Below you’ll find the beginnings of a directory where we’ll be adding peer reviewed "best of" lists of many of the most popular online courses being offered today. Best Online Music Production Courses

If you’re selling courses online your week may look something like this: You’re in the office Monday morning focusing on refining search terms for your Google AdWords campaign. Tuesday you’re publishing an interview that you conducted last week for your blog. Wednesday you’re recording and publishing a podcast for your website. Wednesday night you login to Facebook and let the world know about your new podcast. Wanting a little more exposure for all of your hard work you decide to pay Facebook to "boost your post". Thursday you do a guest post on related blog. Friday you do a radio interview on a local radio station about the success of your online course. What a week!   Over the weekend you get some time to relax and reflect. It was a busy week but you’re happy with your week’s performance because your current students are happy and your hard work has led to many new course enrollments last week.   So with a little time to reflect, you decide to login to your Google Analytics account to see what you can find. You look at the data. You see a boost in traffic on Wednesday. But you forget what you did that day that could have caused the jump in traffic. Did you do the interview or blog post that day? Did your online course newsletter go out that day? You can’t remember. Or maybe the boost was caused by something else all together?   USING ANNOTATIONS TO KEEP TRACK OF THE PERFORMANCE OF INDIVIDUAL TASKS   One way to avoid the confusion mentioned above, and find a clear link between cause and effect, is to use Google Analytics "annotations" tool. This tool allows you to create short notes to yourself to help you remember what your activities were for that day and keep track of what impact that particular activity had on your site’s traffic and conversions. For example let’s look at the following graph:     You’ll notice around February 11th there was a big jump in traffic. What caused that event? Was it something linked to your marketing efforts for that day, or a just a random increase in activity? Did you start ranking higher for some of your search terms? Did a print media publication mention your online course in a story they were working on about some of the best online courses they’ve discovered?   Using a few tools within your Google Analytics dashboard will help you find the correlation between traffic increases or increases in online course sales, with the activity or event that caused the increase.   HOW CAN I TRACK THE CAUSE AND EFFECT OF MY E-COURSE MARKETING EFFORTS?   To begin, you should be tracking your marketing behavior using "annotations". Start by clicking on the date you want to add an annotation to. Next click on the small gray arrow in the bottom-middle of the graph. At that point you can click on "create new annotation". Now you can type a short annotation (a fancy way of saying "note") about your activities for that day. In this case we finalized an interview that was to be published on a related blog.     After you’ve clicked on "save" you can see a list of all of your annotations and a small "annotations box" under the date you’ve added the annotation under. It will look something like this:     Now you can even take this a step further by looking at your "intelligence events" by clicking on the "daily events" sub-menu item. You’ll then be able to see if any of your spikes in traffic line up to any of your custom or default intelligence events for that period.   In this case we can see that this particular annotation lines up perfectly with an intelligence event. If we click on the orange bar below our chart we’ll see that we had a big jump of 182% increase in traffic from our "referral" source. If we were interested in digging deeper we could then click on "go to report" and figure out which specific referral source sent us the bulk of the new traffic.     In a way annotations allow you to sort of "humanize" your graph and analytics data. It’s easy to look at the above graph and just see a series of ups and downs. However, annotations give you deeper insight into which actions are leading to which outcomes. Which of your marketing "causes" are leading to the most valuable marketing "effects" (course enrollments, newsletter sign ups, brand awareness etc)? We’ll end with a question. If you’re selling online courses are you using the analytics "annotations" tool? If so, how useful have you found this tool as an eCourse seller?  

