Prefer a Transcript? Joshua Millage: Hello everyone. We are back, and as you can see, this is three of us on a bench here in Montana. It’s a little bit different format than our normal LMS cast episodes with the side-by-side video, because I’m usually in California, and Chris here is here on his beautiful farm in Montana, but today we’re going to switch it up because we’re at an off site and we thought we have a little bit of fun, and bring in our lead developer here, Mark Nelson, who is going to help us answer a few questions about WordPress LMS themes. So, Chris, why don’t you tell us a little bit about that and then we’ll just extract all of Mark’s expertise for the audience. Chris: So, when you build a WordPress Howard learning management system, one of the first things you start Googling is WordPress LMS theme, WordPress LMS plugin, and we decided with our learning management system plugin, LifterLMS, to go the plugin route. Maybe we can start there. Why are we using a plugin instead of a theme? Mark: Well, the main reason that we went with a plugin because, as you’ve seen, there’s a handful of LMS’s out there that are themes, and some that are plugins. WordPress, as a foundation, is really set as kind of a foundational layer that is you have plugins and you have themes, and there really is no difference, as far as WordPress is concerned, except for just to keep things organized. Plugins usually provide functionality. Themes provide design, and so since the LMS plugin is purely functionality driven, it’s a plugin, and so there’s kind of a line that we try to fit. Chris: So, the big idea here is I have been messing around in WordPress for years, and some themes come with functionality, like we mentioned earlier in our pre-chat, was things like slide shows, and in your mind a clean theme is just going to be design, and then you go and grab plugins for when the functionality is needed. Mark: Absolutely, and it’s not that the theme can’t have any functionality to it, but the functionality really needs to be driven towards the design and the layout of the site. So, I think a good example would be something like the Canvas theme by WooThemes that provides all types of functionality as far as designing and styling the site, and laying it out, as far as content. Chris: Without coding. Mark: Without coding, and it also doesn’t cross the line as far as providing too much in the way that plugins can provide. So, when you talk about things like catching, and SEO, and different things like that, you want to be able use plugins to provide that functionality, and it keeps things clean. It keeps a lot of conflicts from happening when you do that. It gives you a lot more functionality because what you really want to do is, ideally, you want to have a site with all this functionality built into it that you can quickly just grab a new theme, add a new theme to it, and still maintain the functionality, and just change the layout and design. Chris: That’s really cool. So, with the LifterLMS plugin, what we say is that it works with any well coded WordPress theme, and we kind of want to impact that a little bit and talk about what that means, and how to select a theme, but as a starting point what we’re saying here is it’ll work with any good theme. Pick a good theme that works for you, in terms of design and layout, and it’s responsive behavior on a mobile device, or iPad, or whatever. That’s really what the theme is for, but in terms of picking a well coded theme, there’s a couple of things you want to avoid. Number one is one of the other WordPress learning management system themes. If you install the LifterLMS plugin, it can create conflicts because they’re both trying to do the same thing, or similar things. Can you talk about that a little bit, Mark? Mark: Yeah, so if you look at some of the elements plugin themes, what they’ve done is they either have themes built into them that provide some … or plugins built into them that provide some functionality, or they’ve gone to the point of just including a bunch of different functionality into the theme, and when our plugin gets installed, and we have courses, and lessons, and sections, and quizzes, and your theme also has courses, lessons, sections, and quizzes, there’s obviously a conflict there. Besides that, you have the issue of just having a constant nightmare of trying to organize that, so I think that’s a big point. Chris: Another thing, when we say well coded WordPress theme, recently we were experimenting with the theme that was popular about three or four years ago called Thesis, and we ran into some trouble with the LifterLMS plugin on that theme. It still worked, but maybe you could tell us why it didn’t work out with the Thesis theme, which I want to caution you about if you’re selecting a theme to not pick that one for LifterLMS, but what happened? Mark: Right, and it’s not that necessarily Thesis is written badly at all, in any way, but what Thesis has done is they’ve I guess