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Marcus Carter from Carter School of English returns in this episode of LMScast to provide a detailed look at how he turned decades of conventional English instruction into a scalable online learning company driven by LifterLMS and WordPress. Marcus, who has taught for more than 30 years, describes how the COVID epidemic compelled him to switch from traditional language schools to virtual ones. His tentative TikTok videos and lack of camera confidence eventually developed into a powerful social media presence, which helped him see the possibilities of digital courses as a long-term business strategy.

He distinguished himself in a competitive market by concentrating on his proficiency in phonetics and multilingual instruction for Spanish speakers. Marcus also discusses how, after months of trial and error and sluggish early development, YouTube turned out to be his most successful growth and sales channel.

One little alteration to a thumbnail served as the catalyst for a breakout video that has already amassed millions of views after more than 160 films were uploaded before gaining significant popularity. From there, he was able to create a devoted worldwide audience by using YouTube to easily integrate content with course sales through straightforward links and weekly live sessions. Marcus highlights his open, trust-first approach to marketing throughout the discussion, providing prospective students with thorough walkthroughs of his courses rather than depending only on exaggerated claims.

He talks on how producing top-notch courses takes a lot of time and effort often nearly a year each course and why having several revenue streams such as YouTube, teaching, sponsors, and digital goods is crucial for long-term viability. Marcus concludes by discussing how he is now utilizing AI to make language learning more dynamic and interesting, continuing to push the limits of LifterLMS’s capabilities while producing significant results for students worldwide.

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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 LMS Cast. Today I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Marcus Carter. He’s from Carter’s school of english.com, the Carter Method. And Marcus, what this episode is primarily gonna be about is how he’s figured out to make online language learning more engaging, more effective, more interactive, how to push the boundaries with WordPress Lifter LMS using AI to help.

This is gonna be super fascinating, but first, welcome to the show, Marcus.

Marcus Carter: Thanks very much, Chris. It’s a pleasure to be here. Be here.

Chris Badgett: I’m real excited you’re here. And for those of you who are listening via podcast a little later in the show where Marcus is actually gonna get into screen sharing. So if you wanna see what we’re talking about, go to the lifter, LMS YouTube channel.

And find this episode. If you type in LMS cast Marcus Carter, you’ll find it. And if you have the ability to switch over to the YouTube while you’re listening right now, I’d recommend doing that. But first, Marcus, let’s give a little context. Tell us about the Carter School of english.com. Just bring us up to speed on what it is, how long it’s been running, and your brand and your approach, and what your mission is and what’s going on.

Marcus Carter: Okay I’ve been teaching English for the last 30 years and up until COVID the Pandemic I had my own language schools and we were all obviously, in different places and in different towns. And then COVID hit and that all went to pot, basically. And we had to diversify a little bit, although we did continue online a little bit with our students for a couple of years, but I could see that it was going downhill pretty quickly.

And so I. My wife convinced me to start uploading TikTok videos and super embarrassed at the beginning. I had no camera confidence at all, or even though I’ve spent years and years in front of people, I couldn’t speak to a camera. In fact, my first videos was like with a cartoon head you couldn’t even see my face.

And anyway, I kept going and eventually got a bit of traction on TikTok and managed to get lots of followers there. And trying to work out how I could monetize all of these people that were following me. I started opening telegram groups for people for free, but most people were on it for like the free ride.

There wasn’t much conversion there, and I didn’t actually have anything to sell. I was trying to get people into the online courses, that we were doing. And that was the time when I started thinking about, Hey, maybe a digital course would be something that I could sell to these people.

That’s when I discovered lifter LMS and that’s when I set up my first course, which was within the. The context of English teaching. I’m also a writer. I’ve written like nine or 10 textbooks but I’m also very focused on phonetics. I consider myself an expert in phonetics. I’m also bilingual in Spanish.

I’ve got certain things going for me on social media that maybe other teachers don’t necessarily have, and that gave me a niche that I managed to fill and became quite popular. And I transitioned from TikTok over to Instagram, still trying to work it out how I could sell courses. It was pretty slow at the beginning because I, it was, it was, everything was new to me and I didn’t really know how to, bring the people to the courses to do webinars and those kind of things.

That all was a kind of learning curve for me. And then from there, I always had in the back of my mind, I loved watching videos on YouTube and I always thought, I’d love to be a YouTuber, but I didn’t wanna transition over to YouTube because I knew that the editing process was gonna be so much more laborious than what it was on these social media platforms.

But I thought, I decided one day, that I was gonna be a YouTuber and started uploading to YouTube and took me 164 videos before I got one of my videos. And it was actually very funny because it was one of my videos that I uploaded, I had uploaded eight months previously. And I was just looking through my videos and I thought, I’m gonna change the background in that video in the little thumbnail.

I literally changed the background and even today, like three years later, it’s still my best performing video. It’s crazy how something like that can completely change your life, because from there, obviously it’s so much easier. In YouTube, you’ve got your links for your digital course into your website.

Under the videos, people just start clicking in and you’ve got hundreds of, that’s, that video’s got over 2 million views now. And that’s where I transitioned into then starting to earn money from the platform of YouTube and starting to sell my digital courses.

And I started with the phonetics course, which was my original one. Then I did a basic course for beginners, and then a year ago I launched an intermediate course, and just a couple of weeks ago I launched my Between basic and intermediate, which is my latest product, which is based on ai.

Chris Badgett: Wow, this is cool.

And before we get into what you figured out with your recent courses on how to make them more effective a couple quick clarifying questions. Do you do any like instructor led training on Zoom or it’s all kind of self-paced within the LMS?

Marcus Carter: I had, I’ve had everything. I had cohort, I had a, like a Saturday group, but there were like 40, 50 people coming every Saturday.

It’s pretty difficult with English because everybody’s at a different level. So I always had to invent like global concepts that I could teach to people. That’s where phonetics is great because phonetics is, there is no level in phonetics of in English. It’s not like the vocabulary or the grammar that you have to be a bit more advanced.

So I was focusing heavily on, on phonetics and just putting sort of global vocabulary. And so I did have the cohort, I was using my lifter LMS platform for that every Saturday for three years straight. And that was very successful. Had lots of students in those classes. That went very well. I do still teach online too.

Now I, because I’ve got more limited time, I only teach private classes to high level executives for for those reasons that I don’t have much time and to do groups and things. I still have a couple of teachers that work for me, two or three teachers. And, but my main focus is now on, I just love creating digital courses.

I just, it’s just so much fun doing that. And obviously the YouTube channel, I have to keep that going. So I’m live every Saturday at seven o’clock, always on, on YouTube, and I always have a good community of people that come there expecting my classes. And it’s really nice to, they’re all there before me, chatting to each other and, things.

And yeah, I’ve tried to create a nice community in YouTube, which that’s what I use to, to boost, the sales and to promote the courses while I’m live or in my videos.

Chris Badgett: Quick question just tactically, like what’s your advice to somebody who’s, using YouTube as a marketing channel?