A Facebook visitor, a friend of a friend, and a Twitter follower walk into a bar…. Okay, that’s the beginnings of a joke with no good punchline. So I’ll stop there. But imagine those three people didn’t walk into a bar, but visited your online course website. Will they all interact with your website the same way? Will one person be more likely to buy your online course than the other? Is one person "just looking" maybe wanting to sample some of the educational content contained within your blog or newsletter?   Understanding how each of these potential students interact with your website is important because by understanding their behavior you can further refine your marketing efforts. For example, if the visitors referred to you by Facebook are "just looking" you can optimize their browsing experience and introduce soft sells to get them started in the eCourse buying cycle. Or, if the visitors sent to you by referral sites are quick to buy your eCourse, you can optimize the buying process for them and spend more of your time looking for traffic from those sources.   E-COURSE VENDORS: ALL TRAFFIC SOURCES ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL   By gathering this information you can also make informed decisions about where to spend more of your advertising budget and / or time. For example, you might find that you generate the most online course enrollment income from the members who sign up for your eCourse newsletter. But where do the people who sign up for your newsletter come from? Do they come from paid search? Organic search? Referral traffic? Social sites like Facebook or Twitter?   Without this information it’s impossible to evaluate your current marketing efforts and it’s impossible to know exactly how to best spend your precious time and advertising money.   AN ONLINE COURSE CASE STUDY   We deal with many types of clients in a broad range of categories. Most clients who sign up with us to sell their courses online are new course vendors. Most of these educational entrepreneurs don’t even have a website to sell their eCourse from yet. These are our "start-up" clients.   However, we also work with clients who have had online courses up and running for a while, but want to work with us because they want to take their online course company to the next level. These clients are our "turnaround" clients.   Start-up courses and turnaround courses require totally different approaches from our end. A start-up course offers the advantage of being able to build everything properly the first time around. However, it takes them time to get our clients off the ground and selling.   A turnound course on the other hand, offers the benefit of a fully developed course and a built-in traffic base for us to test on, but "turnaround" eCourse sites always come with many broken parts and missed opportunities for course sales and traffic optimization. So it requires a lot more work on our end to fix these broken parts. The particular case study we’re about to look at below is from one of our "turnaround" course clients.   Look below, but ONLY look under the "acquisition" column. You’ll notice that the majority of their online course website traffic came from organic search. When this client first signed up with us they told us that this was the metric they valued most. They valued it because they knew it was a source of a lot of traffic.   However, in the world of selling courses online, quality of traffic needs to be given equal weight as quantity of traffic. Looking at the chart below we can see that 26,314 visits were a results of organic search. Again, just look under the "acquisition" column.   QUALITY ONLINE COURSE LEADS   For the purpose of keeping this blog post focused, let’s skip the "behavior" column. It’s an interesting metric to analyze because it allows you to identify problems and then start down the path to fix those problems. However, this particular metric deserves a topic on it’s own, so for now let’s keep focused on the value of a visitor.   Let’s look to the far right column called "conversions". Notice the discrepancy between the conversion rate of different sources of traffic. In this case "other" (which includes sources of traffic from things like your site’s RSS feed) scored the lowest conversion rate of .86% and "referral" has the highest CR of 3.61%. Traffic from social sites also had a really high CR of 3.18%.   So should this client go out and spend all of their time and energy on these high CR traffic sources? Maybe… but maybe not. We need to dig deeper. Get your shovels out.   DEFINING GOALS FOR YOUR E-COURSE   The numbers above simply don’t tell us enough. They are too general. We need to know exactly what the conversion rate is measuring. In this case we’re measuring two important metrics. We’re analyzing eCourse sales and newsletter signups. So where it says "all goals" it’s currently measuring the combined CR for those two goals.   However, using the drop down link you can change "all goals" to measure a specific goal within your account. So let’s measure our client’s online course sales first. The results are below.     Organic Search: 23 course enrollments (71.88% of all eCourse sales) for a total of $9200 in enrollment income. Direct: 6 course enrollments (18.75% of all eCourse sales) for $2400 in enrollment income. Referral: 3 course enrollments (9.38% of all eCourse sales) for $1200 in enrollment income. Social: 0 course enrollments (0% of all eCourse sales) for $0 in enrollment income.   As you can see, these numbers say something totally different then what we might have observed after looking at the first chart. Before the numbers might have led us to believe we should spend all of our money on referral and social traffic because they convert the highest. Now our numbers are saying those are not as impressive as we might have thought because it was including "newsletter signups" in the conversion metric.   