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In this LMScast episode, Jason Coleman and Chris Badgett discuss teaching tactics for online courses, with an emphasis on how to interact with novices.

They discuss the value of comprehending the “beginner’s mindset” and the difficulties associated with being an expert. One important issue they raise is that it might be challenging for specialists to relate to novice students, which can result in too complex course content.

They suggest simplifying the material and employing “spiral learning,” in which students gradually go over subjects in more detail.

They also discuss the need to streamline your courses to concentrate on the most important 5% of the required information. As well as the benefits of iterating and improving course material based on student comments and experiences. This method facilitates pupils’ comprehension and retention of material. The episode emphasizes how important it is for instructors to assume their students’ roles to ensure that the material is understandable. Accessible, and pertinent to their requirements.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: Welcome back to the education entrepreneur mentor series. This is a five part series where we go over the five critical hats. that you need to wear or have the skills contained within your team to find success as an education entrepreneur. Somebody who’s teaching online, building an online education company, coaching, or building an education based business.

Those five hats that need to be worn to cover the bases are becoming the expert. the entrepreneur, the teacher, the technologist, and the community builder. This is part three. We’re going to be getting into becoming the teacher. Enjoy this session with my business partner at Lifter LMS, Jason Coleman, and make sure you check out all five parts of this series.

Enjoy.

In this session, we’re going to talk about becoming the teacher or instructional designer, as it’s known in the e learning space. It’s one thing to be an expert in some kind of subject matter, but the ability to teach, to coach, to design curriculum is an important part of being an education entrepreneur.

Let’s start our conversation around Beginner’s Mind, which is a concept that comes from Zen Buddhism. And digging into that, I just want to touch on the idea that it’s easy to lose touch with the learner, particularly if you’ve been in your subject matter expertise for a really long time. We’ve all talked to somebody who’s an expert in something.

And it’s just going in one ear and out the other, it’s just too advanced. One of the strategies I learned around how to work with this, I learned from an instructional designer named Julie Dirksen. She has this concept called shelf space. So as we learn and master our subject matter, our shelf space and our ability to hold concepts, frameworks, you know, strategies, tactics, it just gets bigger.

Where as a beginner has a really small amount of shelf space because they’re new to the subject matter and when, if you don’t accommodate for that, the, the learner just kind of gets overwhelmed or there’s too much jargon in. So some of the ways to kind of get past that, and it’s also by the way called the expert’s curse.

So the expert just can’t get out of their own head and they’ve got their library of Alexandria with lots of shelf space. But one way to think about it is imagine talking to a previous version of yourself. What would that look like? Like you’re really advanced in investing, but if you were talking to you know, the investor that you were 15 years ago, you probably would kind of streamline it down a little bit.

And this is where this concept of minimum effective dose comes in. So it’s not about like. Let me pack my library of Alexandria of knowledge into this content. Just kind of give them everything. It’s more like, what’s the least amount that I could teach, explain, concepts. Potentially assignments, activities, and things to get them moving.

In the direction of expanding their shelf space. Julie also taught me the concept of spiral learning. Which is the idea that you don’t have to teach everything. You know, about a piece of a subject matter in one go. It’s actually a lot better to let’s say there’s like 10 key areas of a subject matter to do kind of a spiral across those 10 key areas on like fundamental ideas.

And then when you get back to, you know, that first area, then you can expand on that a little bit. So instead of trying to go deep on like one aspect and take them from, you know, elementary school to PhD, let’s go elementary all the way around and start building and it’s kind of how the traditional grade system works.

So at Lifter LMS as an example, one of our top performing lead generation tools, and also new customer or user onboarding tools is our quick start course, which has somewhere around 30, 000 people in it. And the concept behind that course is the idea that if I can only show people 5 percent of the most important aspects of the software, how to use it, how to set up the website, how to collect payments, create content and all that, what would I teach in that 5%?

So the course content is in total probably about 30 minutes. Even though if I were to teach everything that left your LMS does. I might need like five hours to kind of go over everything. But that would be completely overwhelming. Yeah,

Jason Coleman: I feel that. I think about that with my children too. And I always had trouble with that.

I have these very lofty ideas that I want to instill in them. But there’s like a framework, like that shelf that’s needed. He can’t talk about this complicated subject until you build the. You know, you have to meet the person where they’re at. When you’re teaching them.

I think a tactic I’ve. I’ve tried in some of the investing material. I’ve done is like I want to be able to have someone watch me as I’m researching a stock and I’m taking all the notes and writing all the very complicated things I’m doing.

And and actually benefit from that, like go along on that journey with me. But there’s like a list of like 20 things they have to know. So I actually like started with the end point and said, I want my students to be here. Like they understand they can watch this whole video and they know everything that’s going on.

And I can’t share that video with them yet. But that gives me like the syllabus for you know, all the aspects. I love the spiral thing. I think there’s other versions of that too, where you, you learn something and then. You, learn more and more and then.

It’s like good to relearn that thing. It was like a different context.

Like that was the easy version. There’s all these videos on YouTube. Does Fox media do them or something? And there it’s whatever. It’s like a symphony and five levels of difficulty or like.

You know that series is really good at like hammering that point of like, Here’s one way to understand it, and then there’s another level of understanding it, another level of understanding, the same thing.

That idea of like, going back to the basics. It’s good to, to realize that like your students aren’t as bored with like the basic information as, as you are. Like I was talking about the, you know, the stock research, like that’s what I do actually. And it’s easy for me. I’m like, I do it anyway. I could just put the camera on and then share it.

And it feels fun and I would love to talk to people and engage on that level. But if I was really trying to enter educate folks. That’s not gonna work. Like they need to know the basics. So it’s good to keep teaching the basics and getting better at it. And some of the best teachers that we know I think like Seth Godin, I think of Gary Vaynerchuk and Warren Buffett’s kind of like his, his annual letters, like would often hammer home the same points.