You got like a link below the video and the description, but how do you, how does the actual conversion to sale happen? Is it pretty straightforward and that they click on the link and they’re like, yep, that looks good. Price looks good. I’m in. Is there any other kind of sales motion involved there?

Marcus Carter: Yeah, basically I’m probably not the, I’m, I could probably sell a lot more than I actually do, but basically all I have under my videos, whenever I’m live, the first thing I do when I’m live on YouTube is just say, before we jump into the class, just remember that the links are below to all my courses and I always have the one, the most recent course at the top.

And another thing I have is a a WhatsApp number as well, business WhatsApp number. So people can click on that and directly send a WhatsApp. And I personally answer those those messages. So that’s a kind of good way to get some more, personal engagement from from me. People are quite shocked sometimes when I answer with an audio and I say, it’s you.

And I said, yeah, it’s me. Don’t worry. And so yeah, I think that’s a good, and I also have a little WhatsApp logo on my website too. WhatsApp, I can’t remember what it’s called. It’s a plugin for WordPress where people can just click that on any of the pages and they directly send me a WhatsApp and I answer that too.

So I think that’s that’s important because people always have a lot of questions about, when they’re gonna buy a digital course. And another thing I’ve done for the last two courses that I launched, so a lot of people are selling digital courses online. Obviously when you go onto their landing pages, it’s full of promises and you’re gonna learn this, you’re gonna do that, blah, blah, blah.

This is what’s inside the course, click to buy, but. You are, you’ve just gotta trust what that person is saying is true on that website. And I’m probably not a very good salesman, but I am a very transparent, honest person. And so what I did in my previous, not this latest course, this latest course too, but the previous one is I filmed a, I had a webinar where I brought everybody in to launch this course and I showed them everything that’s inside the course.

Every little detail about what it was all about. And you click here and these are the audio, and then you listen to this and these are the videos and blah, blah, blah. And then that’s on my website. So anybody that goes to my, to the page to buy that course, it’s like a 45 minute video. You know exactly what you’re buying before you buy it.

And I did exactly the same thing with this course that I just launched as well. So I’ve got that, and I think that’s important because a lot of people have said to me in comments that it, things don’t live up to their expectations. That a lot of people are sending courses.

I’ve tried to do this one, I’ve tried to do that one, and then, I’m so pleased that I can actually see what I’m buying before I actually get it. And if you are, if you’re a quality content creator and your course is quality, why not? Don’t be afraid, in my opinion, that your competitors are gonna be looking at your courses and thinking, oh, that’s a good idea.

Fair enough. It’s worth the comp. Probably not many competitors are looking at my courses anyway, but I would prefer to be so open and to say I’ve created something that I know is quality. There it is. Have a look and if you’re interested, you just buy it.

Chris Badgett: I love that approach.

The, it’s, I would call it like in marketing, I’d call it like a video sales letter, but it’s not a bunch of promises in this. It’s Hey, here’s what’s in the box. Here’s how this works. This is exactly what you’re gonna see. Like we’re removing all the mystery. Come on in. If this sounds like a good fit to you, it’s awesome.

Marcus Carter: You go and buy an iPhone and you’re standing there in the i in the iPhone store, and you’re testing it before you know what it’s all about before you buy it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s brilliant. That’s my approach. Can you get into just a little bit of if we take a snapshot of today just the impact you’re having, like things like whatever you’re comfortable sharing, number of students you’ve mentioned it’s become like your full-time income stream.

Now you’ve mentioned, I’m curious like when you’re teaching English to Spanish speakers, like what parts of the world are you hitting and who’s, and also. Do you have any stories about how people have gone through the Carter method and got some job or some outcome? I’m sure you have all that stuff, but can you just tell us, inspire us a little bit with the impact of the site?

Marcus Carter: Yeah. Obviously when you, the digital, the last digital course I just created, it took me 11 months to create this course, and the previous one before that, it took me a year to, to create that. So you’re I’m it’s not my full source of all income. Obviously I’m, I’m teaching and I had sponsors also on the website, and YouTube obviously pays me.

So I’ve got, MSI, multiple sources of income. I think that’s important for any kind of content creator to, open your. Possible sort of income sources so that if one isn’t doing too well, you’ve got another one. And you can more or less keep going. And so I know it’s difficult to spend a year creating a course, and not have any income at all for that course.

And you don’t even know if you’re gonna sell it when you get to the end of it. ’cause you are, you’re reaching a stage. You’re gonna try and do a webinar, you’re gonna try and bring people in, and then hopefully you’re gonna buy it. And then obviously from that moment onwards, it’s just a passive income that you are getting.

And I don’t know how many students I have, hundreds of students that have bought my digital courses. Definitely, maybe, probably 300, 400 I dunno how many exactly. I’ve sold. But the important thing for me is to always be have, they all have their separate telegram groups.

I’m in all those groups. I answer everything as. Quickly and as detailed as possible, anything they need to know, because they’re asking me questions about English. And what about, how do you pronounce this word? Audio message is to have a lot of close contact with the students after they have bought the courses, which then brings them into, a close field of contact with me to build up trust.

Because at the end of the day, when people, a lot of people come into the, to the webinar one thing I must say, when I do my webinars to sell the courses, the launches, I’ve actually only done about three or four launches. The last two were the most successful ones. The typical webinar that people are advertising come to the webinar and we’re gonna teach you this and blah, blah, blah.

So a lot of the time it’s using Facebook ads or YouTube ads or something, and you click on that and you sign up for the webinar. You might not even know that person. So what I did is I. Told people in the, I did YouTube ads in the last one, but I told people in the ad, I said, Hey, are you interested in seeing a new English course that I’m just about to launch?

It’s this kind of level or whatever. I didn’t say come to the webinar, which is another strategy I tried three years ago where people came, I gave them this webinar about phonetics. I was teaching them things and that, you’re gonna get a load of value and then here comes the sting in the tail.

I wanna sell you something at the end of it. And that is the typical pattern of webinars that me as a, not as a salesman I don’t feel comfortable hooking people in and then trying to, get that sale at the end and say, I’ve given you that value. You owe me, some of you owe me a sale now at the end, so everybody that came to that webinar, they knew why they were coming.

They were coming to see the presentation of a new course and. Almost all of them knew who I was. ‘Cause I’ve got, I dunno, 300,000 followers on, on, on YouTube. If they didn’t know me, they probably would’ve clicked on and seen my videos and things anyway. So I don’t have to prove that I’m an authority, which is what a lot of people have to do in these webinars.

Say, look, I’m this person. These are all the testimonials I have from other people that have bought my courses. Look how great I am. I just said, look, this is who I am and this is why you are here. And so whoever was there to see a presentation of a course and they knew that I was gonna sell it that day.

And that makes me feel super comfortable when I’m in these webinars. And I don’t have to like, start getting a lump in my throat when the sale’s coming up and then, all of a sudden come out with a price. But it’s a bit lower today because, and all of these things. I was just very comfortable.

So I’ve probably sidetracked a bit from your original question.