The "social" metric is a particularly interesting metric since only a few minutes ago it was the most exciting metric jumping off the page at us. However, now it’s showing it led to no online course enrollments. Not even one! So does that mean that social traffic is worthless? Should we delete our business Facebook account and stop wasting time on Twitter? No. You’ll be losing out big time if you do. But we need to dig deeper before you understand why.   But first, let’s look at our second goal, which is newsletter opt-ins.     Organic Search: 210 newsletter signups  (38.04% of all newsletter signups) Direct: 151 newsletter signups (27.36% of all newsletter signups) Referral: 108 newsletter signups (19.57% of all newsletter signup) Social: 81 newsletter signups (14.67% of all newsletter signups)   Now this is where things start to get really interesting. First of all, we need to ask ourselves: Can we assign a value to this goal? What is the value of a newsletter subscriber? Do they ever buy online courses? Or do they just visit to get free information? Well luckily for you we’ve tested this metric for this online course vendor and we’ve found that the value of a newsletter subscriber is roughly $4.99. You can see the case study where we measured the value of a newsletter subscriber here.   Based on this previous case study we know that a newsletter subscriber is roughly 300% more valuable than a regular site visitor. Signing up for the newsletter was just the first step in the buying cycle. They want to take the online course for a test drive before they commit to enrolling in the paid version of the course. So now all of the sudden social and referral traffic re-gain a bit of importance. If we give each of these signups the value of $4.99 it equals  $943.11 in value for a 30 day period. That’s not too bad. Luckily you didn’t cancel your Facebook account!   ATTRIBUTION MODELS FOR ONLINE COURSE VENDORS   This is where things start to get slightly more complex. To base a conversion on one traffic source alone is to oversimplify the process. For example, by default some analytics programs base a conversion off of the visitor’s last site interaction before the purchase. For instance, maybe a visitor has your site bookmarked. Let’s say they go to their bookmarks and they visit your site, and on this day they decide to enroll in your online course. Well in this case, this was the last interaction with your site so "direct" will be given the credit for the sale.   But this doesn’t take into account all of the "assists" that other sources may have had in the buying cycle. For example, how did they find out about your site in the first place? Let’s say a friend of theirs was following you on Facebook and they liked one of your posts. In this case, maybe your new student saw their friends "likes" and decided to like your Facebook page as well. Maybe a week later they visited your blog and read through a few posts. They loved your content, but they still were not 100% ready to sign up. So they bookmarked your site which allowed them to easily come back at a later time. When they did come back, they signed up for your newsletter because they wanted to sample some of your course content. They loved what they received in their inbox and they were almost ready to enroll, but first they wanted to look for third party reviews of your program. So they jumped online and searched online for reviews of your program. Your online course had great student feedback so they pulled up their bookmarks, visited your site and enrolled.   Analytics programs using a "last click attribution model" would give this last interaction (in this case the direct visit from a bookmark) 100% credit for the "goal". However, the goal would have never been possible if they didn’t see their friends posts on Facebook first. Essentially, using the last click attribution model undervalues the importance of first "touch points". In this case, social media gets 0% credit for the "goal". But surely the "assists" should could for something? Right?   Some marketers opt to give the first "touch point" rather than the last "touch point" 100% of the credit. So in the case above Facebook would get the "goal" for being the first source to let the buying customer know about your online course. However, this is problematic as well because it ignores the steps in between. Another blog put it perfectly when the author wrote "First click attribution is akin to giving my first girlfriend 100% of the credit for me marrying my wife."   We’ll write a post soon on different attribution models, but it’s important to know that there are options that exist (time decay, position based and custom attribution models) which take into consideration "assists" of other "touch points" in the buying cycle. For example, in your Google Analyitics account you can click on "Conversions" — "Multi-Channel Funnels" and then "Top Conversion Paths" to see a graph which shows the order that visitors found you before they made the purchase.     When you get this far, you need to analyze this data on a case by case basis. You really need to know what your Return on Investment (ROI) is for each eCourse marketing activity you’re engaging in.   The main takeaway for Course sellers is to use your shovels to dig deep into your data. The worst thing you could do is to glance over your analytics data and make decisions that would have you scrap activities that aren’t "scoring goals". On the surface that may seem like the right decision, but if you take the time to dig deeper you might see that those activities are great team players and lead to many assists.     We hope you found this case study valuable.      