And if you follow these folks for a long time. You almost get bored of it too. You’re like, this guy has like three, you know, tricks or three things that he teaches. It was, is that like what do you call that? Like the mid twit mind. So it’s like, this guy only has three things he teaches or, and it’s like, that’s so exciting.

Then in the middle, it’s like. I have three things he teaches. Like, that’s nothing. Then the expert is like, actually only have like one or three things that you teach. And so, yeah, I, I think if you really dig into that, trying to educate folks, like. Educate the basics. Like give the same talk over and over.

I used to do more conferences and talks and I would feel almost like a comedian. Like I did my set. It’s recorded. Peace out. Now I’m working on my next one. Like, and there’s some part of me that felt bad if I gave the same talk more than once. But it doesn’t really make sense because if you’re in a different conference, 10 percent is like folks who’ve seen it before.

But also if you give the same talk over and over again, you can make it better and better and get good at delivering it. And so I’ve seen that also like on the conference circuit, like folks give the same talk. And then I think another tactic is to take intro courses for things, things that you think you know, really well already.

So I think folks are surprised if I think I understand investing really well, and I’d be, you know, if I. I bought a course because I thought it was interesting. I would want to skip to like the later sections where the meat is and it’s like, nah, slow down and just see how they explain the basics. And every once in a while you see something, you’re like, Oh, I didn’t actually realize that.

I didn’t know that the origin of that was here. Or I didn’t know that was pulled from this. You know, where that came from. And I guess a personal story, you know, that helped me understand some of these concepts of like focusing on the basics and going back to the basics. I was at a conference and actually it was interesting.

I was going to do a 40 minute talk and about a week before they said, can you instead do like a four hour workshop? And I was like, I guess let’s go, you know? So I took my talk and I turned it into a workshop and I had an early slide. It was a business one on one workshop. So it was like folks starting out building a business from scratch.

And I talked about some of the stuff that we talked like in the operation section. And I had a slide early on that was like, Hey, let’s review the stuff you guys already know, like in business, you want to make money. What is that? That’s revenue minus expenses equals profit. Everyone’s on board. Cool.

Next slide. And when I said next slide, like half the audience was like, wait, wait, wait, what, what go back? Can I write that down? And I was like, Whoa, like these folks, like they’re, they were good photographers. They were good at selling the things they sold. They were good at tinting windshields. Like the result, it was like a really interesting Collect a group of people with like small businesses as, but they had never really thought of this stuff and it, it actually, you know they didn’t consciously think about even something as, it seems as basic to me as like profit and revenue and expenses.

And so I was like, slow down and I went back and, you know, spent some time on that slide.

Chris Badgett: I remember there’s this football coach. I can’t remember which one, like some of the great coaches, but he had this thing where the very first day of the very first practice, his very first kind of teaching to the football team was this is how you tie your shoes.

Jason Coleman: Like

Chris Badgett: going literally to the very first step. And if you look at the offline world, like a great teacher, let’s say in a university, a professor. They may get like a new class of freshmen every year. So they’re like kind of physically forced to be reminded, okay, these are freshmen. They’re just getting started and then they can perfect it over time.

And also just want to note that the beginner’s market is often the biggest market. So if you look at YouTube videos and You know, or if you look at like course sales on Udemy and stuff, like the, whatever subject matter 101, like these courses often have the best sales. So if you need motivation to like keep it simple, just remember there’s often a lot of revenue potential by not forgetting about the beginners.

Let’s talk about instructional design. What is it? Why is it important? Cause sometimes like a beginner might think, Oh, I just need to get on camera, talk about my subject matter expertise. But what you’re designing is not just content, you’re designing a learning journey. It’s, it’s not a content dump.

We’re not putting the library of Alexandria like in video format and crossing our fingers and hope they figure it out. So it’s, it’s all about designing a transformational path. So the main ones we see in online education in terms of transformational paths are like, you know, incremental improvements or.

Like big result, big transformation, and some of the top, you know, highest value courses and memberships and communities actually help somebody create a new identity. So, think about that. What is the end result? Design for the end result. Do the chunking and work backwards from that end result and create the milestones like we talked about in a previous session.

But also, think about Getting your learners taking action to make the progress, because people need more than just content to learn and make a change. And some of the ways to think about that are, yes, they need some content, they need some core ideas, concepts, strategies. But this is why I’m a big fan of assignments, particularly if you’re helping somebody go from A to B.

Giving them like, okay, we’ve learned this concepts, now do X. And also maintain beginner’s mind and remember this may be the first time they’re doing that. So get them taking action. Potentially, we’ll talk about community later, but perhaps, you know, getting involved in like a social learning aspect like learning together can add more richness to the experience.

And then as a side note, it is good. They’ll also be entertaining. So like a boring teacher, that’s just blah, blah, blah. Here’s the, here’s your homework. Make it fun and entertaining. If you look at some of the top performing YouTube channels, they’re entertaining as well. It’s, there’s a term for that.

It’s called edutainment. We recently about a year or two ago at Lifter LMS designed. We wanted to focus on a problem of, okay, sometimes people are buying our softwares, but they’re not ready. They don’t have their course idea. They’re kind of doing things out of order, which is a challenge. Like maybe they’re buying software, maybe they’re studying ads or.

Trying to build an affiliate program, but they don’t actually have their course figured out yet. Like, what’s it called? Who’s it for? What’s the syllabus? Maybe start creating that content. So we designed a free mini course called the Course Plan Challenge to help people figure out, A, what topic that they sh would be best for them to focus on.

How to really define their avatar, which we’ve talked about in a previous session. How to start doing the curriculum design. And so we’re Kind of getting people ready for the software through training and really just mastering that beginner’s mind. So if you think about, this is why fourth dimensional thinking is really important.

