Students Tweet to Class Twitter via Google Form Click here to see what this is all about! *Most of the ideas on this page came from John Calvert’s blog post linked below. I only recreated this tutorial to give more detail within each step. http://edtechtofu.blogspot.com/2014/07/using-formmule-a... Source: docs.google.com See on Scoop.it - InformationCommunication (ICT)

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EdTech is about to explode. The coming technology and the new trends on the rise can’t but forecast an extensive technology adoption in schools all around the globe. Specific apps, systems, codable gadgets and the adaptation of general use elements to the school environment are engaging teachers and opening up the way to new pedagogical approaches. And while we are scratching the surface of some of them, others have just started to buzz persistently.Read the whole story in Edtechreview.inhttp://edtechreview.in/trends-insights/trends/1832-edtech-trends-for-the-coming-years

Joshua Millage: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Joshua Millage, and I’m joined here with Christopher Badgett. Today, we’re talking about how to create a sales letter for your online course. My question to you, Chris is why is it even important that we learn about sales letters? I mean, I’m just a teacher. I just want to teach. Like what’s the point? Chris Badgett: What it comes down to it, if you’re an education entrepreneur, the big job is really creating your course and figuring out how you’re going to engage with your students, but it’s also important more on the entrepreneurial side to figure out how to sell that course and make sure you’re clearly communicating your offer. There’s a couple of things that come into play that limit education entrepreneurs in the sense of it’s mindset stuff where maybe you’re a little out of touch of what we call ‘The beginner’s mind’, or you have something known as the ‘Curse of knowledge’, and we can maybe unpack that as a place to start. Joshua Millage: Cool. Let’s dive into it. Chris Badgett: The beginner’s mind essentially, if you were to tie that to a marketing concept, but the marketing concept is to get really clear on your customer avatar, like ‘Who is your ideal customer?", and then you could change out the word ‘Customer’ with ‘Student’. That’s like an avatar. It’s the perfect, ideal student that you want to teach to and sell your course to. Getting inside the beginner’s mind of "What is this person coming to you for to learn?", and like "What is their mindset like?", "What is the language that they like to communicate with?", "What types of words are they using to describe their problem or describe the solution they’re going for or what they want to learn?" That’s kind of that getting in touch with the beginner’s mind is all about zoning in and getting clear on that customer avatar. Joshua Millage: I think it’s really important. I mean, on our other podcast that I host, I had a gentleman on by the name of Josh Fagan. He has the … He’s in real estate training, but his customer avatar was insane. He had it down to like, "And Joe was in a car accident four years ago, and he has three kids, and he limps with this … because of this car accident", and just all these details of this guy’s life, but Joe was fake. All right? I don’t know if his name was Joe, but he had a name for him. When he wrote his emails, he was writing to this guy. Because he was writing to a person who made up a lot of different aspects of his customer base, he was able to create really personal emails that people would then respond to him and say, "Hey. I felt like you are really talking to me," and the trick was just actually talking to an imaginary character that embodied who your customer actually was. I think that that learning if we take that learning into the online course space, it’s really important to do that with our students. I think one of the easiest ways to do this is if you have a student base already, to get to know them, to pick up the phone and call them if there’s … and I think talking to people on the phone is one of the most incredible things that people don’t do because they don’t … They just like, "I don’t have the time", "I don’t …" whatever. They carry all these excuses, but at the end of the day, they don’t know how to speak to that person because they’re not actually touching them. I think taking the time to build a customer avatar, but maybe we should coin the term ‘Student avatar’ for people who are doing online courses is absolutely crucial I think. Chris Badgett: Absolutely. Absolutely. That really is what the beginner’s mind is all about. On the other side of that is what we call the ‘Curse of knowledge’. This is what the educator experiences in the sense that they’ve spent all this time and life experience building up the skillset that they’re now going to teach, but it’s important to remember … to me, the customer, where they are and not get bogged down in all those little subtle things that you’ve learned that have moved down to your subconscious, that you have to pull that stuff back up so that your messaging can be