This week’s Fierce resource was originally published on Ted.com and uncovers the three simple but crucial questions would-be company chiefs need to ask to thrive in the future.A recent leadership study conducted by The Conference Board found that 4 of the top 10 challenges that CEOs face are focused on leadership. Yet, many organizations lack a well-developed leadership pipeline. CEOs know their organizations cannot retain highly engaged, high-performing employees without effective leaders who can manage, coach, develop, and inspire them.So I ask: How do we address the every-widening leadership gap? First, we need to start by distilling the characteristics of great leaders. Read the complete transcript here. The post Fierce Resource: Roselinde Torres - What It Takes to Be a Great Leader appeared first on Fierce, Inc..

We get what we want at a faster speed than ever before. Amazon delivers items in one hour. Starbucks provides coffee through a drive through. Uber arrives at your doorstep in a matter of minutes to take you anywhere you need to go. The list goes on and on; there are on-demand services for walking dogs, receiving massages, house cleaning, etc.While our accessibility to products increases, we must remember that people are not things. To share a moment, to build a relationship, to better understand one another, there is not an on-demand option. It requires many conversations…and patience. Patience is becoming a rare mineral in this bustling world we live in.Practice more patience in your conversations. Patience with yourself when a conversation doesn’t go the way you want it to. Patience with someone who brings an issue to you that seems unfounded. Patience with someone who tells you something you don’t want to hear. Patience with a stranger. Patience with a friend.This week’s tip is to practice patience in your conversations. What derails your conversations? Or what we say in fierce, triggers you? In what situations do you feel least patient? Explore that. And with who? Your partner? Your kids? Your neighbors?How will you practice this week? Gabe de Jong has a TEDx Talk called The Most Important Leadership Quality is Patience, and he recommends you using a simple tip of counting to ten to be a little more patient in life. Seems easy enough, right?The post Fierce Tip of the Week: Practice Patience - Relationships Aren’t Built Instantly appeared first on Fierce, Inc..

Are you happy? Is your team happy? Happy can sometimes feel like a soft word. Or something that feels pretty abstract.James Key Lim, chief executive of Delivering Happiness at Work, has shared the findings from a large meta-analysis study that happy employees have on average 31% higher productivity, their sales are 37% higher, and their creativity is some three times higher than less-happy workers.Those are some pretty impressive stats. Given that, below are three ways that we at Fierce work with leaders to create happier teams.Solicit your team’s input and get curious.According to 80 percent of respondents from a Fierce survey on characteristics of good bosses, taking action to request input around ideas and strategies is one of the most vital things managers can do to create great relationships.Tip: Have an hour one-on-one conversation with every person who reports to you. Use some of these sample questions: What has become clear to you since we met last? What topic are you hoping that I won’t bring up? What do you wish you had more time to do? What is currently impossible to do that, if it were possible, would change everything? And then, really listen.Exchange honest, open feedback. Managers who foster and encourage honest feedback from employees position their companies to make more money than those that don’t, according to a 2012 Corporate Executive Board and Harvard Business Review study titled "Open-Door Policy, Closed-Lip Reality." This study found that organizations that rated highly in open communication delivered a 10-year total shareholder return of 7.9 percent compared to 2.1 percent at other companies.Tip: Feedback needs to be clear, insightful, well thought out, and specific. If you or people on your team do not have that skill, bring in Feedback training. Practice giving feedback to each other and evaluating others’ feedback. Many times people have the best intentions to be clear and concise, and yet, delivering and crafting communication takes practice and confidence.Pay attention to your emotional wake. How do your team members feel after an interaction with you? Energized or deflated? Have you ever asked them? This tip is about emotional intelligence and honing the ability to inspire and motivate.Tip: Make a commitment to take responsibility and accountability for how you show up. Ask yourself: To whom do I need to apologize? Who deserves my praise? Who deserves my recognition?These tips may seem simple and rather ordinary, however, they truly have the capacity to shift your life and your team in ways that you can’t even imagine.We see it every day in organizations.Do you have any tips to make a team happier? The post 3 Tips for a Happier Team appeared first on Fierce, Inc..

This week’s Fierce resource was originally published on Forbes and discusses four habits the most successful leaders have in common.It is undeniable that the greatest leaders in the world share similar habits to continue their success. Great leaders transform organizations, quickly captivate the audience of a room, and most importantly - they teach others around them how to be great leaders by example. In today’s society there is a leadership gap, resulting in an uninspired workforce lacking the most important facet of business: leadership.So what is the common thread between great leaders? "People are eager to learn from them, and are mobilized by their missions. And great leaders make the impossible happen every day, igniting passion and innovation throughout an organization."Read the article.The post Fierce Resource: 4 Habits of the Most Successful Leaders appeared first on Fierce, Inc..