If you’re selling courses online you’re likely familiar with the marketing process of getting potential students to:   1. Know you 2. Like you 3. Trust you   And then… and only then will they:   4. Buy an online course from you   You’ll likely engage and invest in activities like search engine optimization, ad buying and speaking engagements to help drive awareness to your eCourse. However, having a potential student’s attention isn’t enough. They need to like and trust you before they ever consider paying for one of your courses.   HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE A POTENTIAL STUDENT TO ENROLL IN AN ONLINE COURSE?   The answer to this question varies a great deal on a case to case basis. Course price, trust levels, how long you’ve been established and your current marketing and advertising activities can all have a big impact on how long it takes a potential student to enroll in your eCourse after they have been made aware that your program exists.   A CASE STUDY   In a recent blog post we analyzed how long it look one of our client’s email newsletter subscribers to sign up for their online training program. In this case study we found that it took students 1 - 39 days to enroll in their online course after signing up for their newsletter. The average time span being 19 days. The newsletter in this case was used to build trust with their potential students. Free information, sample classes and other great tools and resources were sent through email so the potential students could become familiar with the quality of content they could expect from this particular course vendor.   But we can take this data a step further.   USING THE TIME LAG TOOL IN GOOGLE ANALYTICS   The metric above was particular to newsletter subscribers. However, what we want to know is how long it takes a regular visitor (not just newsletter subscribers) to sign up for our client’s online course. After logging into Google Analytics and creating our client’s goals, we were then able to monitor, with more clarity, what the eCourse buying cycle looked like for this particular client. The results surprised them to say the least.   46% OF STUDENT’S PURCHASED WITHIN 24 HOURS!   Before running this test our client assumed that virtually all of their students were intimately familiar with their website, their blog posts and their social media activity before signing up. The client assumed that the trust building process took a long time. They didn’t know exactly how long but when we asked them to guess they said "probably around 30 days". However, after setting up their goals and analyzing their sales data for 30 days, we were able to login to Google Analytics and visited the "time lag" page (Home — > Conversions -> Multi-Channel Conversions -> Time Lag).   The time lag page showed us the following distribution of goals over time. This particular client made $12,800 this month with 46.88% of students paying for their online course within 24 hours of finding out about it! This is a dramatically different buying cycle than the "guess" that was presented by the client earlier. Take a look for yourself.     What about you? How long does it take students to enroll in your online course?

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST If you’re going to start an online coaching company you’re going to need a platform to offer your services on. You’re also going to need some type of framework to help you grade, assess, manage and administer the coaching process. A Learning Management System (LMS) or a Course Management System (CMS) helps you do just that. However, for the purpose of this podcast we’re going to call it a "Coaching Management System". In this podcast we’ll discus how coaches are successfully bringing their coaching companies online. No matter if you’re a life coach, professional coach, small business coach or executive coach, by offering your coaching services online you’re opening yourself up a massive online earning potential. In this podcast we’ll talk about how to setup two system. First, you’ll need the system to sell your eCoaching services on. Secondly, you’ll need a system to deliver your coaching services on. This will mean you’ll need a system that will allow you to integrate group chat, private 1 on 1 video chat, screen-sharing, collaborative documents and so on. Essentially, all of the tools you’ll need to interact with your client online. IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT: How to bring your coaching company online allowing you to overcome the time / space problem of "in-person" coaching. How online coaching opens you up to a global marketplace and what this means for your company’s revenue potential. How to stop exchanging time for money for your coaching services and streamline the coaching process using the power of the internet. How to increase your earning potential as an "coaching entrepreneur" by offering your services online rather than in the real world. And lastly, you’re going to learn about the technology required to bring your coaching company online. SHOW NOTES: THINGS WE MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE View Live Demo Best Learning Management System 2014 (or listen to the podcast) How An Email Newsletter Generated $3600 / Month More For Our Client Best Screencast Software (Coming Soon) Coaching Online Podcast Transcript  