really clear and spot on. There’s a marketing concept here that’s important to learn and I’m going to use a quote from Henry Ford from the automotive industry, where he said if he had given people what they want, he would have given them faster horses, but instead, he built a car. Joshua Millage: Yes. Chris Badgett: Sometimes, our ideal customer and their beginner’s mind, they may not even know what they want, need or clearly be able to articulate their problems. That’s more of an advanced challenge is how do you step into that conversation with your ideal customer and communicate in such a way that your person is having light bulbs going off, when essentially, their subconscious mind is saying, "Wow. This person really understands me and get where I’m at." Joshua Millage: Right. Chris Badgett: "Oh my gosh. I never realized this could be the solution to my problem", or "This is the exact skill I really need. I didn’t realize that." Those kinds of internal self-thought is really what you want to get to. Joshua Millage: Right. I couldn’t agree more. I think one of the things that I want to share is to switch gears and get a little bit tactical here in our time today, and that is talk about some proven formulas that people can use to start to write their sales letters around. One of those is AIDA which stands for attention, interest, desire and action. It’s a very old formula put together. I’m not exactly sure by [Hugh 00:05:30], but I’m sure it was [inaudible 00:05:31] or one of the great ad geniuses of the 1930s and ’40s. It’s a really easy, proven formula for putting together a sales letter that takes someone for realizing that, that what you’re doing can help them to actually taking actions. What do you think, Chris, I just go through form? Chris Badgett: Yes. Let’s start with A. A is attention, so that really comes back to your headline, and I think a lot of people look at their headline as they don’t spend enough time thinking about it, or they spend way too much time deliberating on it and they don’t take action and actually create a headline. To make it really simple for you, your headline should really only do one thing, and that is to get someone to read the second line. I know that sounds crazy, but the idea here is that you want your prospect or your potential student to read the entire sales letter, the entire course description, what the course can do for them, how the course will help them in their lives or profession or whatever it may be, and that headline is just to get them to stop and start to read. It’s a … I can give a good example of that. Joshua Millage: Yes. Please do. Chris Badgett: In my experience, I created a free course, and I titled it ‘How to Build a WordPress Website in a Weekend’. That title there wasn’t just WordPress 101 or WordPress for Beginners or whatever. It grabs your attention in the sense that I’m making the promise that you can build a WordPress website in a weekend, and right now, I have almost 7,000 students in that free course. That, I think really ties into getting the attention in the headline. Joshua Millage: Yes. I’m going to use a really crude example that I heard Ryan Holiday, who wrote a book ‘Trust me, I’m Lying’. He’s a young man. He’s like 24 or 25. He wrote a very good book about modern PR and attention and how they make things go viral and that sort of thing. He was the director of marketing for American Apparel. I’m like 22. I mean, the kid is kind of a phenom. He said something, and again, I’m going to be a little [inaudible 00:07:38] here, but he said, "One thing that people forget about when doing things online is that pornography is one click away." His point is that I have … I do not support pornography in any way, shape or form. His point is things that are biologically addicting are one click away. Keep that in mind. Someone … anything, whether it’s clothes, food … anything that someone is addicted to, anything is at your fingertips. What are you going to do to make someone stop and take a brief second to read your headline? Like the headline should have one goal, it should carry the weight of stopping you, and your track is going [nuts 00:08:15] for me. I think people, what they do is they try and speak really broad, like "Eat better with my course." It’s like, "Who’s eating better? Speak to me." I want to read that and be like vegans … ‘Three Ways to Make Five Meals in Less Than …’ or ‘Three Formulas to Make Infinite Amount of Meals in 20 Minutes’ or something. I don’t know. I’m just wrapping here. The point is they should literally stop and go, "Wait a second. That headline, that whatever it is, that sales letter is speaking directly to me." I actually head a guy who’s a very smart copywriter named Dane Maxwell talked about the formula for a headline is really pretty simple. It’s desired result in an amount of time addressing the objections. What would be an example of this? Let’s think. Chris Badgett: Let’s do something on your vegan example and how to make vegan breakfast. Joshua Millage: Yes. If people think that vegan breakfast are difficult and hard, you could say something like, "Five Delicious