you would say hijacked the [templating 00:05:04] system of WordPress to provide their own templating functionality, which is fantastic for case scenarios, but what it does for plugins like ours, plugins like WooCommerce, and any other plugins that build templating features in order to provide things like products, or courses. It doesn’t … It just completely hijacks it so it won’t work at all out the gate. It requires an extension to be built in order to replicate those templates again in the [theme mix 00:05:30] theme. Chris: Well, let’s wrap it up and leave people with some specific ideas of where to go to find a good WordPress theme that would work with the LifterLMS plugin. All of us have worked with a lot of different WordPress themes, and so far in our experimentation with LifterLMS, some of the major players like WooThemes, and we mentioned the Canvas theme but Woo has a lot of themes. Another one is the StudioPress. Those themes which are built … are themes, are child themes built on top of the Genesis framework. We’ve done some testing there, and those look very beautiful, but you can also go out to ThemeForest, or other themes, and try things out and just see how it goes, but look for themes that aren’t trying to do too much stuff that a plugin should do. Look for good design, but not necessarily lots of extra functionality coming from the theme itself. That’s really what plugins are for, and … Mark: Can you give an example of what that looks like, Chris? Like, what’s a theme that’s doing a lot of plugin things that you think would conflict with what we’ve built, or something that people should be cautious of? Chris: Well, I would say one thing we mentioned is sometimes sliders that are built into themes can be a start to hijack the WordPress core. We call it custom post types. If there’s a lot of like really fancy stuff the theme is trying to do in terms of custom post types, it may be an indicator that, "Oh, I might not want to go that one," so that’s something to be cautious of. Another thing is when you install WordPress, as you know, it comes with the 2012, 2013, 2014 theme. Those are great themes if you’re looking for a free theme and just want to learn the plugin, and all the functionality it has. I actually recommend 2012 as the most simple looking theme that comes with the WordPress install that’s one hundred percent going to work in every way, so that’s a good place to start and it’s also free. Mark: Yeah, I’m a huge fan of the Genesis framework. I think they’ve just … They’ve done an amazing way of building the child themes, so you have this huge selection of all these great themes with all this awesome functionality, and the framework itself is just really well built and it’s built around the WordPress core so that it doesn’t hijack anything there. Yeah, WooThemes is another great one. I think you just want to be cautious of themes that just look too good, have too much functionality. A lot of theme designers today really, to sell the theme, add a lot of slide shows and special widgets, and a lot of extra functionality in order to really make the theme look good, but in the end it ends up causing you more trouble. Ideally, what you want is something that looks good, and is easy to style, and design yourself without a developer, and if you want slide shows, if you want extra widgets, if you want social sharing, you can get free plugins or you can purchase plugins to get that functionality. That way you’re not tied to a theme, because what you don’t want to happen is two or three years down the road, end up wanting to change the design of your site, which happens every three years or so anyway. Now your locked into this theme because all the functionality that you have built into your system comes from your theme, and you’re either forced into buying another theme from the same provider, or having to completely redo the system from scratch. Chris: So, if you have a question of like will this theme work, go ahead and send an email to Chris at Lifter@LMS.com, and I also want to say that when you buy or purchase LifterLMS, you also get access to our support forum. So, we’re going to have discussions there where you can really help find the best theme for your business, or your education application. So, it’s just one of the perks of joining the LifterLMS community so that you have that community, and people have tried different things, and you can really access the ideas and what has happened for other people trying to do the same thing you are. Feel free to email me directly at Chris@LifterLMS.com. Joshua Millage: Yeah, and if you have been watching the video and you feel like me, sitting between these two geniuses, with some extra questions, just feel free to email any of us here @LifterLMS. It’s Chris@LifterLMS, Josh@LifterLMS, Mark@LifterLMS, and we will get back to you as soon as possible. Other than that, we will see you next episode. The post Picking the Right WordPress LMS Theme appeared first on LMScast.