Chris Badgett: Oh, I love that. Yeah. Just the piece I was looking for on the reach which. Spanish speaking countries. If you have 300,000 views on YouTube, you’re probably hitting all of them, I’m guessing, but Totally.

Marcus Carter: Yeah. It’s primarily Spain USA, Mexico, Columbia, but it’s just all of them, everywhere really.

And I got a lot of people in, Australia and things because they’re just, Spanish speakers who have, gone to other countries to live and they need to brush up on their English. So yeah, it’s just wherever the algorithm takes me.

Chris Badgett: And just one more question before we get into our screen share.

I’ve noticed I’ve seen patterns, ’cause I’ve worked with a lot of course creators and ones like you that are just crushing it and moving it multi-year in. I noticed three things. One of ’em is they’ve already got some experience with WordPress, like maybe a couple years before they get into it.

The big one is. They’ve already been making money with this expertise probably in the offline world. Like for you, you said you’ve been teaching English for 30 years, so you’ve been in the space a while. And then the most interesting one is you people take forward imperfect action and just keep going.

You’ve played around and experimented across social media. You’ve gotten better, better at tech. You’re implementing with ai. You get in the weeds sometimes and you get tech support or get help from AI or just mess around until you figure it out. You try a lot of tools. I’ve just seen this movie before, but is there anything else you would add to even if it’s motivation related, like why do you think you’ve been successful here, besides those factors that I mentioned?

Marcus Carter: Yeah. Don’t have a plan B. That’s probably number one thing I would say. When I, yeah, when I closed the academies, all like the furniture, I had three schools all that furniture went into storage. And I still had, receptionists that was still working for me, but they didn’t really have anything to do.

And I, we had five at the beginning, we had to get rid of some of them. There was just two left at the end and they were like, okay, Marcus, what are we gonna do? We’re gonna reopen the schools and take all that stuff out. And I was like. No, we’re not gonna do that. I was like, Hernan te, like I’m burning the boats and I donated all the furniture to some local schools, and I said, we’re going digital 100%.

And I, and it was just like, there is no plan B. These digital courses have to work. Yeah. And when you’re, when you find yourself in that corner, you’ve got no other option than to make it work. And that is when, you kick into overdrive. And I love what I do. I love my studio. I love coming in here.

I love creating content. I love tech. I’ve always loved tech since I had my, Zi X Spectrum, 81 in my bedroom, when I was a kid and things. So I’ve always loved that side of things. What was difficult for me was the camera confidence, and being natural on camera. But, it’s just press record, just keep going.

It just, and just, there is no. Escape. You just gotta keep going in that direction and eventually you will get there. And if you are, if you’re struggling, and it’s you’re in a specialist niche, keep learning all the time. Just keep learning and learning, looking at other creators and try taking something from there.

Put your spin on it and just keep, because you can have the best course in the world, but the biggest problem, or the best I, telephone in the world or whatever product the number one pro problem for every creator or any kind of product or service is, how do I put that product in front of the people that are gonna buy it?

I could have a physical shop, that’s one way of doing it. But if you’re online, like most of us now. How do you get it in front of those people? And so you can pay your Facebook ads, your YouTube ads, but then you are somebody that isn’t, you don’t have an authority channel where people can say, oh, okay, this guy, all right, let’s click on here.

Okay, he’s, he must be good ’cause you’ve got 300,000 followers or something like that. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re good just ’cause you’ve got that. But and so organic reach for me has been the number one way to, to reach people and to create that authority and that community by just keep going and going.

And, as I say, 164 videos on YouTube before, I remember my first check from YouTube was like $2 36 cents, like two years in. But for me, it was like I said to my wife, I said, I’m just so happy that I’ve monetized the channel. Finally people are coming to the channel. But it, because it was just, I’m like that kind of terminator mentality.

It’s just, I will not stop.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Marcus has already dropped a ton of gold and he’s got a YouTube play button behind him. I don’t have a YouTube play button. I’m looking I’m taking notes on these YouTube tips. But another thing about the great course creators is this not just about having a great website and making the sale and figuring out your marketing channel.

You actually have to deliver, quality, engaging, effective learning content. And Marcus is gonna take us on a tour, some of the stuff he is done with his latest course to inspire. If you’re listening, go find the YouTube version of this LMS cast with Marcus Carter. I’m gonna pop your screen up here, Marcus, and just.

Can’t wait to see the show and tell here. So it’s it’s up in the window.

Marcus Carter: All right. Okay. So what you were saying just then about having a great website. I don’t have a great website. That’s one of the things I gotta work on a bit more. I’ll actually show you my my, I was just like fiddling it.

It’s not a great website, it’s just a basic elemental website that I’ve created here. It’s nothing special at all. And I need to improve it. I know I do. ’cause that’s my son keeps telling me, dad, you gotta get this website sorted out. But even that doesn’t matter because at the end of the day, it’s not about, I don’t think it’s about the website, it’s about the landing page.

It’s the link that goes from wherever you are. If you’re in TikTok, in Instagram, YouTube, whatever, that people land on that page and that page is well explained. I’ll just show you for example, what I was explaining before, so this is Genesis is the name of the new course, and this is the landing page for Genesis that I just recently created.

Here is the video where I explain the course in detail inside, I streamed it on YouTube live at the same time. I was doing it on Zoom. And so that’s the first thing people find. And it’s just a basic basic web, a basic page that goes down here with your buttons. One thing I’ve created here is I’ve got four courses now.

A lot of people like to buy bundles, and that’s when I use the memberships obviously in lifter MS. And so here you can say, okay, I want the basic course, gives you the price there, and I want to add it to Genesis. It’s telling me this is in Spanish, but it’s telling me how much I’m saving down here and I want to add this one too.

Or I can have all four. So making things easy, as easy as possible for people to be able to upsell very easily. I always, whatever, this is my, my phonetics course is the one on the right here, pro Speech, so that’s 249 euros, about $280. But if you buy that course with any of the others, it’s only a hundred dollars more.

So I always, when people contact me, I say, buy the phonetics course. You need to add that to any of the others. And it’s just, it’s almost standard now that people buy the package of Genesis Plus Pro speech or Intermediate plus Pro speech or Basic plus Pro speech. Yeah. As I say, my website’s nothing, nothing special at all.

It’s just a basic thing that I throw together and I keep every course seems to have a different theme. So as you can see, this one here is kinda like purple, I dunno why. But the other ones are like orange and green and things like that. So I show you that now how I’ve changed the colors and that’s one of the problems because really my logo is blue and white and my, sun keeps telling me that I should keep the same colors and things like that.

But let’s go into my area where my courses are. So what I just wanna

Chris Badgett: add while you’re pulling that up, I’ve seen this movie before too, where it’s the offer and the training. Like we can get really obsessed with web design, but when you have the right offer for the right people and you’re good at what you do, like the design, while important and a website can always be improved.

It’s the offer that matters. And you nailed it. And I think, by the way, that’s a beautiful landing page that you were just showing us.