Vegan Recipes Using Five Ingredients that all Take Less than 10 Minutes to Create". It’s like talking about the time frame or what people want which is delicious vegan meals. Like in less than … addressing the objections of time constraints, and really painting the picture of what the outcome is. It should just capture you really quick. That one is a little hard because I’m not a vegan. One headline that really struck me was … and there’s a bunch of different ways to do headlines. If people want to learn about some really good headlines, there’s a book called ‘Breakthrough Advertising’. One of them that I heard from way, way back was a music training program. This one doesn’t use that formula, but it says something along the lines of "They laughed at me when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play, they were amazed". The idea that people … that really identifies with someone who doesn’t understand how to play piano, like, "Oh. I think people would laugh at me if I sat down, but then with that training course, when I started to play, I’m an expert and I’m going to amaze everyone". It’s like, "Wait a second. What does that say?" You read that and you’re like, "Wait a second. Hi", and you read the second line and the third line and fourth line. Again, we’re going off on tangents here with the headline, but really, the whole thing is to hit the parking break, stop, and read the second line. The second line or really the second part of the ad should be engaging the interest mechanism in that person, so causing them to be interested in what you have to say. It’s opening and closing loops. It’s saying, "Let me tell you a story", or "Let me tell you how you  can create all these vegan meals, but first, let me tell you a story about my experience being a vegan". You’re saying some things to come, so you don’t have to read to get there, but let me tell you a little brief story. It’s like it’s engaging them to be interested. Then, the third part is desire. It’s pushing on those desire mechanisms, making them want the outcome that your product, or in this case your course can give them. Then, the fourth aspect is action. You’re literally telling them what to do next. "Click the button", "Enroll now", "Register in my course" … entering your name and details and we’ll move … It’s very … This methodology is very direct response, but the thing is, you cannot assume that your prospect or your potential student knows what to do. You literally need to outline it for them. John Carlton who’s another great marketer and copywriter said … He curated in what people call the ‘Carltonian formula’ which is, "Here’s what I got. Here’s what it does for you. Here’s what to do next." That’s another copywriting and sales letter formula that works really well. These are very time-tested. You can go and just type ‘Carltonian formula’ or ‘John Carlton sales letter’. Find that. Dan Kennedy who’s a very prolific direct response copywriter has a book on sales letters. All these people essentially say the same thing though. Get their attention, tell them … Give them the interest mechanisms, show them why they would be interested, a list of desire and tell them to take action. I think these are just key things that people need to think about when they’re writing that piece of copy that goes with actually registering for their course. Chris Badgett: Absolutely. If I can tie it in and I bridge the gap between internet marketing, sales letters and online courses, course descriptions and things like that, many of us have a love/hate relationship with marketing. You don’t want to be seen as like a used car salesman, and for a lot of people on their entrepreneurial journey, they learn to embrace marketing and they eventually realize that it’s just a necessary part of doing business. Daniel Pink wrote a great book called ‘To Sell is Human’. I highly recommend it. Joshua Millage: Yes. Chris Badgett: Once you study sales letter, you’re going to Google that and you start looking around, you’re going to see a lot of like red headlines and yellow highlighter. I just want to encourage people to not be dissuaded by that … what may feel like scamming, but just look at that stuff and learn from it. At the end of the day, it’s about making a promise, putting your offer out there, getting people’s attention for your online course in a way that you really connect with people and get their attention. When we talk about things like headlines, we’re talking about the actual title of your course or a sub-headline and the description of your course to really get attention, or maybe you’re writing a blog post and you improve their pre-selling about this course you’re going to create. These are all opportunities to create at what we’re calling as ‘Headlines’ and then get into the actual content and elicit that interest and  call to action and desire and those things. Joshua Millage: Yes. I think people … Marketing in a lot of ways is a dark art. You can learn some very powerful things in marketing about persuasion and about changing human behavior. With that is like classic Spider-Man saying, It’s like, "With great power