This week's challenge is about Valentine's Day. Here's a chance to spin the wheel to find your perfect match! Read more...

Two challenges in one? I tackled this week's math challenge & added it to a recent football one. Score! Read more...

This challenge is to create e-learning images to share. I grabbed my camera and started shooting. Read more...

This week's challenge is to create an odd course title screen. Mine features some local talent. Read more...

Global Edmonton | Lynden Dorval weighs in on proposed school board policy. I’ve been following this story since Mr. Dorval was first suspended. I hope this passes.

This week's challenge is to use toys in e-learning, and mine took the opportunity seriously. Read more...

(Interested in why online course completion rates matter? Read part 1 here!) We’ve pulled together some of our best tips for improving your course completion rates. 6 tips to higher completion & engagement for your online coursesClick To Tweet Here’s how: Keep it short - Total course length should be between 30 minutes to 3 hours at most. If you have a longer course, split it up into pieces e.g. level 1, level 2, level 3 Split it up - create shorter lectures (2-7 minutes is ideal). If you currently have longer lectures it’s easy to cut them up into pieces and there’s no need to remake them. (Why shorter lessons work better) Modern software - use modern course delivery software that’s mobile accessible and gives a great customer experience. I may be biased, but Thinkific is a great option for this. Encouragement - Give students a little pat on the back as they move through the course. Let them know how they are doing and how much they have accomplished. This is part of gamification and can dramatically increase engagement and completion rates. Remind them - an automated reminder email campaign can have a profound effect on your completion rates. Simply reminding people regularly after they sign up will bring them back to finish the course. You can also consider dripping content to them over time. Drip content means that the actual course content is not all available when they first sign up, and is only released over time. Deadlines - depending on the nature of your relationship with your learners, you may want to establish a deadline for completion or offer a bonus or additional benefit for completion within a certain period of time. Try putting a few or all of the online course completion tips above into practice and you’ll see completion, engagement and enrollment rise for your courses!  I’d love to hear how this works for you, or if you have any tips of your own. Tweet at us, or drop a comment below!

At Thinkific, we’re constantly coming up with new ways to improve our platform and your user experience. This month, we’re excited to announce that our newest feature is Custom Fields! What are custom fields? Custom Fields are additional fields you can request in your sign up form to collect unique information about your users. Why would I want to create custom fields? You are no longer limited to merely name and email. Instead of having knowledge of the most basic information, you can ask for anything, such as phone, company, school, city, Twitter handle, or blog feed. You can have an increased level of organization of your user management system. By segmenting users based on a certain category, you can tailor marketing or communication specifically for them. For example, if you’re hosting a meet-up in your city, you can choose to email a segment of your users who are located near you. How do custom fields work? Create a custom field. Wait for someone to fill our your field. Get ready to learn details about your students. For step-by-step instructions, visit our support page here. I want to use custom fields! If you’re a Thinkific user, you already have access! Head to your dashboard to try it out. If you are not yet a Thinkific user, get Custom Fields (and all our other awesome features!) by creating an account on Thinkific The post New Feature: Custom Fields appeared first on Thinkific.