Marcus Carter: Okay, thanks. Yeah, but even looking here, my courses, like the basic course doesn’t have a background, the intermediate course, that was, I’m looking at it now, I’m thinking, why didn’t you just do them the same?

But these are just things that I overlook, as a creator or genesis. I just threw this together ’cause I didn’t have a featured image for the Genesis course, but I’ll show you, for example the intermediate course, which is the course that I launched a year ago.

And this is when I started going a little bit higher in my technological skills as far as the course is concerned. So I’ve got all my modules here. There’s 63 lessons in this course 10 modules, and they all have like evaluations at the end of every module. So if I just click into to lesson one.

Each. Listen all my videos are based on videos and this is why this course took so, so long. ’cause there’s 63 videos that I had to edit, which took me an eternity to do that. And I’ll explain the way I changed it in the next in the next.

The way I teach English basically is I have this is what the counter method is based on, is that there’s a set of vocabulary there and I introduce a word and then I immediately ask a question to the student. As you can see at the bottom here, it says, do you play chess? And what I do is I leave a gap here.

So yes, I play chess,

play. Do you play chess? So as you can see here, I ask a question, students are supposed to answer out loud, and then they compare their answer with mine. Yes, I play chess, or no, I. I don’t play chess. And so there are always what we call closed questions, which is a yes or no answer. They say it out loud, there’s no real interaction.

I’m just hoping that students are actually saying these answers out loud. Okay. That has worked very well up until now, but I wanted to change things for my new course. So after this part here there’s another series of audios. I’m keen

AI: on going camping in summer

Marcus Carter: for people to

AI: camping

Marcus Carter: people to listen to the audios here.

And then I used this is a plugin that I used here for some different kinds of exercises. You can put the cursor down here, see the translations. No. Okay. This is a pretty basic lesson. This is the first one. I actually got better as I was going along with this course. If I go into one of the more advanced lessons, I can show you how I advance, and let’s go up to here or something.

Chris Badgett: It’s funny how things. You start making something and you’re, that’s that continuous improvement. You just keep getting better. And it’s you can’t, you don’t always have time to go back. I’m not gonna reshoot everything.

Marcus Carter: Yeah, you could, you just gotta keep going here. I learned how to do these audios and put these in.

So that happened after about less than six or seven, but I didn’t go back to change the first ones ’cause there was a lot of work done there already. These, this, the one thing I should say for everybody listening, I’m not a coder, I know. Ha I just know like super basic things, like the and I could not write code myself at all.

Everything that you’re seeing here, all of this has been the help of chat GPT to be able to do these things. And so what you do need to, what I would definitely advise anybody is to become an expert on using chat GT on a daily basis or whatever AI you want to use. So I started putting, different kinds of, exercises in dragon drops and things like that you could do here. These are audios that you can play. She

AI: looked at herself in the mirror and realized she had forgotten her glasses.

Marcus Carter: Or I can play it at N 0.5 speed if that’s a little bit too fast. I put my cursor over here and this come, this pops up.

So this was a great course, and a lot of people bought this course. They really liked it. It’s got lots of listening vocabulary, it’s got the videos and yeah, great success. This was the intermediate course,

Chris Badgett: but lemme ask a quick question here. How do you go from getting custom functionality and chat GBT to your website?

Are you. Like building an A custom plugin with chat GBT or are you, is there something on this page that it’s just unique for this page that has an HTML block in it or something?

Marcus Carter: Yeah, that’s all it is. All I’m doing is, I’ve got Elementor, I’ve got the Elementor Pro plugin. You could do this in Cadence as well.

Cadence is my website theme, but I always use Elementor Pro for building everything. And so these are just nothing more than HTML blocks, that’s all they are. Then once you are, once you wanna design what you wanna do, you just chill. Tell chat, GPT, I wanna do this. You’ve gotta go back and forth loads of times with chat, GPT sometimes, for, to get the buttons right and to do this.

But he will just basically design it for you and explain, paste this. And if you don’t, if you’ve got the paid version of chat G tbt, which is 20 euros, $20 a month or something, just screenshot and just say, oh, this button’s over there, why is that? And then he’ll just do it again until you get it, and then once you’ve got it, it’s just copy and paste. And I’ve got all of these blocks here are in templates. So all I do is I just paste a template into a new lesson, change that vocabulary, and I’m ready to go for another one. So I’ve got a, and

Chris Badgett: Are the audio files living in your WordPress media library?

Marcus Carter: No, the, I use bunny.net. Yeah. As a content delivery network. That’s where I have my audio files and sometimes PNGs and those kind of things, rather than clog up my WordPress site with with too much audios and things. And to, and also because I think Bunny is a better content delivery network.

Yeah. All over the world, they’re everywhere. They’re super fast and they’re super cheap as well.

Yeah. Anyway, so these kind of exercises I’ve got, I dunno, about eight different kinds of exercise. And every lesson there’s two or three, two or three, and I just rotate them and they’re just different and yeah.

So that worked very well. So let’s go back to where we were

and where were we, sorry.

So when I designed the new course, this one Genesis is a course that, it was my original course before I even did my phonetics course. That was the name of it. And I did three or four lessons and then I left it. So I thought I’m gonna, give it birth again to Genesis. And my intention was the only thing that was missing from the intermediate course was the interactivity.

And because students just speak out loud, but they’re not actually using their microphones. It does have a, at the end of every module, it has a, pronunciation recognition lesson where students listen to sentences and then they record themselves and it gives you a scoring on your pronunciation. So I’m connecting to APIs.

Nobody knows what these are basically their, chat. GPT in my new Genesis course is connected to my Genesis course through what we call an API. So it’s just basically a little let’s say a wire or a bridge or something that connects chat, GBT, the brain of chat GBT to my course. I’m connected to another two or three more APIs.

One of them is this pronunciation scoring API. Another one is 11 labs, which is the the voices. And can’t remember which other one I had. Anyway, those are the three main ones. So now I’ll show you the course. The basic course is very similar to the intermediate course although it was the first course I did after the phonetics course, I revamped all the exercises and made them very similar to the intermediate course, but at the basic level.

But Genesis is a different concept. So this is the course page. Obviously what you’ll see here is a league they people win g coins. And I was actually watching one of your one of your guests just recently who was talking about gamification and things like that and saying and she was saying, you can do more than just a league and and streaks and things like that.

I was thinking, oh, I only had leagues and things. But anyway this is just this first concept that I put in. The other a PII have is with telegram. So the telegram group is connected. To the course. And when people are on the course for an hour, there’s a power hour, message in the telegram group that Peter is on the course for an hour.

It’s a power hour. If they’re three days, they get a streak message into the Telegram group. If they reach 5,000 G coins or 10,000 g coins. For Genesis coins 10,000 or whatever, that these messages are popping up in the Telegram group.

So one of my, one of the big problems, I would say, the biggest problem for creators of courses that, have students on their courses is getting the students to finish the courses.