comes great responsibility", and it’s definitely true in marketing. I think if I were to end with this thought, is I think the most powerful marketing is simply the course instructor’s story. The reason I say that that’s the most powerful marketing tool is that for one, it’s truthful. If you can’t tell your story about how you became an expert, you shouldn’t be teaching the course. Any marketers who are listening, who abide by the whole like, "Let me go pre-sell something I don’t know," and then learn about it real quick and then teach, I just think that’s wrong, and I don’t think that you should be participating in what we’re trying to do here. What we’re trying to do with Lifter LMS, what we’re trying to do with the new vision of codeBOX and changing the online education is creating tools for people who are actually teachers, who actually care about their student’s learning. I think this is the fundamental difference between people who are looking at learning, management systems that are really focused on learning, and people who are looking at new course systems or membership. I don’t want to digress too much because we’ve already created a podcast all about this, but really tell your story. Tell why you’re an expert. Talk about that journey. You talk about is it … His last name is Campbell, right? ‘The Hero’s Journey’, Joseph Campbell I think? Chris Badgett: Yes. Yes. You got him. Joshua Millage: Yes. Talk about your journey about being the beginner and all the pain and struggle and triumph and victory and defeat or learning whatever it is that you’re going to teach. That is the most powerful marketing. That fits right in with attention, interest, desire and action because you can take your story and mold it into that. You know what? You don’t have to feel bad about it at all because you lived it. You experienced it. Maybe your story is you are an undergrad who was dissuaded by job opportunities, and you found yourself down and out, and so you started freelancing, and then you started a company, and then now you can actually speak to the fundamental business nuggets, and you want to train the world. I mean, that’s like my story. That’s not a lie. I lost it all. I was on my parents’ couch. I know option. My back was up against the wall. I started freelancing, and then boom. As the story rolls on, codeBOX happened. Lifter LMS happened. Joining forces with you happened. I can speak to these things about partnerships and about picking yourself up by your bootstraps, and I can speak from it from a very real and true place in my heart because I lived it. There’s no lie at all. I’m not embellishing anything. It’s been a hard journey, but now, I can take that journey, package it in a course, train people, and I believe that information will help change the way that people look at business. That is yet to come. It’s going to happen in the next six months. I’m going to create some courses. We’re all going to create courses. What a better way to show people to how to create, to marketing and sell courses online by simply just doing it ourselves. Chris Badgett: Absolutely. Just to echo your [cinema 00:17:43], Josh, telling your story helps your current students and future prospective students really connect with you on a personal level. Joshua Millage: Right. Chris Badgett: If you happen to be a part of the Lifter LMS plug-in that we created our VIP community, and you saw us launch the course or the plug-in, you notice how we did a full video about how it all started with breakfast, and I told my story about making my first course about how to make better omelets, and then we went on this whole journey to where this plug-in now became available to the world. If you’re looking for another example that you may have seen before, there you go. Joshua Millage: It works, man. I really hope that people find this valuable, it helps teachers look at their courses and their life experience in a different way, and be able to package it and make it a little bit more persuasive, hopefully get them more sells and really have more impact. I mean, that’s the key thing here, is we want to help people have more impact by using online education, using WordPress and our plug-in to make that happen. Any closing thoughts, Chris? Chris Badgett: I would just say one of the common mistakes that people make when they are writing headlines and copy is that they focus on the features and not necessarily the benefits. If you’re telling your personal story and you’re getting into what it will do for the student, the number of modules you have and all these things are important, but what’s really important is your message of like, "What journey are you going to take me on? What are you going to teach me? How is my life going to be different after I take this course?", not "How am I going to get there?" Joshua Millage: Absolutely. I think it’s a great way to cap off this episode. All right. Until next time. You can reach me at ‘Joshua@LMScast.com’, and Chris over here at ‘Chris@LMS.com’. Until next week. We’ll talk to you soon. The post How to write a Sales Letter for Online Course appeared first on LMScast.