You’re not just providing content in an isolated bubble of time. These people are on a journey, you’re hooking into a pain point or an opportunity for a particular person, all the way to them being successful with your program and what do they need throughout that, like content, ideas, worksheets, you know, there’s a lot of multimedia, which we’ll talk about a little bit that you can do to kind of make your experience even richer, but yeah, plant, think through time, not just like it’s an isolated, isolated package that they need to know about.

Jason Coleman: That course plan challenge course is awesome. Like, so here’s a plug for that. I, I think I definitely have like, I, I Helped implement it on the website in certain ways. So I had to like, look at it too. That was my first exposure to it was kind of not taking the course, but just like doing stuff.

But then afterwards I referred back to it when I was planning a course on myself, my own. And I bet you probably do too. You almost like go back to your own course.

Chris Badgett: That’s the same planning.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s awesome when you have like a piece of content like that. Yeah. Yeah. A few posts and things that I reference the, you know, in the, the book I wrote about WordPress is one of those two where it’s like, Oh, I don’t remember this, but I wrote about it in the book.

It’s funny. Yeah. So yeah, plug for the course plan challenge. That’s awesome content. I yeah, you talked about like being entertaining and turning it on that’s tough for me. I remember, I think of like the teacher’s voice, like my kids in elementary school, all the good teachers, like they, you know, you’re talking to them, like they have a normal voice and then when they’re talking to students, man, I would like mimic it now, you know, but it’s like higher pitch and you’re like, Oh yeah. And like, you know, energetic and you get it, making it sound exciting. You’re talking about the boring stammer, but it’s like, this is awesome. It’s funny you said that. Then it like triggers in my head now, like I should turn that on for this.

And I, I don’t practice it enough. I think to have it natural. And I remember thinking about that when I was homeschooling my kids for about a year in COVID, I was like, I think the content is good. But like, I really think like, the teacher. I don’t have like, the energy they need right now, and I like that they’ve taken action too and I thought I could ask you, cause I, I feel like I struggle with this when I’m consuming content, I like, I like to read books, and sometimes reading books at like, 11 at night, before you, before you go to bed, or like, early in the morning, no one’s around, and and it’s a business book and I’m like, that’s really good ideas.

And it’s like, okay, now take action and do these things before you read the next chapter. And I’m like yeah, no, no, actually later. So I don’t know if you have tips for like encouraging that or making folks more likely to take those action and those next steps.

Chris Badgett: I think just to answer that real quick, that’s one of the cool things about learning management system is you can use things like required assignments.

Prerequisites, like you can’t move on to the next section to fill or drip content. You can’t, the next one isn’t coming for another week. So to create the space. So I

Jason Coleman: think like the course plan challenge has like a very clear, there was like six part layout of start to finish some of the stuff we’re talking about, you know, how to develop the outline and plan for your course.

Another method I’ve seen work with folks is to design a course through like content accumulation and then later strategically curate it. So, you know, the idea here is to produce content, useful content, continuously. And I talked before about like eBomb as a method of that, whenever you answer a question for someone.

As an expert, other people have that question, write it down, share it somehow, put it somewhere. It’s good to publish it if possible, but if, even if not, just kind of write, write down all this content. And force yourself to do that, and get good, and then at the end, you, you can or, organize it into, you know, a structured learning path.

You could build it into a course, some other versions of this Are like, so you have, say like blog posts once a week for a year, you got 52 blog posts. Then you can build these hubs around common concepts or use cases. Or it’s often called pillar content from like a marketing perspective. So like, cool, you talked about you know, once we’ve done in the past, so I’m thinking we have membership software.

And so we’re answering all these questions about the different problems of setting up a membership site and running a site and thinking about pricing and things like that, and then. We build content hubs around common use cases. So we have a hub for course people who are building like a course, like memberships and people who are building associations and people who are building video sites and we aggregate all the content into those hubs.

And then what’s good when you’re building those hubs is you’ll realize there’s gaps in the content. So when you do that practice of curating the content into a course or a hub or a pillar. You’re like, Oh, you know what we don’t have is, you know, we’re trying to All the content from A to B on this topic, we’re actually missing some of the key questions we don’t answer, or we link out to someone else’s website for that, or we often refer some other tool, and it’s like, oh, that’s a missing piece that we should write ourselves.

So yeah, we did that for Penguin Research Pro with the use cases. It was awesome because we’ve been writing content for years and years and years. When we put together the hubs, we kind of did almost for ourselves as like a practice to help us focus on the use cases. It was something that we could deliver to folks when they sign up, Hey, what use case are you?

And then we give them the hub. It’s like, here’s a better way to like browse through our content. And when, when we put it together, we were like, we were given that as like a freebie add on to the full membership. And we’re like, this is valuable in itself. This feels like. More valuable than the software, like the ideas that we’ve been talking about.

So you might find content you’re building for some other reason when you package it together, it becomes valuable and you can put a price tag on it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I think one of the things is like this presentation, these sessions are all about really identifies an aspect of this, where when you put your customer at the center of your business and not your product.

Like you mentioned, Oh, this, this other thing may be more valuable than the software. What that, in my view, what that comes from is, okay, this, this particular type of customer in this case, they need technology, which we’re going to talk about in another session. And that’s what we do. That’s what our business is.

And we incorporate a lot of the other things we’re talking about here, but they need help with all these other things like becoming a teacher you know, being a subject matter expert, building community and so on. So you can expand outside of the scope of your core business and just provide more resources to help people even further.

And that’s just a helpful way to think about it. And like you said, you can sometimes signpost other resources like, Oh, well, they really need to figure out this other thing. There’s this other expert over here and just introduce them to another body of work. There’s a saying, just because you’re on the train, it doesn’t mean you have to carry the luggage.