I've just finished an online course by Google: basics for teaching, where usage of Google apps has been taught for the teaching practice. Even if the course’s been really basic I’ve had the chance to get some more new ideas about its application. For the final work each participant has had to create a document explaining Apps’ usage experience.As you could find it of interest, here you can check it and comment whatever you want, the debate is open:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N7C_99mfDc-ydIk8VkphHtXf4hHtnEEhHY2BF0Zk8f0/edit

It has been 30 days since I joined the group 30 Day Blog Challenge. I scheduled this post in my editorial calendar to remind me to check in on how I did with the challenge. Truth is I am still doin… Source: www.hotlunchtray.com See on Scoop.it - InformationCommunication (ICT)

Prefer to read a transcript on Preselling? chris badgett: Hello everyone, we’re back with another episode of LMS Cast, I’m Joshua Millage and I’m joined here with this beautiful gentleman Christopher Badgett, and today we’re going to be talking about some marketing techniques and some ways of getting your course in front of as many students as possible. I’m going to start this off by asking Chris, you know Chris, I’m curious. You’ve launched a lot of courses over the past few years. What are some of the things that you’ve seen people run into when they launch the course in terms of what are some of the difficulties? joshua millage: Well for me and many of the clients I’ve worked with who are creating learning management systems and selling online courses, just the act of getting your learning management system together is a project in and of itself, but then what happens is people can get bogged down with actually creating their course. There’s an interesting way to move past that and also to test the market to make sure people are interested and willing to spend money on the course idea you have. That’s just called pre-selling. chris badgett: I’m familiar with pre-selling a little bit. Obviously it’s selling something before you launch it, but I think your definition of pre-selling is a little bit different. What does that involved? joshua millage: If you build an online course website and a learning management system, to really launch and get paying customers in the door, it’s good to validate your idea by putting a sales page up or putting your course offer out there. There’s a couple different ways to approach it. One is to come up with a course idea, publish it, put a price tag on it which can either be one time or recurring monthly revenue, and Lifter LMS plug-in is set up to eaisily be able to do either one of those options right out of the gate. You can put your course out there and have the first lesson ready, or even sell it but the course doesn’t officially start until some pre-defined date in the future. Another interesting thing you can do with learning management system like with Lifter LMS is set up drip content so  maybe you have one, two or three lessons in the clip, and then they’re designed to drip out once a week and then lesson 4, 5, 6, 7 and so on, you haven’t even created yet. That’s what I mean by pre-selling, and you can do it that way or you can be totally open about it. Either way is fine, but be totally open about the fact that you haven’t finished creating the course, and that if you buy now, you’re going to get some kind of early bird discount in exchange for their trust in you to create the course as you move forward with your students. chris badgett: There’s a really brilliant marketer out there named Clay Collins, who a while back, before he started his company Weed Pages, he was in the info product space and he created a product called the interactive offer. It was a method of actually going to a list that you had already created, that was kind of the key kicker. You had to have a list already built, but it was a way of engaging them to see if there was any demand for a product idea, and then selling it in such a way that was very honest and transparent but then also gave them time to create the product. I think his formula was there was the early adopter’s narrative, which was this idea that’s pervasive in western culture in particular, which is if you get in now, then you’re going to win. It’s the idea of an early investment in say a stock or a bond. We instinctively know that if we can hit the right type of company or right opportunity early, we’re going to be better off than the person who comes down the line. There’s an aspect of that, which in the case of a course would be if you sign up now, it’s not totally created but because you’re taking a risk here, I’m going to give you more of my time one on one, something like that. You give someone a benefit there. There’s the aspect of scarcity, which is I’m only going to allow 50 students in, or 100 students or 10 students. You make sure that there’s a small piece of the pie available for that first group. It’s early adopter’s narrative, scarcity, and then there was one other, I’m blanking on it. Essentially those are the two main pieces of the puzzle, which is let me engage with you because you’re engaging with me, and there’s only a limited amount of a space or time. Actually, these are things that we’re looking at doing with the Lifter LMS plug in. The difference with us is we actually do have a full blown plug in available. We’re not selling it and then creating it. It is fully created. We are limiting the amount of time the cart will be open from October 30th to maybe the 4th or 5th, we haven’t really decided, but we’re trying to capture the most engaged group because we want to engage with them over the course of the next few months up until our full blown launch, which is going to be coming up at the beginning of the year. The reason we’re doing that is we want to make sure we have a really focused group of people that give us good feedback, and that we’re building the product in the direction that adds value to their lives. We’re even adopting this mentality. I think it’s really healthy. I think there’s some mindset things that people have to get over because I’ve worked with people who are like, well I just don’t feel like I’m being honest if I pre-sell. That’s the thing though, you need to be honest in your pre-sell. You need to be honest about a) here’s the idea for the course that I have. It’s not fully flushed out but I have the credentials, I’m a subject matter expert and I can speak to this content and I want to see if any of you are available or interested in taking this course. I think that’s the thing, you have to know what you’re going