It’s a real I know that students would learn a lot of English if they finished the course, but if you just buy the course in the heat of the moment and you don’t finish it, you’re not gonna learn English. And it might be the best course in the world, but you’re not gonna, you’re not gonna get there.

So one of my, missions with this new course was actually to try to hold students’ hands as much as possible in the telegram chat. And putting these things in for motivation. Students dunno this yet, and I can say this ’cause none of my students are gonna be watching this podcast, but I also have with print full.

I dunno, that’s a merchandising thing that I used to have on my website, on my YouTube channel. I still have all my products on there, so I have the phonetic table on a mouse pad or a cup with some expressions on it or something like that. I will be sending those when that guy, Luis.

When he gets to 30,000 G coins, he doesn’t know this yet. He will be receiving through the post, his mouse pad with the phonetic table on it. Yeah. So that, just to take it a little step further, what does it cost me $20 to do that, and to be able to reward somebody who’s got 30,000, this guy’s doing really well.

So I thought that was important. Anyway. As you can see here, I’ve changed the lifter LMS. This took me a lot of work, Chris, it looks like it. To get in here and to get this to look like this. Yeah, it was not me, it took chat, GPTA lot of work, let’s say, because it’s, you’ve gotta go into the little source code details of lift drill MS to be able to change the colors.

And it was really difficult to do this, but I just wanted it to look a bit more futuristic than the basic courses that I had before, which were all just a white background, with the normal squares and things. There’s 50 lessons in this course, and instead of it being on video, it’s all through ai.

So I’ll just click here on lesson one.

I. Okay, I’ve got five monitors and my Mac Mini is a little bit slow at showing these things on the screen. So this is just like an automatic popup that you get on the first lesson of every new module. So the first lesson is all about the present simple. This is the grammar that is in this first part.

It pops up on the first one but it doesn’t pop up on lesson two for students to read through that and they just click off here. For my course, because I’ve got people all over the world, it’s important that they have the option of British or American accents. So I’m British, let’s go for British.

And also they can choose, masculine or feminine voices or masculine.

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That’s coming from 11 labs, right?

Marcus Carter: The voices are coming from 11 labs. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yep.

Marcus Carter: So this is what I wanted, instead of it being a scrollable course where students go down, as I was showing in my previous course what I wanted to is to have the sensation of a web app where you are, on this screen.

This part here substitutes the video part where I, had to edit all those 63 videos. Now I don’t have to do that. Now I’ve got a CSV, which is on Google Sheets, and I’m pulling from that CSV and it automatically fills in all of this vocabulary, and it’s connected to 11 labs. And 11 labs has given me the word.

So when I click on the word, always, do your parents always visit you on holidays? I’m also using cashed audio because it, it turned out a little bit expensive to be continuously generating. That’s why it was so fast the way it gave it to me. And basically here, I just, these are the yes no questions.

The same as before, but I’m gonna actually say it. Yes, my parents always visit me on holidays

and it will give me a correct answer if I said it correctly. I can check my pronunciation here. And that’s the other API that I’ve got connected there. It also comes out this API in other parts of the course. So cut me off if you want me to make this shorter. No, you’re

Chris Badgett: good.

Keep going. My mind is being blown here, so keep doing it. I’m so impressed. And as a especially as a non-developer, I think that’s just incredible.

Marcus Carter: Yeah. You don’t have to be a developer nowadays to do these things. So some of the problems I’ve had, for example, where if you look down here, it says back to the Genesis course, just to get rid of that button that lifter LMS had at the top there, which was interfering because it, I had to put that in there.

So this now works, and I can go back to straight back here. Let me just click back in. Go to lesson two this time.

So it’s slow loading because of all these lemme just close Google that I have somewhere else. Yeah. So as I say, so the good thing about this for me is that I didn’t have to create 50 lessons. I just had to create A-C-A-C-S-V with all the vocabulary. And the AI does the rest for me. Basically. You can, I can click on, if I click on this rest word here.

Do you often rest when you travel? I can also click here and, it gives me the translation. So I’ve got, I’m using I’m deployed on the courses up on GitHub, which is the repository, which is then connected to render, which is what deploys it all over the world. And that’s where all my nodes are of like, for the translations and the speaks and all of those things which are connecting to the APIs.

So as I was saying before, what I wanted is like an app. So you’re looking at like a web app. So when you want to go to the next part, or lemme just show you this, if I wanna bring up that grammar part again, I just click here and I can, I. Have a look of any of the grammar that I want that will bring that popup back up.

That was another thing that I added. I try to think of everything that a student might need while they’re in the course. Oh, they don’t ans understand that question. You can translate it. Don’t worry. Oh, what was that grammar? You can look at the grammar. Wherever you are in the course, you can check it, you can change the accent again, if you want to, you can start the lesson again.

Once you’ve answered one question, then it graze out so that you remember which ones you actually answered. You can repeat the question. You’ve got your progress bar. You can let’s, it’s too fast for me, so let’s put it down here. And, ask another question. Relax. Do you think recycling helps the environment a bit slow?

Or if that’s too slow for me, and I want it asked fast early. Do you wake up early to enjoy your hobbies? So I’m trying to think of everything that a student might find challenging and to help them out so that they can calibrate the course to their liking along the way.

So when I click next, this is what I call the training section where they’re learning the vocabulary. They’re just using close questions. Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. If I make a mistake, for example, if I say yes, I wake up late to enjoy my hobbies is it will detect that as a mistake and it will tell me the, what I should have said there.

Yes, I wake up. Early to enjoy. So just to, and then you just say it again and then it’ll update the progress bar. So go to the next part here, which is practicing with the ai. So you’ve done the training, you’ve learned those 10 words. Now the AI is gonna converse with me and induce me to use that vocabulary.

So I start the lesson. Hello Marcus. Let’s practice the words you learned in the training section. Our first word is wake up. What time do you usually wake up in the morning? So it says, hello Marcus. It’s pulling from the lifter LMS ID of my name to say that it says that in a couple of different places in the course.

And now I can basically converse in this part with whatever I want. I don’t have to answer his ques, I can say whatever I want. So I can say I wake up at three o’clock in the morning because I’m a fireman and I have to go and rescue people from houses.

That’s quite early. I see you have an important job. How often do you wake up at that time for work? Yeah, this is quite a long conversation. So he’s using how often he’s using the vocabulary from the first part. He also tries to interact a little bit and say, oh, that’s an important job, to acknowledge what I just said.

It’s not just a cold next question that he’s saying. If I make a mistake and I say, wake up me every day,

I noticed a small mistake change. You said, wake up me every day. The correct way to say it is I wake up every day, please repeat this sentence. I wake up every day.

Well done, Marcus. That’s much better. Now let’s practice, get dressed. What do you usually do after you get dressed? Okay if I didn’t understand that, I can also, see the translation here and it’ll show me in Spanish. And if I dunno what to say, I can also click on this here and it will give me a a suggested answer.

I usually have breakfast after I get dressed and they automatically disappear those things. Okay, so then that’s the part where you put into practice everything that you’ve learned in the training section. And then you go over here and this is the exercise area which substitutes what I had in my other course, the part where those audio things were and things.

