just be me, it’ll be me, Dana, shebang Chow, our platform expert. We, one of the things I’m really proud of and that I think is super helpful for clients is we team consult.

And so when the client comes in, it’s not just Robert it’s me with my. Talented specialists and they’re diving deep on answering, asking the questions they need to ask all the content we’ve talked about here today. And and we get it done. So after that, I then get scope documents from my team.

I put a bow on it, send it out to the client in about four eight hours. And we’ll go back and forth a little bit perhaps if we need to. And we bring ’em on board. And we’ll create a client channel or a Slack channel and we’ll get to work everybody. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And just to highlight some of the kind of niche specialties you mentioned LMS migration.

There’s healthcare is like an industry you’re interested in. 

There’s all kinds of subject matter experts who do a million different things, which you guys have or have experience in any other just really sweet spots that you love. And really enjoy those clients in terms of niche or industry or type of platform or whatever 

Robert Lunte: the migration work is a big strength for us.

And that includes the instructional design that goes into that as well. Taking a look at old content and doing an audit and improving with the instructional design, which is something that Dana had referred to verticals, healthcare, FinTech, executive coaches. And don’t be shy if it seems a little bit out of the box.

I think we’re probably the company for you as well on that as well. ’cause as I said, we’ll try anything from cowboy hat to horse arenas. If we can get it done and on demand support. I have a popular service called On Demand Support. It’s basically prepaid development, instructional design hours, every 30 days.

And it’s a way to chill out the cash flow if you’re kinda low on cash flow and don’t need to pay prepay for four to 70 hours every 30 days. We can work that way. So that is something that is been popular and and useful for the clients. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Robert and Dana, thank you for coming on the show.

We really appreciate it. Go check out Course Creek, that’s course creek.com. Reach out to these guys, book a meeting and thank you so much for coming on the show and thank you for sharing what you do and the passion, the shared passion for this industry. We really appreciate it. 

Robert Lunte: Thanks for the opportunity.

Chris Badgett: We look forward to sending clients your way.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. 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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