Facebook and Twitter may be ubiquitous, but there are many other social media tools out there that can enhance teaching and learning. Here, three educators share their favorites. Source: campustechnology.com See on Scoop.it - InformationCommunication (ICT)

Looking for a Wordpress LMS Plugin Dos and Donts transcript? joshua millage: Hello everyone, we’re back with another episode of LMS Cast, I’m Joshua Millage and joined like I am every day with Christopher Badgett. We are broadcasting to you not live, but somewhat live, from Santa Cruz in Whitefish, Montana, right, Chris? chris badgett: Yeah. joshua millage: Cool. Well we love LMS Systems, we love WordPress, and today is actually a really good episode for me because I don’t know the answers to some of the questions I’m going to be posing for Chris, and really what we’re trying to figure out is the WordPress LMS plugin do’s and don’t’s, like what is it we should be focused on when we’re looking at LMS plugins, how many plugins should we be stringing together, is that a good idea, is that a bad idea. I’m not really that technical, as you know, Chris, and so for me it makes sense. I’m going to go get this plugin to this and that plugin to do that and it all seems fine and dandy to me. Why not? They’re plugins, string them together, see what happens. I’ve learned from your kind, generous teaching as well as Mark and Tom, that that’s not always a great idea. There’s some disadvantages to that, so give me the top level, high kind of bird’s eye view of how we should be looking at LMS plugins and how we should be considering buildign this bullet-proof foundation of an online school or online course system. chris badgett: Let me back up and first start with when you’re learning WordPress and you start building WordPress sites or you’re hiring development design marketing teams to do it for you, a more beginner person, if you’re doing it yourself, or a beginner agency, they may be very quick when you pose a question, to be like can we make the website do X, that be like, oh, let me search and see if there’s a plugin for that. Plugins on the WordPress repository, there are some that are extremely popular and almost ubiquitous, and there’s others that come out, they’re great ideas at the time, but the developer behind them stops supporting it, and you’ll see a lot of plugins at WordPress that haven’t been updated in over 2 years. Not all plugins are created equal. There’s a core group of plugins outside of learning management systems that I almost always recommend and always use. To give a couple examples of those, one of them is Akismet, which comes when you install WordPress to prevent spam, another one is WordPress SEO by Yost, and then those are really core plugins and anything else is really extra, and you don’t even need the SEO plugin if you don’t plan on investing time into developing your SEO, but to tell a story of Lifter LMS, the WordPress learning management system plugin that we’ve built here at [Cobox 00:02:55], we decided to make that a plugin and not a theme because it’s really all about functionality and we’ve built it in a way that it can work with any well coded WordPress theme, and we also … A lot of times people don’t realize this with certain themes or plugin, the plugin or theme developer has actually bundled all these other plugins inside of it to make it look as if it does more. It’s not that they’re doing  a bad thing, they’re taking shortcuts to getting functionality quickly into their plugin. We were very intentional about how we created Lifter LMS in that we didn’t bundle or sneak in some plugins for our functionality. We’re building everything from the ground up, and we’re very conscious about what additional things we’re going to integrate with. Two examples. One of them would be WooCommerce. We know WooCommerce is really popular. Lifter LMS has its own e-commerce system that’s really amazing and designed specifically for WordPress LMS, but we know a lot of people use WooCommerce and like it and want to integrate with it, so we did add to our plugin to allow that to happen. Same thing with BuddyPress, which is a social networking plugin for WordPress, but really at the end of the day when you’re building a WordPress management system, you don’t want to get to a point where you have 10 or 20 or 30 or even 50 plugins going, because the opportunity for conflict and the complexity involved in opening up just the door to plugins not getting updated or whatever, it’s just not a road worth going down, and at the end of the day, if you need like 40 different plugins, you might actually be putting too much functionality in your site because at the end of the day it’s about learning, and Lifter LMS has the core foundational pieces you need, and of course if you want to integrate something unique to your situation, go for it. Use gravity forms to do a survey or use other plugins, but make sure they’re well respected. joshua millage: I just want to speak out to anyone