So I wanted to go to town with this. And you start off with just the basic flashcard exercise, which is, pretty basic here, where you just got flashcards and if the idea is to get a streak here. So if you knew it, you just say, I knew it. I knew it. And you get a diamond for the first ones there.

Get another one here and then that’s it. And you go back. So that’s just to, to start off the exercises. What I didn’t say before on the AI conversation is when you finish the conversation, it analyzes everything you said with your mistakes. And a popup comes up and it tells you all the words that you used.

It gives you recommendations on the mistakes that you made if you might need to revise the present. Simple or something like that. Do you want me to go through all these exercises, Chris?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, let’s see. ’em, my mind is completely blown. And also, you’re doing all this in chat, GPT, right? And the APIs to the various tools like 11 Labs and the per.

Pronunciation checker or the grammar checker or whatever.

Marcus Carter: Yep. Everything. Sometimes I have to go to Gemini or gr if I don’t get it right with with chat. But yeah, basically I’m just 90% on chatGPT.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Yeah. Let’s see these other interactive learning tools, I think this is fascinating.

Marcus Carter: Ooh, that’s not good. Could not load. Breathe. Refresh your paste. That’s not good. Something’s happening here.

These are the, I’ve been like literally the last two weeks just ironing out all the bugs that people keep telling me. Should have loaded. Why is that? Failed to load exercises. Okay, that’s not looking good. Forget that part. We’ll edit that out. Let’s go to a different one here. Okay, this one here is like a bit of a game that I decided to a bit of a stressful thing here where you get 30 seconds to answer the question and I’ll show you what you can do here.

There are different kinds of questions, so you’ve gotta fill in the blank here. You, I’m just gonna reveal the answer here. Finish, and then I just press and it gives me the right answer. I can ask for a little tip if I don’t know. It says, oh, it’s one word and it begins with an S. Okay. So it’s gonna be some here because it, I’ve gotta use one of these words here.

If I’m get stressed out with the time, I can freeze it.

Chris Badgett: Wow. You do think about your students like and their experience?

Marcus Carter: Yeah, a lot of my students are actually very senior. I’ve got 75 year olds, quite a few, over 60. A lot of students. Yeah. This is just a multiple choice here which is, pretty basic.

Nothing interesting going on here. You can translate here if you click the translations on, then when you hover over it, you get a tool tip pop out. So that’s that one there. Fill in the audio one here so they gray out, because I’ve obviously been testing with this course whoops. So you listen, we will arrive at the station by noon.

So here, I’d have to write, arrive, and then go to the next one. Nothing. This one’s a pretty cool exercise where you, this is a pronunciation exercise, so students have to listen to the sentence. I wake up early every morning for work and then record themselves. I wake up early every morning for work, so it gives me a a rating for my pronunciation here.

And if I do it, let’s just go to the next one. If I make a mistake,

the new telephone costs less than my old one. So what I do is I click on these and then it opens up another little modal here, and I just say this word. So more.

Okay, now I can continue. Now that one will be. Green more. I dunno why that shifted down a bit there. But anyway, shouldn’t have done that. Then I have a listening exercise here where basically students listen to a dialogue.

AI: I usually wake up early on weekdays. How,

Marcus Carter: If I don’t understand that dialogue, I can flip it out here and you can’t see.

’cause I’ve got my toolbar at the top, but that’s not normally there. And I can translate everything that’s there and it will translate it into yellow text, which should do. There you go. And the good thing is if I what times I wake up early? I usually wake up early. I’m gonna, I’m gonna make a mistake here.

If I make a mistake,

AI: I usually wake up early on. Weekdays

Marcus Carter: it, how

AI: about you? It

Marcus Carter: actually. Plays the part of the dialogue where the correct answer is. And when I get it right, it just continues. So that’s my listening exercise. And then writing here is the final one. There is when you finish the writing here you’ve got different kinds of writings.

You can do a story, a diary, an opinion, a description, an email, for example. And it would generate your prompt, write an email to your manager about your late arrival. And you have to use five of these words at the top here, not all 10 of them. And when I use one, if I say I wake up as I write the word, my progress bar highlights and it shows me that I’ve done that word, but I’m not gonna write it.

But you’ve gotta write a over a hundred words to finish the writing as it says down there. It doesn’t go green until you get to a hundred. And then you click check. And then the I AI gives you all the feedback, the mistakes. How could you could improve it. Yeah. So that’s,

Chris Badgett: that’s basically it. I’m gonna pull your screen down and just say I’m completely blown away.

This is this is incredible, Marcus. And I know, ’cause I also like you, you’re like, I know my students need to freeze. Like I know what the people listening or watching this are gonna ask. Could you just re rehash the tech setup there? Like the APIs chat, GBT, WordPress Lifter and also, yeah, I guess let’s start with that.

Just, so if somebody’s interested in this, can you describe your, the tools you use and the workflow you use to create a new lesson?

Marcus Carter: Yeah. Okay. I’ll show you. I can even show you. Do you want me to share again and show you the

Chris Badgett: yeah, I’ll add your, I’ll add your screen back so we, we’ve got the Genesis screen back up here.

Marcus Carter: Okay. Yeah. If I go in here, are you not seeing, ah, yeah sorry. There it is. Can you see the backend now?

Yeah. Okay. So this is the template here, and in this template there are different HTML blocks in Elementor. It could be in cadence or whatever theme you’re using. You just add an HTML block.

Now, as I say, I’ve been doing this for 11 months now, and there are like 30,000 lines of code for that, for, for what you’ve just seen. So if I click on this one here, this is section two AI conversation, HTML. So that’s where we were doing the AI conversation. This big one here is the the first part, the training.

Each one of these is the exercise menu and the different exercises. So it’s just basically. An Elementor page with blocks of HTML stuck into it. Now I’ve learned what, how I should have done this. I should have used global CSS styles and even had those CSS styles on Bunny. I didn’t do that. I didn’t know anything about that at the beginning.

Chat GT didn’t tell me that because I started with the training section and I said, Hey, let’s do this next part. Oh, let’s do this. And it wasn’t, I didn’t have the, the experience of the architecture of the way I could have done this much more easily. So it’s given me loads of problems. I had loads of problems with.

Making the course responsive to all the different screen sizes. Yes. And realize that was gonna be a problem. And I’ve literally just finished today, two weeks later, getting it to work on iPad, which has been the biggest problem I’ve had. It’s taken me literally three days to get one button working on the iPad because it was receiving, merge files or whatever.

Lots of things that I had no idea, I didn’t realize I was gonna have problems. Literally two or three days before the course launch, I was testing with a teacher. I said, just go through the lessons and things she was saying, but I can’t see the screen. It’s all off the screen. I said what are you using?

I said, I’m just using my laptop and I’m using a 27 inch monitor and I’ve only ever tested it on this. Yeah. So I didn’t realize I was gonna have all of these problems. But as I say it’s basically just modules of HTML files. And the only reason I put it into different modules is because I was getting really confused in the first one when I was with chat GBT, it was like over 3000 lines of code.