I wrote my first non-fiction "how to" ebook about 10 years ago. After I wrote it, I quickly realized that I wanted more interactive elements. Essentially, I wanted to play more of an active role, holding my readers’ hands as they worked through the content. So I took the logical step of  transforming my ebook into an online course. I expanded my ebook content, offered podcasts, video tutorials, a private members only area, a grading and assessment area and much more. It was definitely a change for the better, but it wasn’t easy. Below you’ll find the 8 things that I learnt after I started my first online course company.   1. It was much more work than I thought   Writing an eBook was easy compared to creating an online course. The cost students pay to access online courses is usually much more expensive than an eBook and therefore students rightfully want to see additional value in the content. I was required to create video tutorials, buy new audio recording gear to create podcasts, learn coding to create a social community, hire coders to create grading tools and much more.   2. I wasn’t offering an online course… I was starting a company   I was doing more than just putting a course online. I was creating a complex system that would be able to handle the administrative tasks of running an online course and implementing marketing strategies to help me promote my course. It was so much more work than I originally thought. The business and administrative needs of my eCourse company ended up taking up a huge percentage of my time… which leads me to my next point.   3. Balancing student satisfaction and growth is hard   When I started my online course I wanted to make sure my students felt like their $200 course enrolment fee gave them access to a course that looked and felt like a $5000 course. I wanted there to be a moment when the student said to themselves "I can’t believe I only paid $200 for this course". I wanted them to be "wowed" by the content, the design, the layout and the interactive features. I knew it would take a pretty big investment in time on my part to get to that level. However, as the eCourse grew in popularity I found my time being pulled towards needing to deal with administrative duties (email, advertising, coding issues etc). When you’re first starting out it’s incredibly difficult to grow your course while at the same time keeping your current students happy. My advice to you is to create great value in your course before you offer it to your students. Make it as good as you can possibly make it before you open up the doors and let people enroll. Because once you open up the doors… you have a business to run.   4. There were many opportunities for growth that I didn’t know about   When I first started my online course, I just thought I was going to be offering my course online. What I didn’t realize is that my students were hungry for additional courses, more advanced courses and personalized one on one consulting. I transformed from a one product company to a multi product company. Not only did I offer additional educational courses, but I was able to offer a job board on my site where employers could pay to get access to my community as well as a social network where people could pay to promote their profiles. My newsletter even became so popular that I was able to sell advertising within it. As did my site’s blog. I didn’t plan or anticipate any of these revenue streams.   5. Focusing on learner objectives should become an obsession   Once I was able to stabilize the administrative side of my online course business I transferred my energies back to my students and I become obsessed with their educational achievements. I started asking myself questions like - What does implementing a different teaching technique have on student’s outcomes? What impact does course design have a student’s outcomes. I would test and test and test. I analyzed the data and measured the metrics while at the same time keeping my eye on the results that students were producing. If their projects didn’t meet my expectations I didn’t see that as their fault. I saw it as my fault. Why was my teaching not getting through to them? What wasn’t clear? Was my course content unfocused? What was I doing wrong?   I would go back to the drawing board and redesign the course and assignments until I got outcomes from the students that I was impressed with.   6. You don’t have to be a licensed teacher to be a great teacher   When I started my course I wasn’t a trained "teacher". I was a subject matter expert. I liked teaching and I found it came natural to me, but I didn’t know much about pedagogies. I think this worked in my favor because I became obsessed with finding new ways to teach. This lead me down so many interesting paths. I was learning about outcomes based learning, democratic teaching, designing e-learning environments focused on individual student goals and so much more. The wold of education is fascinating and I could use my own students as test subjects to find out what teaching methods work for them and which ones don’t.   7. Building a thriving student community is hard   On an individual level I become very happy with my students’ individual goals. But I wanted more. I wanted to build a thriving community of learners who share similar passions. I didn’t just want their relationship to be with me (their teacher). I wanted them to build relationships with each other. Achieving this was very difficult. It required that I spend a lot of time getting to know each student and then looking for connections within my community of students to try to link people together. I found myself needing to be the one to initiate discussion all the time. Especially when I was first staring out. However, this investment in time paid off in the end, because many of the students followed my lead and slowly but surely they started to participate in the community. They formed their own connections and didn’t rely on me as much any longer.   8. I didn’t know I could earn so much   Years have passed since I first started my first online course. I remember when I first started out my goal was to make $500 / week running my course part time (I had a full time job at the time that I didn’t want to leave). I also thought my target market was pretty small. I didn’t expect to become rich from the venture that’s for sure. I just loved the topic and the opportunity to share my views with others interested in the same areas as me.   However, my efforts led to growth.  Slowly but surely my hard work brought in additional income. My $500 / week goal was hit and then I pretty quickly jumped to $1000 / week. Now my eCourse makes upwards of $4000 / week. It wasn’t easy, but I did it, and it continues to grow to this day. I never would have expected in a millions years for my course to get that big. But it did! So if you’re just starting out… enjoy the ride and focus on your learners outcomes!  