to be selling. So many people in the internet marketing world that you and I have been a part of for so long sell something like hey, I’m going to teach you about facebook marketing. In reality they’re really good salesmen but they really don’t know anything about facebook marketing. That’s kind of given this whole theory about pre-selling a really bad idea. The colleges and universities do this all the time too. Back when I was at Isuzu Pacific University, in my senior year we created an MBA program, I didn’t actually create the course content, but I managed the logistics. It was a 15 month MBA that went all around the world, and really we pre-sold it in the sense that we wanted to make sure we could get 10 people signed up before we put a bunch of investment in making sure we had all the locations for us to travel and setting up the tickets and all of that. We had more demand than that and we executed the strategy over the course of that 3-month summer, got everything ready and then things started in the fall. I think it’s a good idea that I would encourage all of our listeners to consider when they’re launching their businesses. I’m sure they have core products out there that they’ll automatically be able to put in a system like Lifter LMS, but I think pre-selling, especially if you have a captive audience already is a great way to mitigate risk and also create a really stellar product because you’re getting feedback on the front end instead of releasing it from the back. It’s really cool. joshua millage: I think that that interactive piece is really amazing and important because we has entrepreneurs and educators, we may think we know exactly what people need to learn and how they need to learn, but by being interactive and being more agile in our approach to developing courses and taking that feedback early on in the journey, we can course correct and really give the market what it needs and adapt to the learning styles that seem to get the most impact and engagement from the customer or student. chris badgett: That’s huge. We need to do a whole other episode on the dangers of arrogance in education, but I think assuming that you know everything that a student wants to learn without getting any interaction from them is a disaster. I think that’s why we’re seeing such a resurgence in certain types of education, business education in particular. You go to college and they’re going to tell you what they think you need to learn. In reality, you and I both know we’ve been fighting in the trenches here for 4 or 5 years and business has changed a lot from the industrial revolution of the last century. I think that the professors need to hear from us about what we’re experiencing and then lend their wisdom and expertise to it. It’s a relationship. It goes both ways. We need everyone. The students need the teachers, the teachers need the students and we need to open up those communication channels. With a system like Lifter LMS, it’s really easy to do that. I’m excited to get it out there for everyone, and hopefully with this little tidbit of knowledge, we get some stories about proofs up. joshua millage: Absolutely. Just to close it out, if you want to be a part of our interactive offer with Lifter LMS plug in, we want you to know how much we value this group of early adopters and how much we’re listening to what you want and what you need, and you know we’re experiencing what it’s like to launch version one of something, but we’re not going away. This is a marathon, and that early adopter feedback is going to be really important to us and we value your opinion. chris badgett: Let me do a couple of shout outs. I want to give a shout out to Peter, who sent us a couple emails, thank you Peter. John, who sent me a couple emails, so I’m really excited about the people who are listening to this content and reaching out and engaging. It helps us think about things. That’s what we want to do. We want to make sure that we’re hearing about the things that you want to know. We have a lot of knowledge between our team, and we need to know what you want to know first, second, third and fourth. When you engage with us it just makes this community much more robust. I’m excited, so thank you for everyone who’s reached out to us. You can reach Chris at [chris@lmstask.com  00:10:03] and I’m excited. We’re ready to spread more good news about online education. Until next time, we’ll see you later. The post How to Presell a Online Course (so you know what to teach) appeared first on LMScast.

Internet Safety Cheat Sheet For Digital Media Use In Schools Source: www.teachthought.com See on Scoop.it - FootprintDigital

Prefer to read "how to price your online course"? Joshua Millage: Hello everyone.  We are back with another episode of LMS Cast.  I am Joshua Millage and this is Christopher Badgett.  Today we are talking about pricing and when it is important to choose a single price option over a reoccurring price option.  These are questions that make my head spin, Chris.  Where do we start with all of this? Chris Badgett: I think to get this conversation going we can talk about the Lifter LMS plugin that we’ve created in that.  If you use the built-in course cart, the shopping cart that comes with the plugin, no third-party plugin required, you have to assign a course to either have a one-time payment or have a recurring payment.  With our plugin you can also integrate it with WooCommerce if you want to use their card system and all their extensions which include a recurring payment extension called subscriptions, which is a great plugin for their system. Anyways, that’s the technology side but before all that is we have to have this conversation about I’m going to sell a course.  Do I want to charge a one-time fee or put it on a recurring monthly revenue?  That’s a big decision.  Let’s talk about that in terms of how big should the price be, like if you were to think about the same course as one-time payment versus recurring.  Then let’s talk about if we are going to do recurring, how do we continually add values to justify that monthly or weekly or yearly bill that product receive. Joshua Millage: I want to start off in terms of single versus reoccurring payment.  I think the big question is the business model behind it and reoccurring revenue means reoccurring value.  If you look at the Software as a Service base, so SaaS as it’s called, that idea is that people paying monthly like for salesforce.com or Infusionsoft [inaudible 02:06] and the reason that they’re paying monthly is that as the product matures it’s going to get better and new features are going to be added in.  