And then he said let’s put the next one. And I said can we do it in a different block at least? So I can just scrolling through, be organized and just to get there. Yeah. So basically I have a template in my WordPress site with the, with all of this on. And in lifter LMS in every lesson I have one little HTML block stuck at the top, which calls all of these lessons.

That’s all it is in lifter LMS. So I have one template a global template, and then in each lesson, like the 50 lessons, there’s one little HTML block, which calls the CSV and calls the template and that’s all it is. And then That’s very

Chris Badgett: cool.

Marcus Carter: Yeah. And then it’s I can show you if you like.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

And a question I have here when you’re doing this is the how much are you writing, like all the individual like phrases and things you use in all your different blocks? Or is chat GBT like selecting the question about waking up earlier or whatever?

Marcus Carter: Yeah, none of it is hard coded.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Okay.

Marcus Carter: Everything comes from ai.

So what I’m doing is I’m caching the I’m caching the files the audio files because 11 labs. Has turned out to be quite expensive, a bit more than I expected with loads of, it’s like doing loads of things. So I’m caching it onto Bunny. Like different versions. There might be for one word, five different possible questions that they could ask you in the cached file with the different accents so that at least, there’s a variety of five or six different questions they can ask you with the different accents that they might use and different genders.

Chris Badgett: So do the students get do they all have the exact same experience or not necess necessarily? No. Yeah, that’s

Marcus Carter: the beauty. Yeah. Nobody does the same course.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. But driving towards the same outcome of learning that level of language.

Marcus Carter: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. The conversation part, everything’s different.

So if I go here to lesson one and I go into Elementor that’s all I have. Yeah. I just have a, that’s all it is. I’m just calling the template.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Marcus Carter: In lesson one.

Chris Badgett: Wow.

Marcus Carter: Yeah, that’s it. That, that, that’s what’s in, that’s what’s in lifter.

Chris Badgett: That’s amazing. I’m pulling your screen down again just to Okay. Lay on the plane here. But, and this, especially since this is December 19th, I’m gonna say this is the coolest AI thing I’ve seen all year.

And and I am just so impressed because, WordPress, myself included I can’t write code. We have talented engineers on the team, but I understand the whole point of democratizing the web is to make it so anybody can be as creative as your being while leveraging technology. Sure. Maybe you’re a developer or maybe you just want to keep it simple and WordPress, but you’re empowered to just go with WordPress and chat GBT and all the AI tools that integrate in.

It’s fascinating. It’s fascinating. And the also notice, like you, you’ve removed yourself as the teacher, like the 11 lives, voices and stuff, but it’s not like you’re not teaching, you’re orchestrating this whole thing like a conductor. And so you’re still teaching, but now you’re just leveraging technology and your body of knowledge together to come up with a wonderful learning experience.

It’s amazing.

Marcus Carter: Oh, but the whole idea is scale, yeah. I can’t edit 63 videos, it’s just. Burning out my eyes sitting here, yeah. Doing that. So the whole idea, now I can now create my next level course and just take that template and just change the CSV, maybe update a little bit of the exercises, make them a little bit more difficult.

But more or less, in a month or less than a month, I’ve got the next level of the course. I can do three or four courses, and one of my ideas now is to do tailor made courses for, for example, some of the big companies I work for, they don’t know this yet, but I’m gonna give them a presentation and say, look, this is a financial banking course in your corporate colors designed for you.

They’ve got the one, one of the things I’m talking about, they’ve got like 35,000 employees. And so I’m like, this is. Designed specifically for you and your employees. How can they not buy it? It’s if they’re gonna be teaching English, why would they go with the normal, these big English teaching companies when they can have something completely tailor made for them.

Very easy for, for human resources to see the results of how they’re doing. If you’re using the the groups plugin and things like that for them to pop in and see how they’re getting, the results on their evaluations and things. The good thing about what, AI has given us is your.

Only limitation is your imagination. Now there is no excuse for you to say, I dunno how to do it, because knowledge is 100% free now. And so it will be a learning curve, obviously, because you’re gonna have loads of problems. And I’ve had them, I’ve had, I’ve literally, as I just said, I’ve spent three days trying to get a button to work on the iPad, and that is super frustrating.

Yeah. But as I say, I don’t have a choice because there’s a woman who bought my course and she and my course is 600, 600 and something dollars. That course is, on offer. It’s actually $800. That course. She only has an iPad, so I have no choice. I have to make it work on the iPad. And I spent the first few days doing some other things, but then there was just one button that I couldn’t get to work and I finally got it working this morning.

So Amazing. Yeah, it’s just

Chris Badgett: You’ve gone exponential Marcus. This is impressive to watch. And that’s a, yeah. And as a, I think what’s most important here is developers can write code and, or accelerate with chat GPT and stuff, but you as a subject matter expert in education and language learning, particularly in the English, Spanish you’re just, you can do anything now.

It’s it’s amazing.

Marcus Carter: Totally. It’s amazing.

Chris Badgett: I see why you wanted to show this, ’cause I’m proud of you, man. This is so cool. Yeah. And I I just wanna ask the question again, just ’cause I know people watching or listening are gonna be curious. I’ve heard WordPress, I’ve heard lifter, LMS I’ve heard some of the add-ons, like groups and so on.

You’ve mentioned chat, GBT, you’ve mentioned 11 labs, some other APIs for niche language learning scenarios. You also mentioned GitHub. And you’ve mentioned Elementor. Is there anything else that kind of fits into this stack that’s like critical for somebody to understand? And particularly, could you touch on the GitHub piece?

What, how GitHub gets involved? Yeah. And for a non-engineer to start using GitHub, like I’m sure that was a little intense for you and. Here you are.

Marcus Carter: I still have no idea how GitHub works. I don’t even know what it is really. It’s just basically, I know it’s a place where people put their codes, and they call it a repository, whatever that is, and so I was designing the course for the first 11 months locally. I had it on local server here, on my computer. And then, chat said later we’ve gotta deploy this on on whatever. And I was like, okay, we’ll do that later. And then when it got to the stage, about two weeks before I said, okay, we better start moving this, because I didn’t do it initially because it just takes longer when it’s deployed onto the servers.

If you wanna update something, you gotta wait for it to deploy and then come back and I locally, you just press enter and then it’s ready.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And

Marcus Carter: Literally chat. GPT walked me through every single step. He said, press, you gotta have the screenshot thing, where you pay the $20 so you can screenshot and upload that to him.

And he says. Press that button there in the corner that says upload file. And then you know, it you got no excuse for not doing it. And then from there you connect it to render. I still don’t really know what render is and what’s the difference between bunny and render, but I had to do that.

He said, you need, he told me you had to choose render or one of the others or something like that. I don’t know if I pay five or $10 a month to render for that. And so he just walked me through it and it was surprisingly easy. It was literally a couple of hours and you are live worldwide.