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST Are you selling courses online? If so, did you enter into the market with the assumption that you need to scout for students and teach them for a pre-determined amount of time before allowing them to complete your course and move onto the next stage in their lives or career?   If you use this educational framework you’re not alone, many course sellers do. It is, after all, the way most of us were taught. Therefore, it’s not surprising to find out that it’s the way most of us teach.   But it’s time to question this approach. Is this the best approach for your online education company’s needs? Is this the best approach for your students’ needs? Or do you just use this educational framework because it’s what you’re familiar with?  In this podcast we address this issue with author and entrepreneur Jeff Cobb who has nearly two decades of experience in learning technology. He challenges the "1 time transactional approach" to education and asks online educators to explore ways to build stronger and ongoing relationships with their students that meet their needs as lifelong learners.   IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT: Lifelong learning and what the "other 50 years" are. Why thinking about online education as a one time educational transaction may be hurting your online education company. Why schools are slow to adopt lifelong learning initiatives. New content creation challenges for lifelong educators. The link between freelancing, lifelong learning and online education. Why lifelong learning makes educational institutions more accountable to student outcomes.   SHOW NOTES: THINGS WE MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Jeff Cobb’s "Leading The Learning Revolution" Website Buy Leading the Learning Revolution on Amazon  

In a recent blog post we talked about how gamifiying a client’s educational site led to a 260% increase in student activity. However, in that case study we mentioned that it was something else, not gamification, that led to the biggest increases in student participation… and that was something much less trendy and much less technologically advanced. It was simple "proactive" rather than "reactive" teacher/student communication.   With proactive communication the responsibility of initiating contact with a student in an online learning environment falls on the shoulders of the teacher (or learning institution). With, reactive communication on the other hand, the teacher will primarily only respond to student initiated comments or questions.   After reading the book "Motivating and Retaining Online Students: Research-Based Strategies That Work" by Rosemary M. Lehman (Ph.D) we decide to test the impact that implementing a proactive rather than reactive communication strategy would have on overall student engagement results. But first we needed to find a client who was ONLY using reactive communication with their online student population.   One of our clients volunteered for this experiment. They told us that "In the past we put a lot of the responsibility of the community in the students’ hands. However, we didn’t realize that we didn’t really give our students much incentive to be part of that community. We just gave them the platform and walked away. The community existed as a good idea in an abstract sense [to us] but it never really started to take off until we made it our responsibility and not our students".   So we got to work on this clients site and we set up a system of communication where they became a much more active voice in their own online community. They posted questions, started conversations, created case studies and introduced students to each other who had similar interests. The result? A 1200% increase in student participation!  

Academy Of Mine recently chatted with Michael Linsin (see his website) about his book "The Classroom Management Secret". It’s a book dedicated to helping teachers working in a bricks and mortar setting effectively manage their classrooms. However, we thought it would be interesting to chat with Michael about how some of the concepts within his book translate into the world of online education. How does classroom management be integrated into your course design, Learning Management System (LMS) and your strategy as an online teacher?  You can find our interview with him below. Enjoy! THE INTERVIEW Hello Michael and thanks for chatting with us and our education blog readers today about your experience as a teacher. You talk about many things in your book but let’s start by talking about classroom organization. You mention that in a bricks and mortar setting that the classroom environment should "match your call for excellence". How do you think this could translate in the online classroom or online learning environment? Obviously, online educators don’t have the problem of stacked boxes and messy desks. But what are some of the things that online teachers can do to create a well organized learning environment? In many important ways an online teacher sets the tone for the class by how well they communicate what specifically students need to do. This is a primary thought and concern for online students. They want to know what the requirements are, from meeting times and reading assignments to homework and tests. A teacher who lays it all out from the very beginning, in a clear and detailed way, communicates their care and concern for their students—letting them know through their actions that they are their number one priority. This positive first impression relaxes students and frees them to focus on learning. When students can see and experience upfront that the teacher isn’t just going through the motions, but cares about them and their success, they’re compelled to give more in return. You also mention that in a bricks and mortar setting it’s important for a teacher to be present, not only in formal classroom settings, but also in "informal settings" such as the hallway or other gathering places