The value is increasing because you’re paying more money. It’s also good for the business because it will have some predict revenue and all these other things and it situates them to improve on that.  The traditional model is you sell Windows 98 and you got to pay hundreds of dollar to go to XP and hundreds of dollars to go to the next to the next the next.  That doesn’t always work.  You’re waiting a year to get a bunch of upgrades all at once where it’s much easier to just go every couple of weeks get another few features and things. That’s like the software side of it.  I think when you apply that methodology to courses how are you going to be engaging your customer base.  Are you going to have a system set up so that you can maybe do something like weekly people hang out or foster community behind the product?  That I think justifies the reoccurring fee or maybe just continue adding content. Some of the people that we work with in the legal realm the reason that they have reoccurring revenues that loss or waste changing so they guarantee that they’re always going to be up on the new latest, greatest law for IRAs or something like that and so therefore that justifies the reoccurring because they have to constantly do work to make sure that they are upon it. In think if your selling a static like here’s an end-to-end product and I’m just going to put it out there, it’s going to be harder to justify that reoccurring fee.  It’s going to be much easier to just do a straight ups and low cost. Chris Badgett: There is a middle ground there.  Let’s say you do have an end-to-end solution but you don’t really have value that continues after they’ve gone through the program.  What you can do though is if you have 1000-dollar course that’s a lot of money for somebody to pay, but you could instead think about using that recurring thing just to lower the barrier, the entry to get people into your course so instead you could do a 2-payment options, 1,000 dollars or 100 dollars a month for 12 months or something like that. Or just not even do the one-time pricing but put an end to that reoccurring payment so that the value come sure this period and you’re done.  You don’t owe anymore money. Joshua Millage: That’s good.  When it comes to pricing, Chris, like 100-dollar course or it’s 1,000-dollar course, 2,000, how do you think about those different levels of pricing in a single format as well as reoccurring model? Chris Badgett: Pricing is a huge topic but pricing is also really subjective.  If you ask a real estate agent like, "How much is this house worth?"  Some will say, "This house is worth, what, people are willing to buy on it."  They’re dodging the question because a lot of value is perceived.  It’s in the head of the prospect. Then there’s things like actual value like if you … your learning management system and your online course maybe it includes a live event in the price, you know you have a certain amount of overhead, cost to put on the event and host the event, everything so there’s value.  That’s like more tangible hard value. A lot of online courses are purely digital in nature so we get more into perceived value space but at the same time if you’re really talented expert in marketing and sales, if you were to put on a course about how to market your Learning Management System or just market your business, that comes from your entire life of experience and your education, everything which is valuable. One way to think about it is what would it cost for me to have a one on one with you to teach me all that stuff.  Maybe we’ll do surprise a little bit because it’s an online format, but that’s another way to arrive that like what the pricings worth.  Obviously, if you ever have any one-on-one interaction either in a group of hangout, in person or whatever, that should substantiates a higher value. If your course is 100 percent passive in nature, it may be worth less.  With the Lifter LMS plugin if you use a certificate functionality, if you’re actually giving somebody a certificate that’s credited by something or allows them to fill continuing education requirements, that course is valuable and maybe be mandatory if the person has to continually submit these hours. Pricing and value is a really big conversation.  You can also use the interactive approach in terms of just asking your market, how much would you be willing to pay for me to teach you online how to do X.  That’s another way to do it. Joshua Millage: The thing I would want to add is that I think that most people, north to 90 percent of people are going to default on undervaluing themselves.  My dad for better or for worse so he send triple what you think you worth and then probably be close to the markets willing to pay.  A lot of that just comes from self-image, "It couldn’t be worth that much money," and there’s this resistance for asking for more money. I want to say that not that we need to be profiteers or price mongers and just charging a lot of money.  We do want to find that happy medium of what’s the value and what its worth.  I think naturally because people are naturally resistant to sales, they often undervalue themselves.  One of the things too there’s an old saying that says, "Where money goes, focus flows," and that’s definitely true. The higher that someone … The higher the price of the course you’re going to get … you probably get less students but much more engaged students, too.  That is that side of the pricing strategy that’s important to think about. A lot of people go and they sell 19-dollar course and then they wonder why no one ever took it and there was an impulse why.  It really depends.  Maybe that is new strategies just a volume, volume, volume or maybe you’re like, "I don’t want volume so much as just starting the community."  I think it’s hard to start a really robust community at the lower dollar points in my experience, because people just don’t take it seriously. Colleges as a great example of that, a lot of people take college pretty seriously but they’re also paying a lot of money.  That’s one thing to remember but I would say that when people are thinking about their prices, leaning to the idea of having a premium price model or at least having premium price options because I think you’ll be surprised to see who shows up in those [defined locals 09:19]. Chris Badgett: Absolutely. Joshua Millage: Cool.  I think that’s a good nugget on price and pricing.  I don’t know if we’re taking our medicine on this or not because I think our Lifter LMS is priced very, very reasonably at 97 dollars for a single set license and 297 from multi-set license.  That probably won’t hold forever.  