So sometimes you can use. Your depth of knowledge and connections to point people in other areas that are going to support them. That ultimately supports your core business as well. Let’s talk about lesson design. People are not robots and there’s variation in personality types, culture you know, predispositions and learning, it often comes up and there’s like multiple learning styles.

So how do you design for that? And there’s also consumption styles. Like how do people like to consume content or engage in community or get support? Kind of the classic learning style thing is, well, there’s visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Visual people are they like watching videos. They like seeing, like, pictures and graphics.

Auditory people like to listen. If you listen to podcasts, and like a lot, like me, you’re probably an auditory person. There, there’s a few you know, really nerd out on YouTube. You’re probably a visual person. There’s also the, the readers, like people who like to read, you know, I know lots of people who they really dislike video and they, they prefer to read.

Kinesthetic people they don’t like reading, watching videos or listening. They just, they’re actually really into like the assignment, the get moving, like get action. I just want to start like playing with this software or this movement technique or these art implements and just start, I, I learn by doing is what kinesthetic is.

And then there’s the it’s not really a tension span, but it’s the idea that some people like rip through content and they’re just like scanning and then other people are deep divers like they read every word, they watch the video really slowly, they’ll like email you and be like, Hey, you have a typo here on line 736 about whatever, like they’re very detailed.

So when I’m creating content either for marketing or as part of training, I think about that sort of a classic example of that. If I’m doing a video lesson and there’s like a big idea and concept and thing, I’ll kind of spotlight at the beginning for the scanner people who are going to move really fast and maybe not watch the whole thing just to kind of give them their, their quick hit.

But then of course I’ll go into detail and do the whole deep dive for the deep divers. And then the quizzing and assignments aspect. This really helps the, particularly the assignments help the kinesthetic learners. So like, cool, we’re actually, we have a project here. We’re going to do something.

So not just creating content for consumption, but think about action. And I, I really learned about this different learning style, content consumption style, making sure we’re taking action and not just consuming information. At Lifter LMS as an example with our support, I lean more, and many of us, by the way, are we do all these things like we scan, we deep dive, we watch, we read but you’re often stronger in one area.

Like, I think you’re more of a reader, I’m more of a, you know, video audio guy, but I also know you like video and I also read, but you probably have a primary, it’s kind of like a personality type, but when doing support for software like Lifter LMS. I realize the biggest mistake we can make is to assume the world is as we are, particularly in a teaching role.

If you happen to love videos and all you do is make videos and have a YouTube channel and have video lessons, you’re kind of ignoring a large percentage of the population. So we’ve made a commitment to make technical documentation with a lot of words, a lot of screenshots. And we do YouTube tutorials for the video learning folks.

We do courses that have more assignments and just mix all the multimedia styles. We do live calls. Some people, like, really like to learn in community. You get into that and, like, people have different types of conversation preferences. Like, oh, I just want to send an email. I want to jump on Zoom. I want to watch your live stream and not have the pressure of being live on a call with you, but I’ll be in the comments and you’ll notice people cluster, you’ll start seeing the same names in different places.

So thinking about that is, is, is one way to do that. And, and like even something like a refund policy for a course or membership. That’s really for the kinesthetic people. Like I don’t want to read your sales page. I’m just going to buy the thing. And then if I don’t like it, I’m going to ask for a refund.

We also do trials as a conversion tool. So that’s for the. I don’t want to read your sales page. Let me test it out before I buy it. And and even in the software itself, like there’s places as an example that like, oh, here’s a video tutorial, here’s a link to technical documentation. The way the course builder works, it, it kind of encourages people to create different.

You know, types of learning content and resources. So it’s a, it’s like personalities, you know, so many personalities in the world at the same thing applies to what the different types of learners, and they may, they may be exactly your same avatar, but they’re going to have all that variation and personality.

Jason Coleman: With the different learning styles and the kind of content types, modalities of making content. I know it puts pressure on folks that they feel like, Oh, I have to be a good writer and a good video person and make podcasts. And I have to build, you know, visual displays of this information. But what’s good is there’s lots of tooling and help you can get with those stages.

So I, I always recommend like starting with the modality that you’re most comfortable with. And then using that to build things. So an example for myself, like, I think I I’m a reader, I’m a writer. So when I was doing video and trying to do it off the cuff, it’s not coming across as well. And it got easier for me when I scripted it, basically like wrote a blog post and then like, you know, kind of sort of read it as I was doing the video.

But that helped me like organize my thoughts and figure out what was important to talk about. And, and some people go in the, and actually I’ve gone in the opposite direction. Sometimes there’s like a very complicated topic and I don’t actually understand it. I started recording and I ramble with someone on my marketing team and they just ask me questions and they dig deep.

Then they get a bunch of content and they’re like, okay, I’m going to turn this into a blog post, a written blog post. There’s tooling, like if you made the video, you made a bunch of videos and now you want to make blog posts, you can get the transcripts.

And run it through something like ChatGPT and say, here’s my transcript, write me like a blog post, and it you don’t want to paste, you know, post that directly, but it gives you like a really good first draft if you’re good at making video and not so good at making, you know, writing stuff from scratch.

And, and I yeah, just, so. Yeah, just, it is so important. I know like on my team, we’ve had a lot of written content over the years and we try to do more video and you the best version of a YouTube video is like thinking specifically about the YouTube market and how they consume content and how long it is, and it should be visual and not just words, not just a talking head, like the ideal, most Produce videos on YouTube.

The ones that do really well are very well thought out. There’s kind of an 80, 20 there where they’re like, I have the blog post. If I film myself talking head, reading the blog post, that’s better than no video at all. And so, and it’s a good starting point. And then you can see if you gain traction, you know, like, Oh, there’s a little bit of traction in this video.