I was like, wow, that was amazing. I also use Python Anywhere, which is another, some kind of server or something like that where you can put Python code, which is what I have no idea, but I’ve got quite a lot of Python code on that thing. And that is what connects everything to my Telegram groups.

That’s where all the messages go through there. And yeah as I say, I have no I might have said GitHub, like it’s a repository, but I’ve got no idea what that is really.

Chris Badgett: And in terms of, I’m just, I’m left with this question what do you do when you get stuck? Like I know you’ll email Lifter a support ticket as example.

But there’s only so far we can go like in helping with chat GBT and render and all, and Bunny and all this other stuff. Maybe you’ve hit elementary with a message about something. It sounds like predominantly you’ve just figured out how to work with chat GPT as a co-pilot to get you unblocked whenever you get stuck.

Marcus Carter: Totally. You will never get stuck with chat GPT because it’s he knows everything, and it’s his language and he speaks all the languages, all the coding languages. He knows everything. He will make mistakes and he, you will do things and he forgets, like what he said two paragraphs ago.

And you have to always keep, quite often, I just re I just say, here’s the code again, here’s the code again, just in case, you just have to learn how to work with him, but he will always get you out of the. Out of the wherever you are stuck. And and I have obviously, lift LMS sometimes I need some support from them or something like that if I’m trying to find workout things that are in the plugin.

But really no other platforms have I needed to use any kind of support. I had a problem with Elementor. I, when I started trying to save my, because it’s got so many lines of code on the same page, I was getting a server error from SiteGround, which is what hosts my WordPress site, and I had to open up support with them, and they just upped the memory that I needed in my PHP and that was it.

Away you go. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s absolutely amazing. And on that note of like hallucination in chat, GPT, when it says something wrong or it doesn’t work, I would, if I was. Guess, I would think at some point you’d hit a wall, you can’t get over and it’s, you’re just totally stuck. But maybe not Marcus Carter.

He’s not giving up. He’s burned the boats. He’s going forward no matter what.

Marcus Carter: Yeah, it literally, sometimes I have been stuck on certain things of code that it didn’t work, and I’ve had to go to Gemini and then I’ve had to go to Grok and then I’ve gone to Deep Seek and I’ve had perplexity open and I’ve had like, all five of them are like, we gotta work this out.

Like this block here is halfway down the page. Why can’t we put it, yeah. And it’s taken me different ais to actually find the the problem to solve the problem. But you will always find the solution with the ai because it’s just like having a full stack developer in your pocket.

Chris Badgett: I think part of the reason you’re so good at this is that you actually, you have really strong vision. You know where you’re trying to go. You’re continually protecting like the integrity of the learning experience and the learner. Yeah, because it’s easy to get into AI tools and just start messing around and being like, oh, that’s cool.

Oh wait, I can do this. But you know the outcome you really wanna have and that’s impressive.

Marcus Carter: It all started with the intermediate course when I started making those exercise and I thought, hang on a sec, I can create any kind of exercise I want to create where you can press a button and something happens on the screen and you listen to an audio.

And that’s when I thought maybe I could make like the whole screen a different color and have some kind of UI and where people could actually, and it just went from there, just like I thought, right? I don’t want to be making video courses all the time ’cause it’s just too time consuming.

I can’t scale them. And I can now make the course for the big companies. I can, very quickly I can change the CSS, change the colors, put their logo on it, change the vocabulary for this, for their industry, and away we go.

Chris Badgett: And you you do continue to make videos for YouTube, but that’s for YouTube, right?

Marcus Carter: Yeah, that’s where the sales come from. So I can’t, YouTube is I haven’t actually uploaded a video for six months to YouTube. Because I’ve been so full on with this course, and one of the problems with the course was when do I launch it? When’s it gonna be ready? And I was like, more or less, I had it done, but I still had a load of things to do in sort of October and I said, November the 30th, that’s the date.

And then it was just a massive rush up until then. And literally two hours before the webinar I finished, it wasn’t even working properly. There were bits that weren’t working properly. I finished two hours before, but if I didn’t put that deadline, it would’ve just kept dragging out.

So I thought, let’s, and I had, like in the webinar, I had over a thousand people that are supposed to be coming, but you normally get a quarter. So about 250 people came to the webinar and yeah. I just hope this is an inspiration for people to think you can do what you want. Yeah, you can do and build whatever you want.

Whatever you can imagine, you can do it and just try, go on an HTML block, go into chat, do say, Hey, can you put a button in the middle of the screen that when I press it explodes and says, hippy hip, hip, hooray, and he’ll do it for you.

Chris Badgett: Do you have an example where you use chat GPT to help with lifter?

For example, one of the questions in my mind is okay, if we’re delivering the experience through this interactive content that’s coming from somewhere else, how does lifter know when the lesson is complete?

Marcus Carter: That was another thing I had to hack. I had to hack the listen complete button.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Marcus Carter: I dunno if you saw that. It says, I finished the lesson, did you see on the exercise menu at the bottom it says, I finished the lesson. Okay. That’s your button. But I had to I had a little bit of a problem with the toggle because you can toggle it on and off in lifter LMS and so at the moment you can just say, I’ve completed the lesson.

You can’t re toggle on yet, because when you re toggle on. I get the button pops up at the top of the screen, so I said, okay, I’m just gonna toggle it off at the moment if you’ve completed this. But so basically chat, TT he’ll go into your website and he’ll look down through your documentation and he’ll find out what are the IDs, for that button.

But very often he hasn’t been able to do that. I’ve had to go into your plugin myself, and it’s super extensive and there’s just so many things you’ve got there. And I’ve just and I take a screenshot and he says, click on that bit where it says that and open that bit of code and paste it here.

Ah, so the student ID is, this is the thing that they use. And and then eventually I find things but, and sometimes I actually go onto your website and I look at the little videos because he can’t read the videos. And so you’ve got videos where it explains how to do something if you wanna, whatever.

And so I go in there and I look at the video. So I’ve just seen it in the video. It’s this, and he’s oh, okay. Like it’s just so yeah, he will dig in.

Chris Badgett: That is awesome. I’m serious when I say that is the coolest AI thing I’ve seen this entire year. I’m passionate about online education, so there’s a lot of cool AI things, but this is something else.

My, my hat’s off to you. That’s Mark Marcus Carter. You can find it at Carter’s or Carter school of english.com, the Carter Method. If you are a Spanish speaker looking to learn English check out the courses. Yeah. And you have all kinds of different levels and stuff like that, but Marcus, thank you for being a shining example of what I call an education entrepreneur.

It is just amazing. You’re obviously really good at both education and entrepreneurship, which includes, marketing and sales and building a product and all that stuff, but it also includes innovation and you are just innovating at a crazy exponential rate. It’s really fun to watch. Thank you for coming on.

I really appreciate it. I can’t wait to talk to you from a year from now. ’cause then it’s, I don’t know where we’re gonna be, but thank you so much and keep up the amazing work. Thank you. Thank you. You’re welcome.

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

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