That’s for this first group of people that get them on October 30th and then we’re going to shut the door shortly after that and open it back up January 1st.  I don’t know what we’re going to try then really.  We’re going to reevaluate what value we’re providing. One of these things when we talk about getting a little under the hood of our pricing strategy is we want to make this really easy purchase for a lot of people and we want to limit the amount of time it’s being sold to capture the highest engaged people, the people that are paying attention to the content we’re putting out there, the people that want to improve online education and the people that will give us feedback so that we can rapidly improve this product and make it evaluation more valuable than when it launches on the 30th. If you’re interested in that, you can learn more at lifterLMS.com.  Just enter in your email and you’ll be taken to the first set of videos that we’ve produced on the functionality of the plugin and how it can really change the way that you distribute and engage with your students.  We’re excited about that.  Again, if you have any questions, you can always reach me at joshua@lmscast.com and this is Chris at lms.com. Chris Badgett: One more thing.  If you purchase the plugin, one of the things of value that you get is access is to our support forum, but it’s also a community.  If you want to put an idea up on the private support forum about how much should I charge or for my course it’s about X, Y and Z, this … We’re building a community here of people who are all trying to do this online education thing and build a business around it if you’re outside of the nonprofit sector. Anyways, the community is here for you.  You can see what other people are doing, what they’re charging, they’re pricing structures and so on.  Feel free to reach out to us directly if you just want to run an idea by us or anything like that for your pricing or fixed price versus recurring revenue. Joshua Millage: Right on.  All right.  Until next time, we’ll see you then. The post How to Price Your Online Course appeared first on LMScast.

Would you rather read how to create a strategy for your online course? Joshua: Hello everyone we’re back with another episode of LMS Cast. I’m Joshua Millage and I’m joined once again with my very [mountainous mountain man 0:00:09] friend here Christopher Badgett. Today we’re talking high level strategy but I think this is really, really important when you’re thinking about building a course because well, because strategy informs everything else. We’re going to be talking about Blue Ocean Strategy versus dealing with things in a Red Ocean so Chris what is the fundamental idea? What is that even mean blue ocean versus red ocean? Chris: Well it comes down to strategy like you said in positioning your business your course, your product your offer to the world. A blue ocean is wide open it’s like you’re the only one out there you’re essentially creating a category, you’re offering something that’s truly unique. The red ocean is competitive market where if I were to think the context of online courses I would say a competitive market would be how to do internet marketing. It’s very competitive but a blue ocean example of that would be some very specialized new competitive or non competitive market where you ca just rise up and create a name for yourself as a leader and gave that what they say is the first mover advantage. Joshua: Right and this is a concept that goes back to a book that was written I believed in the late 90’s or early 2000 it’s called the Blue Ocean Strategy and essentially what the analogy that is being used here is that you don’t want to participate or you want to avoid participating in a ocean that is red where it is like sharks are eating each other and eating things and it’s all bloody to it’s competition versus a blue ocean which is like you said wide open and there’s not a lot of competition. But some of that comes back to language and positioning messaging, so one of the most incredible books I’ve ever read I think I have it … It’s somewhere around here. It’s a book called Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz. It’s a book that’s like it’s about two hundred dollars, two hundred fifty dollars if you’re going to buy it now it’s been out of print but it’s the most phenomenal book for one copy writing but really this idea of positioning and one of the key ideas in the book is one of market intelligence and so as the market matures the messaging in the market become it has to become different. The example he is because this book was really like I think in the 1960’s or so. He talks bout cigarettes so it used to be cigarette companies come out and it’s like we have the best cigarettes when the market is really new that headline could work like we have the best cigarettes. Then as time goes on the market gets more mature, more competition comes in to the market we have to position themselves differently. Now its cigarettes with toasted tobacco and filters, like what the heck is toasted tobacco? I don’t know it’s like the language changes and then the market gets more mature and now we have Virginia Slims [which had it told 0:03:17] the female demographic. As the market matures again so they’re constantly positioning and current trying to create these new pockets this new opportunities in the market that already heavily kind of bloodied with competition and I think that happens everywhere you see it all the time. The cell phone market was absolutely saturated but Apple came in and just changed everything, they had a new message new opportunities. I remember when Steve Jobs gave that speech he said today we’re releasing a revolutionary, new internet device a phone and a personal I think he said like a personal productivity device too or something like that or like a internet reader. Then he’s like he said like three or four times he’s like by the way it’s all one device and he’s like oh my gosh because up into that point you had your phone, we had like a little like compile at internet tablet, these things are working bonds he created a whole new market by putting them together and doing something different. My question to you Chris is how do you do this with education courses? Chris: Well let’s have a fun little experiment here and give me an industry or type of skill and we can do a competitive version and a blue ocean version. Joshua: Okay well let’s do one and I think let’s do gardening. Chris: Gardening, all right easy for me. Joshua: I want to say easy yeah. Chris: Because I have a learning management system my