We should probably make a better one. So that’s encouraged folks start with the modality that, that you’re best with use that to kind of go into the other media realm. And then, you know, allow yourself to 80, 20, like just put something out there. It’s not perfect. People still appreciate it because they want to listen to it while they’re washing their dishes.

They can’t, you know, read it on the laptop, whatever.

So another thing that, you know, when I think about building courses and educational material it’s important to focus on a single path learning journey. So you’re going from A to B, but there’s a bunch of options in the middle. There’s a, he said. You know, use different tools and, and so it’s, it helps, especially with the first version of things to simplify by addressing like one clear path from start to finish.

And so an example of that that, you know, notoriously it was hard for me was I’ve tried, I don’t think we even have something on our website called the membership handbook. But with our membership site handbook, we’ve been doing this for like over 15 years. And it’s like, day one, I was like, we should have a quote unquote handbook for how to set up a membership site.

We have these content hubs and other things, but there’s probably seven drafts of the membership site handbook. The thing that killed it every time early on was that there’s so many options for like, where do you host your website? You know, which tool do you use? Our tool, of course. Okay, cool.

That’s an easy decision. But then it’s like, which email tool do you use? Which You know, how do you build your course if you’re building it? And, and I found the membership handbook that’s gone on. I’m never going to make it, but I’ve made similar content. It helps to simplify. It’s one path. It’s like, so I, I note the choices, but then make one choice for them.

That’s the default choice. And it helps to remember your customer avatar when you’re doing that. Cause you’re like, Oh, who am I talking to? I’m Oh, Chris Badgett. You know, as my avatar, you have like this very specific person you’re talking to, you can kind of guess which tool they already have or that they’re going to know about and just pick that one, pick the obvious one or the default one or the one that you have a partnership with.

And yeah, like the, the path that the folks are learning is like membership site handbook. Another problem with that is it’s like a vague concept. It’s not like, you know launch your membership site or get your first membership sale or find your first member. Or it’s even, we have six different use cases.

So a handbook for each use case would probably be good. It’s too vague. It’s good to, Hey, you’re taking Crispadget, your avatar from A to B to a very specific outcome, like we talked about and yeah, eliminating those what ifs. That’s the other thing too. So there’s options of tooling and ways you could go about things, but there’s also like almost FAQ style, like, what do you do if this happens?

What do you do if this happens? What if. You, you know, your customer you’re selling to doesn’t have a lot of money, so you probably, what if this, what if that and take note of those, maybe you even have FAQ sections, but don’t let it derail you when you’re writing the first draft from A to B, just, you know, log those what ifs for later, and assume it, you know, the ideal situation.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think one way you can kind of litmus test yourself. If you’re at the handbook idea, it’s getting a little out of hand, getting hard to like figure out what to do next, how to structure. I call this problem in the course industry, creating a giant course. So if you find yourself like, Oh, this is expanding.

This is like 50 or a hundred lessons. It’s probably getting a little long in the tooth and it can be really liberating to think about many courses. So. Like with Paid Memberships Pro as an example, like, a handbook for associations sounds easier to create as a separate thing from like a handbook for course creators a handbook for communities, and so you, you kind of Can separate those out.

And if the same trainings are relevant to your avatar, just not all jumbled together, then a membership or course bundle can be used to offer access to that. So you allow a bit of it, a little bit of that choose your own adventure while also like kind of simplifying the learning experience in each of the many courses.

Let’s talk about user experience design. We’ve talked about learning journeys, but It’s, it’s really important to think about designing that as like a total user experience and how people learn through time. So, you know, traditional school system starts elementary all the way up to higher education, and that’s a process that can take you know, years, decades.

But so like you kind of get the macro view, but if you really zoom in on the micro view, like just take it one step at a time and when you kind of chunk things down to lessons it’s good to come up with your, your own instructional design framework. So here as an example, we’re talking through like topic area.

Like a big idea slash strategy. Then we get into some tactics and then we’re using story as a way to do like case study, learning with examples through story. And then we’re also adding in a little conversation, which people learn from. I found it really interesting. The Google’s notebook, LLM, I think it’s called like, you can give it a resource.

And the way you learn is you have this option to turn it into a car, an AI generated conversation, people learn by that. And that’s what we’re doing here. We’re having a conversation react and so on. But one of the easiest ways like to come up with your instructional design framework is to think of concepts.

So like, what are the big ideas? What are the strategies? What are the tactics? And then give people specific actions to take to move forward. And we have a lot more options besides quizzing. Like I’m just going to check, some people call that a knowledge check to make sure like you got, you got the core ideas.

But getting people involved in projects, there’s things, there’s a type of learning called project based learning. It’s not just about theory. This goes back to that idea of different learning styles. Some people do really good with theory and they can kind of extrapolate and figure out how to put it into practice.

Other people do better with like, let’s get moving in a project and kind of back in and back and reinforce like what the core concepts are. The other thing is designing for what happens when people get stuck when they fall down. This is the same thing that happens in traditional education where, you know, you have your all stars.

You have your people that are kind of getting left behind and you have like the average performance. So design through time what kind of resources and support you want to have. That could be like office hours. It could be a contact form, like right next to syllabus. So a student could like privately reach out to the instructor.

It could be some community aspect. Which we’ll talk about in a little bit. I heard this phrase once, like surround yourself with help. That’s what you want your people to feel like. There’s a whole, And there’s this great training, but there’s also like all these resources and there’s like a menu of them that can appeal to different personality types and consumption styles.

And I was in a training or a coaching program called SAS Academy, and I, I thought it was a really cool implementation. There was probably 300 courses in there. There was live. Coaching, training, and coaching calls. There were in person events in big cities around the U S three times a year. There’s a Facebook group.

There was you could just like email the company and get help. So like, it was just like a full featured robust user experience that had like tons of resources and people could really choose their own adventure through it. All while driving to the same outcome.