where students meet. Can you explain the importance of this? What’s accomplished by meeting students in these informal settings? Can you speak specifically about how this might apply to adult learners in an online environment as well? Building relationships with students through your likeability and willingness to interact outside of class, and with no strings attached, provides a traditional-school teacher with tremendous influence to both curb misbehavior and spark greater motivation for learning. In an online setting, although you may never meet your students in person, your likeability is still important. You can still build a level of rapport through your humor, your smile (if Skyping), and your calm, organized presence. Your personality alone can improve interest, motivation, and a better learning experience for your students. Combating boredom is something most teachers need to think about (in both the online an offline worlds). You mention that students have four desires: The desire for adventure, humor, challenge and fascination. How could you see these translating online? If you’re Skyping a lecture or discussion, then it translates perfectly. Including these elements will cause students to become more emotionally invested in their learning. It will cause them to participate more, pay closer attention, and dig deeper into the subject area. In other words, your class will become not just another hoop to jump through, but rather something they immerse themselves in so deeply that their final grade takes a backseat. They learn for the sake of learning, because they’d rather do that than watch their favorite television program. When you can make your class something your students look forward to, something they’ll remember years later, everything else comes much easier. The last question I want to ask you about today is praise. I really like when you state in your book that "every time you praise you student for something that didn’t involve hard work or a certain mental toughness to accomplish, a sliver of their dignity is taken from them. As if a sinister voice whispers, "piisst! Hey, you in the third row. Yeah, you with the smiley face sticker. You know you didn’t really earn it, don’t you? Your teacher just gave it to you because average is all you’re capable of." You mention that teachers need to keep their eyes peeled for "true accomplishments". Once those genuine accomplishments are identified what things can you do to acknowledge the accomplishment and how can this translate online? In a traditional school environment it can be anything from a head nod to a note folded over and taped to a student’s desk. As long as the gesture is genuine and based on true accomplishment, there are any number of ways to praise students. Generally, though, private and subtle moments of acknowledgement tend to be more effective and more meaningful than the public, over-the-top variety. An online course shouldn’t in any way limit a teacher’s ability to point out exceptional work. It may take a bit more creativity, but it’s important enough to find a way. It’s one of the primary ways we give feedback, letting students know they’re on the right track and giving them a jolt of energy and confidence to push their work to levels they didn’t know they were capable of. Thank you for taking the time to chat with us today Michael. To our blog readers if you’d like to learn more about Michael’s book "The Classroom Management Secret" you can do so by reading more about the book on Amazon here. 

Are you interested in seeing how a site running on the WordPress platform can be transformed into a powerful Learning Management System? Well we hope that you are because that’s what we want to show you today. WHY CHOOSE WORDPRESS TO HOST YOUR LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM? One of the biggest advantages to running your Learning Management System off a WordPress install is that WordPress is open source software developed by a passionate community of coders. But it’s not just the open source software itself which makes it valuable, but it’s also about all of the amazing theme and plugin developers that are designing programs to fit within the WordPress framework. So compared to other Learning Management Systems, WordPress gives you the potential of getting much more than just a powerful open source option… you get a whole host of tools including marketing plugins to help you sell your course online, social plugins to keep your students involved and beautiful website themes to impress your eCourse site visitors. And best of all new educational WordPress plugins are being developed all of the time to meet growing demand. So you don’t have to worry about the software going out of date (or looking out of date). There are other non-WordPress open source software options available on the market, and many of them are quite powerful, but from a design standpoint they leave a lot to be desired. The beautiful thing about WordPress is that it’s a platform that has a community surrounding it that’s not only interested in the power of the platform… but also in the look of the platform. It’s really a win-win for both teachers and students. A WALKTHROUGH OF A WORDPRESS LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM IN ACTION Academy Of Mine actually runs our clients’ site off of a modified version of the WordPress platform. We also install many advanced plugins like Scribe (for content marketing), Authority Labs (for search ranking tracking), CometChat (for video chat), WP Symposium (for social widgets) and thousands of dollars worth of WooThemes extensions and themes. These licenses normally cost people hundreds of dollars each month. However, because we have developer licenses for these companies (which cost us a lot of money) we can integrate these WordPress plugins into our clients’ Learning Management Systems at a major discount. If you’re interested in seeing a working copy of a WordPress Install setup as an LMS please check out our working demo here.