Increasing the Popularity of your YouTube Videos Now let’s take a look at video Popularity. The other factor that helps drive views. Note - this is part 6 of a series of resources about marketing courses on YouTube. To start at the beginning click here: Part 1 - Online course marketing with YouTube - Part 1 Just like in high-school, the popular kids get picked first. Except on YouTube the popular videos get found and watched more. I’ve put together a short summary / checklist as a reference for you. Get the Checklist here.Our popularity attributes include: Views, Ratings, Comments Views - the number of times your video has been watched. Views is a funny one as it is your goal is to drive this up and the higher it gets the more easily you get new views. A video with even 10 views will get more views faster than one with zero views. And one with a million views will acquire the second million much faster than the first. Here’s a few steps to get your initial views: Seeding - when you first launch your video, get a few quick views. Share it with a few friends to get those first few quick views. Sharing - share you video with your audience or list. You’ve put the work in to create a great video - now’s the time to share it out. You should be ready to do this almost as soon as you launch so set this up in advance. Email it to your mailing list, post it on twitter, share it on your blog, post it on your company Facebook page. Get it out on all your channels. Ask for more shares - wherever you share your video, ask people to share it with others. Ratings - the rating of your video is the total of the thumbs up and thumbs down given to your video by viewers. Oddly, videos with really bad ratings can actually perform very well on YouTube - I’ve seen videos with far more thumbs down do extremely well in terms of views. It appears that YouTube is more concerned with videos that generate an emotional reaction, even if it’s bad, than curating good content that users enjoy. So you can succeed with plenty of thumbs down, but I would NOT RECOMMEND this approach. You should go for positive reviews. Positive reviews will come in two main ways: Content - The first way to increase your YouTube video’s rating is by providing good quality content that viewers value. As part of this, ensure that your video title accurately describes your video content. Mislabeled videos are the number one reason for bad reviews (thumbs down).  Ask - Ask your viewers to rate your video. "If you enjoy this video please comment and give me the thumbs up below! Thank you!" - If you don’t ask they won’t do it. I’ve seen plenty of videos with lots of views and very few reviews or comments. Mostly because no one asked the viewers to thumbs up or comment on the video. Comments - The final popularity attribute to your video is Comments. Comments are left by your viewers below your video and signal to YouTube and to other viewers that your video is inspiring engagement and interest in your viewers. Comments on your video are great for driving more views to your video. To get more comments - ask viewers to comment on your video, but also give them something specific to comment on. Ask for their opinion on something, ask them to ask you a question for your next video. Here are a few examples of comment inspiring statements you can make in your video: "If you enjoy this video please comment and give me the thumbs up below! Thank you!" "I really hope you enjoyed this video, it would mean the world to me if you left me a comment below." "I’d love to hear what you think about X, please let me know in the comments below." "What else would you like to learn about from me? Please let me know in the comments below and I’ll do my best to include it in future videos." Or if you’ve given then advice on how to do something or you’ve taught them something ask them to comment on their situation or view on this. For example if you’re teaching them how to make YouTube videos, ask them to comment with: "I’d love to hear about what kinds of YouTube videos you want to make or how you’re using YouTube. Please let me know in the comments below." Respond - Hop back into YouTube regularly and respond to as many of the comments as you can. This has a few benefits. It signals to other viewers that you care and may respond to their comment so they are more likely to leave one. It signals to viewers that you are still active - if they see a comment left two years ago and no responses to any comments they may think you’re no longer active or possibly even out of business. This could reduce their interest in your course or product. It increases the total engagement and number of comments on your video which increases your exposure on YouTube. Also, if you only have time to respond to a few comments, pick the compliments to respond to. Research has shown us that the people who leave positive compliments as comments are the ones that care most about getting a response. Even more so than those that leave their opinion, they often just want to be heard. Ideally you should also answer questions that are asked. This can even be an opportunity to refer people to your course for more resources or answers to their questions. Don’t get into a battle with commenters. You may get negative comments, and it can be useful to address them, but do so politely and professionally. Think about writing not for the negative person, but for the thousands of others who may be reading this. You want to appear as the professional positive person. Winning the battle doesn’t matter and can often lose you potential customers if you come across as very argumentative or rude.   Check out this free series on marketing online courses using YouTube!Click To Tweet Be sure to grab the short summary / checklist I created as a reference for you: This is the end of our 6 part series on marketing your online courses using YouTube! Can I ask you for a favor? I’d love it if you could share this series with your friends!  - Greg

Today we’re announcing another new feature! User Segmentation is part of our ongoing effort to give you more control and visibility into your student data. What is segmentation? Segmentation is a tool that can help you divide your user base into groups of individuals that fit into specific categories. Segmentation is simple and easy to use, but when paired with other search filters, it can serve several powerful functions. Why would I want to use segmentation? Ease of use: It can be hard to remember out of a massive list of students which users have yet to complete a specific course or have made a purchase. Instead of manually clicking through names one by one, segmentation allows you to do a search to effortlessly determine who those users are. Action-oriented: Segmentation allows you to identify specific users by combining multiple filters to narrow down your search. For example, I can combine "Enrolled in: [course name]" with "Has not completed: [course name]." As a result, I’ve learned that three students have not completed a course they were enrolled in. At this point, I could choose to send them a reminder email to touch base with their progress. Targeted marketing: With knowledge of the personal needs, interests, and priorities of your students, you can design your marketing and communication to suit what they are looking for. For example, those who are enrolled in a free trial should receive different promotions than those who have paid enrollment. By defining your customers’ individual needs, you can support them in achieving their individual goals. How can I take advantage of Segmentation and Mass User Email? Here are some examples of ways you might segment your users and reach out to them: Distribute coupons for your course to a specific audience, and then segment your new students to see who signed up using that coupon code and contact them with a targeted message. Segment users who signed up for a free trial, but didn’t purchase the full course following their trial. Contact students who didn’t complete a course, and haven’t logged in since a certain date. When you update a course with new content, let students who purchased a course before know that their course has been updated. Contact all users who signed up from the same company email domain. View all students who have made purchases - this group is the most likely to buy again in the future! Notify affiliates of changes to your program that will help them promote your courses. How does segmentation work? Open your users list Apply a search filter Order your search results That’s it! You can then export your segmented list, or for our upgraded plans, email them directly through Thinkific. For step-by-step instructions, visit our support page here. I want to use segmentation! If you’re a Thinkific user, you already have access! Head to your dashboard to try it out. If you are not yet a Thinkific user, get Segmentation (and all our other awesome features!) by creating an account on Thinkific! The post New Feature: Segmentation appeared first on Thinkific.