Jason Coleman: When I think about. Resources and support and like additional help around like a core, you know, course or learning experience.

Sometimes there’s a lot of different options and you can kind of copy what you’ve seen elsewhere or kind of what’s been recommended or some things might seem obvious. But a lot of times it’s good to, you know, get the core material out there. And as long as you have a way for your, you know, your users to get back to you through like a, you know, send them an email, ask for feedback.

Have a contact form have, you know, if there’s a support or you dump them into a community where people can chat, like, it’s, it’s important to get that feedback and that feedback is kind of, they’re going to tell you what they needed. There’s this kind of trick where you could almost do this too. I actually, I thought of this, I do this with my kids.

I’ve never done it with in the context of business, but someone’s birthday is coming up and you don’t know what to get them. You can pretend like I just got you like the best thing for your birthday and you’ll never guess what it is. And you’re like, actually, try it. Like, do you think you know what it is?

And they’ll guess and if you keep track of the guesses, you’re like, all right, well, here’s three things that Chris wants for his birthday. So it feels like that kind of thing where if you kind of it’d be interesting to like do that in advance. Working on bonuses, like you’ll never guess what they are.

Actually try to guess. And then what people say is like that they’re telling you what they want. And you’re like, okay, cool. That’s they, you know. This person used a core resource, but they need, you know, extra documentation support or video, or they want something else and you can figure it out. And so, yeah, it’s interesting.

Like, I think you, you mentioned designing like the total user experience and there’s different modalities and having these extra things you know, tagged onto your content and that really helps reinforce and, and get the outcomes that you want and it’s really important. I feel like a lot of times I’m, I’m like the keep it simple guy or, or I see the importance of that.

And I also remember all the conversations I’ve had with folks who feel slowed down by that or paralyzed by that, or like, I’m never going to be able to do all that. So I talked about like, Hey, there’s different media and modalities that you can produce your content as like, pick the one you do the best and focus on that and make that the core of what you’re doing and make sure you ship that at least.

So if you write well, right. And if you’re good on camera, do videos. And as always, like, I think it’s good to start small and try to, you know, we’ve talked in different ways of trying to not make it too complicated, bite off, you know, something you can chew, work on that, do it really well publishing early is important when I talked about earlier in sessions, how there’s a difference between like putting the content together and just having it ready for publish and actually publishing it and putting it out there.

You get feedback. There’s folks who I forget the fellow has a writing course and he loves Twitter. He’s like, I tweet a bunch of random stuff and whenever tweets get engagement, that’s the core idea. I should make sure when I write my book, I actually focus on that. So he wants to write books and share books, but you know, he tweets because he gets a sense of like, which of the ideas are kind of, are hitting his audience the best.

So that’s a form of publishing and, you know, early, like small forms, teasers you wrote the first lesson, push that out there, see if you can get attention. There’s lots of ways to do that. And also not just publish early, but get paid early. If you’re trying to make money on these things, there is always a difference of the audience who’s willing to consume this, but not pay for it.

Or the person who’s paying for it is a different type of customer or user reader learner. And so getting money involved in the system, like makes it real for, for yourself and also for the person learning. And you said to one thing at a time, like step by step. So focus. I think, like, I think about paid memberships pro and off the lift our own messes this way too, where there’s so many features in the core product, there’s so many add ons, there’s so many other plugins, third party plugins, you can tie in other services.

And a lot of people come to the software and they see it on, they get excited and it’s like funner for them to like. Add a form, add a community, add an email list, it should be drip feed, right? I guess everyone’s doing that and they, they get overwhelmed and it’s kind of like, well, like remember you’re trying to help your learner get from point A to point B, focus on the core, you know, experience and educational content you’re producing, make sure you nail that, and then these things are accessories, they’re helpers, they’re additional, and definitely it is better to have them, but it’s also good to do one at a time so that folks don’t feel overwhelmed.

Dispersed. It’s kind of like if you start at the same time, like a slack, a Facebook group and an online community, like they don’t know where to go. You know, it’s like only one of those at a time.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Even like what we’re, what we’re doing here is we’re kind of expanding the shelf space to be like, Hey, there’s all these personality types.

There’s all these different content types. There’s all these consumption styles. And so you still, like as an expert can, you know, kind of research and we’re, we’re expanding your mind here you don’t have to implement everything right away, but the first step is just like kind of awareness that. Oh, wow.

This, this is more rich and nuanced and detailed and there’s all these options, but then like you said, shrink it back one step at a time and don’t forget beginner’s mind. And some of the most successful people I see with softwares like ours are, you know, they take consistent and perfect action, but they also continuously improve.

So this is why, you know, doing a signature course, like one main thing might be a good idea. Cause it’s like. When you podcast or you become a YouTuber, there’s a saying that your first video is your worst video. So if you’re continuously improving, I’m like, all right, it’s been a year or whatever. I’m gonna remake that course or I found that I could better train my learners using this method of like concept, activity, community conversation, whatever it is.

I need to retool or supplement that old lesson. So It’s not about just moving on or doing too many things at once. I wanted to double click on support systems. Cause I think this is how it holds a lot of potential and it’s poorly understood. And I like to tell a story with this. There’s a popular online education platform called masterclass.

I think it’s about. 19 a month or something like that. And they did, they build a great product there. You can learn from the best in the world and like what amounts to about of hour of training per course. And you can learn how to tell jokes from Steve Martin. You can learn a business from Sarah Blakely and how to be an entrepreneur and stuff like that.

But if you get stuck and you fall down. Or you have questions, they’re not there to interact with you. There’s literally zero support and that’s why it’s 19 a month. But if you want, there may be somebody who’s not as far along as as Steve Martin is a comedian, but there may be this other person who.