own gardening so I’m kind of familiar with pace. Joshua: Right, but I want to talk about gardening too not because you are a domain expert in this and you and your wife have a phenomenal course on organic gardening. I also think that for the untrained ear like myself I just think gardening. I don’t know about all these other things and I was just getting to know you I don’t know about Pharma culture and organic gardening all these things but to me it’s just gardening. I look at it from my perspective it’s like I don’t want to get involved there, there’s too much competition. How I would I position myself differently? Chris: Well let me just start it off just kind of go Macro in high level and say that sometimes a blue ocean strategy is better and sometimes entering a competitive market is better and all that really comes down to as a blue ocean can be harder to pull off, and it takes great marketing and positioning and your offer really needs a resonate. It needs to have what we called product market fit, if you go into a proven market you just … It’s going to be the ocean is going to be red the model is kind of improving and now you just have to position yourself a little differently as why you’re better competitor to these other offers or your still in the same category. For organic gardening it falls to create an educational course about a beginners guide to organic gardening that would be a very competitive market, very red ocean, there’s a lot of books and courses in person online about how to get started with organic gardening. If I wanted to take more blue ocean strategy approach I will create a course that’s very specific and in some ways like you mentioned the new Steve Job’s example combine a bunch of elements that people already understand into like one product. That course would be how to turn your regular lawn into a food forest in one year? With Pharma culture techniques or something like that, that was so targeted and so specific that there’s really not that much competition out there for in that nature of Pharma culture and also with the food forest focused. Joshua: Right. Chris: Which is an organic gardening that doesn’t exist just on the ground in the way we traditionally think about a backyard garden that has layers and canopy and all these different things. That would be an example of entering a organic gardening very competitive. Joshua: Right. Chris: How to turn your lawn into a food forest in a year very niche specific and blue ocean like. Joshua: That’s awesome. That’s really cool and I think that’s the difference. Let’s do another one, let’s do like accounting. Chris: Accounting so intro to a cruel method accounting would be very competitive in terms of accounting expertise. If I were let’s say you and I are location independent entrepreneurs we can work from anywhere, we were just in Thailand I spent last winter in Costa Rica and just so we have this location independent thing which is really cool. Accountants can do that too so if I were to create a course called how to take your brick and mortar accounting business one hundred percent online and fully location independent? So you can. Joshua: Yeah. Chris: Ran your accounting business and continue to attract new clients from a Southeast Asia beach? Joshua: Right. Chris: That would be like, that’s like mind blowing-ly different and kind of more blue ocean like and it goes against the grain of the traditional more standard accounting education material. Joshua: Right and then one this is it looks like something that I’ve been looking for is, if there’s any accountants listening I would love to talk to you because I’m constantly looking for help me in the accounting world and understanding so if you had a course on accounting basics for internet entrepreneurs that would, no one is doing that. Chris: Yeah. Joshua: If there’s an accountant listening no one is doing that well and no one is teaching us how to organize other seats no one is teaching us and it’s excruciatingly painful but it’s because there’s this idea of like one side fits all this is how you do it across the board. No I want to be spoken to specifically as a location independent internet entrepreneur the way I’m doing the way of accounting. That’s taking accounting down to any entrepreneurs down to location independent entrepreneurs, internet entrepreneurs. The niche goes deep there and I would read that and go that’s for me, because I’m that person and he can speak directly to me. We talked so many people lately from all over the world, people who are also in gardening, people who are in mind set meditation training with VA Pension planners. I’ve talked to all sorts of people and I think this is something I hope inspires them to talk, think about what they’re teaching and think about they’re messaging around and get really specific on who they’re trying to help curved out that blue ocean for themselves. Chris: I just want to say too we’re big believers in the power of niche marketing and focus. If you’re concern of like which way should I go? Should I go red ocean? Should I go blue ocean? Or you say there’s a lot on this podcast that one approaches to transcending include so do both. Try if you’re an expert in accounting try a traditional competitive course that is similar to other ones you’ve seen out there and targeting a more general audience. Then just do some experiments with some really niche focused, combining different ideas or processes in different ways to try to make this kind of blue ocean course. Do both and see what your market resonates with because you may find that one way or the other it works best for you but the best way to do it I would encourage you to watch couple episodes ago about pre-selling as put both offers out there and get people on those courses and see what resonates and also see what you have the most fun doing in the type of interacting with the type of people that you’re attracting to those different offers. Joshua: I couldn’t agree more. Well Chris I think that’s a beautiful way to sum up today’s episode and would love to hear everyone’s thought on this content. You can email me at Joshua@lmscast.com or chris@lmscast.com we’re really loving this podcast we’d love hearing from everyone in the audience. We’re excited for the upcoming launch of Lift your LMS and if so if anyone is [interested 0:11:46] would like to be notified about that you can go to liftyourlms.com watch some of the content that we have available on that plug in and yeah let us know what you think. Until next week, we will see you soon. The post How to Create a Strategy for Your Online Course appeared first on LMScast.