who’s like me out there, it’s like sometimes I get plugin mania, like just because I can install a plugin I want to. It’s not that it’s a good idea, but I’m like ohh, that sounds fun, boom, I plug that in, plug that in, plug that in, I’m like 40 plugins in deep and all of a sudden something crashes, I’ve got the white screen of death, I can’t even log in, and then I’m paying somebody to help me go figure out a PHP area in some random line. It’s just because I got plugin crazy, you know? If anyone resonates with that story, my suggestion is have a separate WordPress install to have your plugin craziness on, but don’t do that to your main site, and so what I’ve learned is that you want to have the minimum viable plugin setup. Having more is not better at all. You’re adding, like you said Chris, complexity to the site, and you want it to run as lean and efficiently as possible, and sometimes there is reasons to install more, different plugins but for the most part you want to look for a system that takes care of all of it. I would echo your statement about Yost, I think Yost is phenomenal, as well as, is it Akismet? chris badgett: Yeah, Akismet. I’m not even sure how to say it and I’ve been using it for a decade it feels like. joshua millage: Me too, and that one does save you a lot of pain and stress with the stand box and what not. Those two are pretty bullet proof. I love what those guys are doing at Automatic and then the Yost group, but I would say when it comes to LMS systems, just be conscious of what you want to do, whether you’re on WP courseware with Sensei, the Academy, well I guess that’s a theme, but still, you want to make sure that you’re not bogging down your server setup with a bunch of different plugins because some of these systems have e-commerce, some of them don’t. Some of them have just course structuring no quiz, so you’ve got to maybe figure out how you’re going to integrate that. You want to be conscious of what you need and then go look for a system that meets that. Obviously you’re not going to … Full disclosure, we developed Lifter LMS, so we’re going to pretty much pitch you on that one all the time. I’m kind of sorry that I’m not sorry about that, but we’re passionate about it. That’s why we stepped out into this space. We wanted to do things differently. We saw a gap in the market and we wanted to create an end to end system. We think we’re approaching it in a very new and different way with getting this incredibly amazing test group of people and listening to their feedback and iterating and moving in directions that they think we should move in. chris badgett: Absolutely. Just to give a really specific WordPress LMS plugin example, we’ve gotten a lot of feedback from people who have been using the WP LMS theme, which I’ve used before and helped people set up. When you install that, that WordPress learning management system, you have to, at the moment of installation, install something like 12 other plugins. Now the end result is it makes a nice learning management system but people start getting confused, and there’s just a lot of like moving parts there that we’ve heard a lot of people say when we reached out to the WordPress LMS community that they want an experience not like that. That was really the community help shaped our vision for a more minimalist approach. Something that’s simple, that does the core functionality, that we’re going to continue to evolve over time, but isn’t locked into all these other dependencies to all these other plugins. joshua millage: Right. Right. I love it. Well this is a great foundation episode for anyone who’s just starting out with their WordPress LMS system and looking at WordPress LMS plugins, or if they already have one, maybe looking to the future and how to refine and make things much more efficient and lean. Good work, Chris, thanks, I feel really educated now, and that was … I needed that. Any closing thoughts for us today? chris badgett: Yeah, I would just take the counterpoint real quick and say plugins aren’t bad. If you find a plugin and it works well with Lifter LMS or with your learning management system theme and you’re like wow, this is really awesome, it works, and not getting any conflict, let us know about it. We want to hear from you. Leave a comment, and let us know what you find out, and in some cases, I mean we’re a web development shop so we actually build our own plugins sometimes just for specific projects, but maybe you see something that a plugin is doing that you want included in Lifter LMS or you just want to share that hey, what this plugin does is important to the needs of the learning management system community, I just wanted to let you guys know about it. That’s my closing thought. They’re not all bad, but I would encourage minimalism whenever you can. joshua millage: Absolutely. That’s a great point, Chris. All right guys, until next week, we will see you soon. The post WordPress LMS Plugin Dos and Donts appeared first on LMScast.