Teaches stand up comedy who you can talk to one on one who will review your bits or your jokes and like give you feedback So like you may be able to charge that that comedy educator may be able to charge 2000 for the course, for the signature course called zero to like, you know, improv comedy success or whatever, because they’re like really supporting you and support systems similar to consumption styles and learning styles.

There’s two layers to this. One layer is what do you like to do? This is your world. This is your creation. Do you like doing one on one coaching? Do you like moderating and holding space for a community? You like doing office hours, like, there’s all these different ways. Do you like email? Do you like text message?

Like, some people do support, like, hey, unlimited instant message. And there’s, there’s two vectors of this. And this is actually really detailed out in detail in the course plan challenge to help you think through this. But there’s two kinds of support. There’s synchronous and asynchronous. So synchronous means I’m helping you in real time together.

So that could be a one on one call could be instant messenger. It could be like a group training that you do live. It could be a in person event and then asynchronous. Some people prefer like, Hey, I need time freedom. I don’t want my calendar filled up when I’m doing things kind of in my own speed.

Email support may be better for that. And you have to set expectations. So people are like, Hey, I haven’t heard from you in five minutes. Like you need to set like what your expectations are. Then the other vector is private versus group. So if you do offer one on one like synchronous private coaching support.

Or you offer one on one email support. That takes more time, but it’s more valuable. So you can charge a lot more. And you can even have plans on your course or your membership where like, you know, it’s like course only, 200 bucks. Course plus group coaching, 1, 000. Course plus private coaching, 5, 000. So it, it affects like the value and just anchoring that to this idea of like masterclass where it’s 20 bucks a month or it’s here and I have your back and we’re going to be working together privately.

It’s 2, 000 a month. So figure out both what you want as an individual, cause this is your creation and two, what would be most helpful for your customer avatar? Cause. You know, for example, if I was helping somebody or an avatar that had a certain health concern or, or medical challenge, they may not want any kind of group, anything, it’s a private thing and they just, so my, it would not be appropriate to even explore the group options, but maybe it is, it just depends on your avatar and my pro tip for you is the easiest way to add this to do it and support your people better, but also to make more money is to offer what I call a group.

Ask me anything, office hours. So this is a group coaching call. You could do it on you know, like a webinar platform. And you could do it on a YouTube live stream with comments. You could even do it not by face, like, Hey, there’s a time of day. I’ll be in this Slack channel. You see people do this on Twitter sometimes like, Hey, I’m waiting at the airport, like ask me anything for the next hour, but the cool thing about the office hours is it’s time boxed.

Like, let’s say it’s an hour every week or every two weeks or once a month, so you’re only committing as a creator to, you know, that time box. It’s also scalable. You could have two people show up. You could have 201st come, first serve, or you take the questions in advance and kind of choreo graph it a little bit.

But that’s the quickest way to go from the $20 a month. Do DIY self-study training to actually having some high fidelity support system that doesn’t eat your lunch for time. Provides a lot of value. Also actually creates a little bit of community aspect. ’cause people will be at the office hours and I’m like, oh, that’s a great question, even though they didn’t come up with it.

And then they’re, they’re learning. So and that, that’s what we did at Lifter LMS too. I realized. You know, selling software, there’s a lot of this like automate everything, have a passive, you know, business, but like there was so much demand, you know, you see it in emails and stuff, can I just get on a call with you?

I’m like, well, we don’t charge like an arm and a leg for the software. In fact, a lot of it’s free. How can I, but how can I meet this need? Oh, so we introduced the office hours, which happens once a week and it continues to, we’ve been running it for about five years.

Jason Coleman: We used to have consultation calls, so it’s like for 300, you could talk to us for an hour about anything.

And then some folks are like, I can’t afford 300. Then I tried a couple times to be like, all right. I’ll help you out, just let me record it, and I can use it for content. They’re like, that’s weird, what is the way I want to do it? But then you’re like, that’s exactly what the open office hours are, like they ask me anything, and it’s just a reframing of that you know, it’s such a multiplier on, force multiplier on your time.

So we have a version of that now too, it’s, it’s great. And it’s also a good source of, you know, for content. I think I love it. Like all the different, you know, ways you can support someone. And I think something that’s important to remember when you’re kind of presenting these options and kind of writing sales pages for them and things like that is to.

Explain like what, what the common experience is like when, when you submit a ticket, this is what’s going to happen when you get on the call. This is exactly what’s going to happen. And even better yet, like testimonials that are like, I had this issue. I talked to Chris for 30 minutes and totally solved my issue.

So that, that can be like, it’s easy to forget that you kind of like, Hey, we do this, this and this. And people have like an expectation or some kind of pretense or like, like you said You’re in a marketplace of other people solving the same solution, and you’re trying to stand out by like delivering a superior support experience.

You’re like, you got to tell people up front that it’s superior and kind of own it. So we had an exercise too, where we revamped our support page, where it’s like, we’re actually better than everyone, but we’re not telling them. So like, let’s tell them tell the person, you know, about to enter our funnel.

There’s different ways to deliver support. And what you’ll find, even if your intention is not to have a channel, a new channel for support, everything is support. Any way that someone can talk to you, they will. Use it for support. I mean, we turned off blog comments on our blog posts a while ago because 90 percent of them were random support.

So it’s like, here’s a blog post about how to do this thing. And it’s like, my comment’s not about what you wrote about, but I was wondering how to do this. And I was like, did you not see the like click for support link in the upper right of the page? So yeah, yeah, every method is going to be support.

You should decide up front the best way that you support your, your users and your learners and how you, your preferred methods of communication and then stick to it. So, but it is good still to like allow the support to originate from anywhere organically, cause you, you kind of can’t fight it. But funnel it proactively into the channels.

So some, for example. Like another funny example, like to support comes out, I would do these customer conference surveys, so I am going to call you and I’ll ask you some questions for my benefit to learn more about my customer. And when I coach my team, he’s doing this too, is like at least half of them.