Authentic PracTICE Through Global Collaboration [GM] The authors of this blog post "@ICTPHMS (Dan KIRSCH’s Blog)" and "@knolinfos (Gust MEES’s Blog)" have met each other on Social Media  "Twitter" and decided one day to work together on a common blog about "Digital CitizenShip", a "Global Collaboration" from authors of the USA and Luxembourg (Europe) was born. Find below, please, OUR collaboration blog: - https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2014/10/11/learning-to-become-a-good-digital-citizen-digital-citizenship/ Source: gustmees.wordpress.com See on Scoop.it - FootprintDigital

We might think that teaching coding is something boring and complicated. But when you base your exercises on games (you gamecodize :-D) then… your students get astonished! Introducing a new subject can be threatening for some people. Things get worse for those students not in favour of STEM matters.Then, how to make them buy your fabulous lessons about coding? Act as an illusionist.First of all switch your digital board and open your IDE (I’ve used Basic256). Start speaking about video games: how long they think a game needs to be coded, types of games, etc. Let them express themselves about the topic. Then start to explain what Tron is: a film by Disney which gave way to several games. Let them go on speaking about different aspects of the game while you start typing code. For sure you’ll listen to the silence (students suddenly shut up hypnotized by what you are doing) as you go on striking your keyboard, but break it to explain what you are doing and how (different aspects of coding, as main loops, debugging, variables, strategies, etc).Some tips:Use the help window: they should realize they don’t need to know everything by heart. If doubts pop up a helping window can also pop up. Make some mistakes on purpose: that’ll give them a good view of what debuging and trial-and-error are. Show some hesitation and use the expression "let’s try…" Use a scaffolding approach, constructing the main algorithm, and adding new elements around it as you continue.My basic version of Tron game needs about 10 minutes top to be coded. When you execute the final code and the students see the results they get way surprised by how easily you can make games.The coding phases go like this:Create a main loop and listen to the keyboard. If ESC is pressed exit the loop.Insert the code for the motorbike (a point) to go down the screen when pressing the down arrow.Do the same for the rest of the keys.Move the point around, with no physical restraints.Make the algorithm detect the walls left by the point, and make them "real".Let the player win when getting to the bottom right corner.Add random spheres as obstacles.The lines of code look like this:For more ideas about what games to code check the following list. MVC stands for model/view/controller, and AI for artificial intelligence. The grades have been given taking in count: that a student has to code them, and Basic’s features.DifficultyText/graphicMVCSpritesDataAIAnimal, vegetable,difficulttextyesnomatrixbasicArcanoiddifficultgraphicyesyesmatrixnoAsteroidsmediumgraphicnoyesarraynoBattleshipmediumbothnonomatrixnoBejeweleddifficultbothyesyesmatrixnoBiggest cardeasybothnonoarraynoCheckersdifficultbothyesnomatrixyesConnect fourmediumbothyesnomatrixyesConversationeasytextnonovariablenoDodgereasygraphicnoyesarraynoEscape the mazeeasygraphicbothbothmatrixnoGuess the numbereasytextnonovariablebasicHang manmediumbothnonoarraynoLand on the moonmediumgraphicnoyesvariablenoLife's gamemediumgraphicyesnomatrixnoMarble, chips...easytextnonovariablenoMaster mindmediumtextnonoarraynoMath sequencesmediumtextnonoarraynoPokermediumbothyesnomatrixmediumPongmediumgraphicnoyesvariablenoPuzzle: match pairseasybothyesyesmatrixnoPuzzle: slidingmediumbothyesyesmatrixnoSimon sayseasybothyesnoarraynoSnakedifficultgraphicyesyesmatrixnoSpace invadersdifficultgraphicnoyesarraynoText adventuremediumtextyesnomatrixnoThree in a rowmediumbothyesnomatrixmediumTic-tac-toeeasybothyesnomatrixbasicTroneasygraphicnonovariableno