In April 16th the next Basque GAFE meeting will be hosted in Donostia (Basque Country, Spain). I'll be presenting Screencasting & P2P review (T2). So excited!For more information: https://sites.google.com/site/educacioneuskadigapps/iv-encuentro-topaketa

ptto13 created with WOW Slider, a free wizard program that helps you easily generate beautiful web slideshow Source: justywk.blogspot.fr See on Scoop.it - Educational News and Web Tools

The Ultimate Blog Promotion Checklist. Print it out. Bookmark it. Check them off the next time you write a new blog post. Source: www.buzzblogger.com See on Scoop.it - InformationCommunication (ICT)

Prefer a Transcript on "How to Create Courses for Various Learning Styles" Joshua: Hello everyone! We’re back with another episode of LMS Cast. I am Joshua Millage, and I’m joined here today with Christopher Badgett. Today is going to be a little bit different because we’re talking about Learning Styles and why they’re important to consider when you’re building an online course. Everyone learns differently. Some people are visual. Some people are kinesthetic. Some people are auditory. Some people are some combination of a little bit of all of it, and so you need to keep this in mind if you want to have a truly impactful course. If it’s just all text, you might be missing out on someone who learns visually. Chris, with that, let me throw the ball in your court. What do you think about this? How do you take these all things into consideration? Chris: First, let’s talk about those styles. You’ve mentioned about visual versus auditory and tactical and tactile or whatever. Then we can end with, later in this episode, about people who take a big picture top-down approach and others who take a bottom-up step-by-step roots approach. If we get into visual versus auditory and kinesthetic, the way you can do that in an online format is visually, obviously, you could use video in your content. You can have that same lesson, also, be an audio and it could be a recording of the same thing, which is great for the person. Let say they’re a kinesthetic learner and like to be moving, they could plug that audio into their ear buds and go for a run. Some people learn better while they’re moving. Joshua: I totally do. Chris: Yeah. Joshua: Yeah. It’s a podcast. That’s why I have a podcast. When I’m running, I soak up that information. A little caveat story, but my mom was a teacher. She had a gift with kids that had learning disabilities and things, and people that had ADD, she would just recognize that excess energy, so she would have the workaround. I actually definitely fit into that category. In college, I would go to the gym and read my textbook when I was on the treadmill and I would retain so much more information than if I was sitting, kind of like, pent up. It doesn’t work for me. Yeah, I agree. I think it’s good to have that ability. Give your course that ability for that segment of student that learns that way. Chris: Absolutely! Some people are more cerebral. If your main course content is a video, you make an audio version and now you have an audio format of it without the distraction of the video. Then, some people just like to read. You can have a transcript or a right out of what the video is all about or have a download version where someone can download it and then not be online to consume that content. Yeah, there are just so many different ways you can go. As a general rule, whenever possible, I would just encourage people building a WordPress Learning Management System to deliver your lessons in multimedia format like that. Joshua: One of the things that I’ve learned and this is just a simple way of doing it, is if you can record a video, have that recording available in audio, and then also give them a transcript so that they can read it. That’s just a very simple way of putting all of those pieces of the puzzle together immediately. Now, one of the things too is you can find, this is like another little trick or hack. I have a group of writers that I can tap. I give them a transcript and then they actually make it into a real language because I don’t write how I speak to you. I’m using slang and things, but they’ll actually take it, flush it out, and make it into a lesson. You can find these people on oDesk or Elance and type in "Editor," or you find some amazing grad students who just need some extra cash. They’re really good at writing, a little pro-tip there. Look for people that are English majors. Chris: Yeah. Joshua: They’re perfect. It helps them out and they enjoy helping you because they’re actually doing something that helps the business grow or helps a course spread, but it’s not that difficult. It just takes a little bit of time finessing the systems. I record the video, then I have my editor give me the MP3, I put that on