They’re only taking the call cause they, that’s the way they know to talk to you on the phone and they have a support question they’re going to ask you. So it’s like, try to answer the support thing and then be like, Hey, I helped you. Can you help me answer these questions now? But we also you know.

When folks are DMing you on Twitter or contacting you you know, if it’s a quick answer, answer it, but always, even if you answer it quickly, say the best way to get help is to go through the proper channel. The fastest way to get help is to go through the proper channel. Something I use now, because I have a team, is like, I’m not actually the best person to answer this question.

I know I seem like it is because I’m kind of the face of the company, but the team is experts, or experts, and they know this better than I do. So, every time you redirect support, kind of include that. And yeah, the other thing, you know, about this when, you know, doing support is that exceptions become the expectations.

So an example of that is we do technical support through our ticketing system on the website, and we don’t do support on the weekends because our teams working Monday through Friday. And sometimes the team is like. I’m not doing anything. I really care about this person’s project. I’m going to go above and beyond and help them on the weekends, like, cause they just can’t help it.

They’re like, Oh, it’s a problem in my head. And and so they give the feedback on the weekend and that’s okay to do in extreme cases or sometimes every time you do that, that person just learned, Oh, actually they do do support on the weekends. Or they do do support through Twitter. I mean, this is like a cliche Twitter is like, you call the phone system.

How do I, can you help me with my purchase? I want a refund. No, you can’t do a blah, blah, blah. And then you just yell on Twitter and then they DM you and say, how can I help you? And then all of a sudden you’re magically like talking to the C suite and they’re going to reverse everything for you. So yeah, if you make these exceptions, like people learn about them.

Chris Badgett: 90 or like, let’s say 80, 20, 80%. Like, yes, you do need to reinforce boundaries. And actually, but on the other side, sometimes if they do get through, or you make an exception, I learned this concept from you. I was already kind of doing it, but I didn’t have a name for it. You call it a make my day? So every now and then, someone will reach out to you through the wrong channel, or even you might see them struggling.

Like in a social community or wherever and you’re like, man, I can really help this person. They’re being so nice you know, they’ve already like sent in a testimonial or whatever and Either you you help them off channel like and just over deliver and then or like you actually seek them out and you’re like Hey, I saw in this group is happening, you know, we don’t normally do this But you know I really appreciate what you’ve done in our community and we really want to help you and then you you call it a make my day So that’s something you find you can do as a creator.

And the crazy thing with that kind of thing is sometimes then that person, you know, will upgrade to your bigger offer or if they haven’t read a testimonial, they will, you know, they tell your friends, they become an affiliate or whatever. So it’s this weird. Dichotomy of like maintain boundaries, but also like, break the rules.

Yeah, yeah. And over deliver. And

Jason Coleman: the important part of that is to do it consciously instead of reactively. And forget where I got that from is ’cause it’s funny. Maybe it wasn’t that good for, but I think the company went outta business. It was like a department story. Either like Neiman Marcus or of those types, you know, like a, a big department store.

And they used to give their sales team a budget of like a thousand dollars a month. To like make the day so you’d be in the buy shoes and it’s an expensive high value department store, but you buy like 200 worth of shoes. And if you said you were hungry, the person could like tap into their budget and like go buy you food so you could eat the food while you’re trying on shoes or something like crazy.

That doesn’t usually happen in an apartment store and sometimes you would get they would spend more like taking care of you than they would. And that was part of like their core values and how they did some, but it also was probably like a marketing budget item. Like that money didn’t come out of the support budget.

It came out like this is marketing and we hope that person goes on to say things. And I feel like like Scrooge McDuck or like the Scrooge over here, like bah humbug don’t help people. But in reality, if you you know, you scale a product, you have hundreds of folks, you can’t give this level of care to every customer.

So it’s good to do it selectively and when we do that, kind of make, make your day. We have time. It’s a customer that’s interesting or like matches our values or we have some idea that they’re a sneezer who’s going to talk about it or, or, or be nice. It can be a good story and that kind of thing. Or, or sometimes it’s a technical challenge.

Like we actually have this challenge where I’m curious to figure out like, cool. I’ve never used that email marketing tool. Let’s figure it out for them. Yeah, so that’s great. Yeah. When to bend the rules.

Chris Badgett: And the last thing I’ll say on this support thing is you may be. You may just have a pricing problem.

It’s notorious in our industry that people under price, you know, this is part of the expert’s curse. You’re so close to it. You know, all the stuff you’ve kind of undervalued what you do, or maybe you have some imposter syndrome going. So if you’re kind of like, well, I don’t want to do. You know, unlimited email support, cause my courses is 200.

It’s really well done. They should just follow the steps and do the exercises. Yeah. But if you, if it was 1, 000, would you answer an email from them twice a week and give them that access? And there will be some people that like, quote, abuse that you’re getting like five emails a day. But there’ll also be like tons of people who are like, I don’t really need help.

It’s included as a benefit of the bundle. And then there’ll be kind of like the average, which is how I kind of get to like that two emails a week. Is that worth an extra 800 a month to you? So always think about pricing when it comes to support and it might change your mind on what type of support you want to do and how much and

Jason Coleman: all that.

Yeah, it’s going to be flexible cause like, like, Hey, this is how we do things. People keep trying to do support on Facebook or whatever. Every time that happens, that’s an indication that people really want to communicate that way and you should consider, or they want a phone call and every time they ask and you say, we don’t do phone calls.

It’s like a mental note. Maybe we should figure out how we can do phone calls. We can make money off this.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And you don’t have to necessarily change your pricing. You could just add one more plan that has that level that where the cost benefit analysis makes sense.

Jason Coleman: So many options. Just carry it.

Chris Badgett: 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 at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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