SoundCloud or someplace to host it, put the video into YouTube and host it there. I go to Rev and get a transcript, then I take the transcript and put it out to the oDesk person to make it into something that’s readable. Put it all together in the backend of your Lifter LMS plug-in, it’s what we would recommend, of course. There you go. You take one form of content and you put it in all these different forms, and that works really, really well. Of course, the more time you spend considering those learning styles, the better too. Chris: Yeah. Let’s also touch on a big picture versus a bottom-up approach. This is actually true for the teacher and the student. For the student, I would encourage you when you think about designing your online course, you can use prerequisites and lock down the progress through your material. You can even put in quizzes in the way of that progress and that sort of thing. That’s like the traditional ways of doing things, but I think there’s a large segment of the population who doesn’t learn that way. They actually like to jump around or maybe even start with the last lesson and then they’ll go to the middle and then the back and then they’ll fill in the gaps. Their learning experience, that’s just how they like to learn. I think it’s important to think before you lock it down in a more waterfall step-by-step approach. If somebody is more in that step-by-step preference, they can just go through it the way as well, so you give people the option. Joshua: Yeah. I think it’s true. It comes back to course design too, and is it a linear style or is it more of bits and pieces and chunks and things. It’s all strategy. In future episodes, it would be cool for us to just dial in different strategies and explain. The course design, I think, is a really interesting topic area that … as we’re recording this right now, I’m like, "Yes, that would be interesting," but, of course, we want to hear what people want to learn too. You can always reach out to us at joshua@lmscast.com or chris@lmscast.com. We want to hear from you, but I think this is a really good episode to get people to consider these learning styles and not to just go into … there’s no reason to be one-dimensional. Chris: Absolutely! It’s true for the teacher too when they’re creating a course. We actually designed our Lifter LMS software around this concept where, if you’re a teacher … some people might want to … let’s say, this is their first time creating a course and it’s all just in their head. You can start with Lesson 1 and not even know where you’re going, "I’m just going to do Lesson 1, then I’m ready to Listen 2, and by the time I get the end, I’ll figure it out." Some people think that way. Other people, it’s all done in their head. They create the course first, then they create the lessons and the sections, they write all the titles and there, and then they go back and they add the content. The software can adapt to different ways. That’s more of a course creation style, but it perfectly mirrors their learning styles. The same is true, maybe a lot of people are intimidated by video, so they prefer to do an audio. So, you do your audio first and if you do want bulk out your multimedia format, you can then hire somebody to get on video and teach your material and put that in your course. It doesn’t always have to be you, and like we talked about in the before is you can do the same thing with transcripts and getting the written format. You can start with any one of those and where you’re strong and then figure out how to do the rest either yourself or outsource it. Joshua: I completely agree. That’s a huge negative wisdom that people can take and imply right now in whatever system they’re using, so I hope that people enjoy that and use that and start considering the different ways people learn. It’s really out of respect for their students. Cool, so any final thoughts for the crew? Chris: Yeah. I would just close it out and say we’re talking about learning styles and engagement with different styles is really important to us at our core. If you need a little motivation to do the extra work to factor all these learning styles, it’s very true that having a multimedia format increases the perceived value of your material. You can often charge more money at that point. If you need a little motivation to do that work considering raising the price of the course because of that value you’re adding is a great little side-effect of accommodating learning styles. Joshua: Awesome idea man! You’re always giving these last-minute takeaways. That’s so true. You can raise the price there and the value because you’re giving more value, so awesome. All right, well, that is it for today and we will see everyone next week. The post How to Create Courses for Various Learning Styles appeared first on LMScast.