This is a question we get a lot. The simple answer is "No, we do not offer phone support". However, as everything in life, the reality is a bit more complex. Below I will try to explain our support process and metrics, why we generally avoid phone support and the conditions under which phone support is an option. Our current support system Our support is ticket based. A user sends an email within their learning portal or through our support portal and this becomes a "ticket" within our support system. Any further email exchanged on that subject is kept on a discussion thread and is visible to all our support representatives. This offers transparency and the ability to capture important metrics that we use to improve support. For example, we measure the number of emails exchanged to solve a problem, the amount of time between a request and first response and the Kudos our representatives got for timely and to-the point answers. Those metrics become a yardstick against which we strive to improve each month. Support patterns The transparency of measured metrics reveals support patterns that need fine-tuning. As an example, a few months ago we discovered that we had a very specific time-window which was problematic. People that requested support on Friday would often have to wait for more than 48 hours to get an answer. The fact that our support is located in Europe made matters worse for people on the West coast of the US, under that specific scenario. As a good portion of our customers are indeed in West coast the number of delayed tickets was huge. In order to deal with that problem we introduced a Saturday morning support shift. This eliminated the first answer delay problem almost entirely. Another example is the rule-of-3. Whenever a question is asked 3 times it rings a bell that it should be turned into a knowledge article. This helps reducing the support overhead and lets additional customers with the same problem get an immediate answer. Scaling support Support requests grow together with the business. This is a positive headache considering that growth is important; a headache nevertheless. In TalentLMS we offer support for all type of customers, free ones included. This puts additional stress on our support representatives and makes support scaling a pressing issue. An extensive knowledge base, videos and other collateral can help reduce the support load but only up to an extent. The trying truth is that a growing business will have a support load that is on par with its growth. Additionally, complex support requests will start to emerge. Those need combined effort from people with varying backgrounds. For example, a number of our customers need help with setting their custom domain names or setting up their single-sign-on solution. This transfers load from support representatives to a crucial resource; your tech team. When the tech team needs to allocate too much time supporting customers this has a negative impact on the product improvement rate. If mail-based support is hard to scale, phone support is a harder beast to tame altogether. To start, phone support has little value when it is too restricted. Restrict it too much and it can easily turn into a marketing gimmick. Ideally you should offer phone support 24/7. Also, it is hard to have shared support technicians as the phone is intrusive and needs immediate attention. This context switching is highly unproductive, especially when it involves tech people. From a financial point of view, phone support introduces a number of complexities that make it more expensive than the ticket mechanism. At the end of the day, this cost is to be transferred to the product price tag which is bad news for everyone. Phone support myths Still, phone support for many customers is synonymous to better support. This perception is based on assumptions though, which often turn to not be sound. The preference for phone support is mostly due to practical and psychological aspects. The practical aspect is that phone support minimizes the time to get an answer. In reality though, the answer is rarely immediate, as your question may require feedback from multiple people. Phone support is great for simple questions (that can easily be tracked on the knowledge base anyway) but makes little sense when the representative needs time to curate a proper answer. What you actually get is an immediate first-answer, which is important but commonly is not a solution to your problem. The psychological aspect is also a strong one. Having immediate access to a fellow human being is powerful. We see this a lot with less tech-savvy customers. Email seems impersonal. In all truthfulness, written communication is less personal than making or responding to a call. However, as a means of communication, written text is more useful, as putting in the time to write a concrete description for a problem (or a related solution) reduces the inherent noise of the spoken language. Which in turn can reduce the total resolution time for a support request. There is however one case where phone support is indeed superior. This is when the customers find it difficult to articulate their problem in a proper way and, at the same time, the support agent cannot "read between the lines" and provide helpful answers. In other words, when there is a communication gap. In such cases the total resolution time for ticket based support can skyrocket. This problem can be mitigated though with more experienced and better trained support agents and close monitoring of support metrics. When we offer phone support Although we have a strong preference for the ticketing support system, there are a number of occasions for which we do offer phone support. The most common case is when pre-sales consulting turns to supporting. As part of our sales process, we offer live product demos where customers can ask us anything they want about the system. And since there is a free product version, customers may try the product for as long as they want and get a sales representative to answer very specific questions by phone before buying. The second way to get phone support is via our newly introduced "Customer success manager". This is available only for bigger plans, starting from Plus upwards. The customer success manager is a direct point of contact that is here to help you succeed in whatever usage of the product you have in mind. In this broader scope, phone consulting and problem solving is part of the communication scheme that is offered. The third way to get phone support is as part of a training package. We offer paid training services where an experienced member of our team offers an in-depth walkthrough of the system. This is open-ended and can turn into a questions/answers session for you and your team with high value. Epilogue I tried to pinpoint some advantages of the ticketing based support compared to phone support. Although, as a company, we have not ruled out phone support altogether, and we do offer it under specific occasions, we truly believe that ticket-based support is more predictable, scalable and, at the end of the day, useful. As we continue to evolve we’re emphasizing on improving the support KPIs we track, mainly the time to get a first answer, the quality of answers, the total resolution time and the size and depth of the knowledge base. And this translates to scalable benefits for everyone. The post Do You Offer Phone Support? appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

eLearning games are mounting in recognition for their motivation and engagement value. Most of us believe that game design for eLearning is for experts. Indeed, games are designed better with the aid of game experts. But with a little imagination and plenty of material borrowed from your content, you can create smart games that lead to enjoyable learning experiences. Why are games so fascinating? What is it about games that traps us into their world and transport us within their stories? How come we’re able to engage in playing games for astounding periods of time? And why is this quest to win and achieve points and higher leaderboard positions so important? We could be waiting at the doctor’s office or riding a train; if we are engaged in a mobile game, we easily lose track of time. If there is one answer that will satisfy all these questions, it is this: human emotion. Games engage us through emotion. Notice how, in a single game session, the user begins with anticipation, then moves into excitement and in the end finds himself or herself screaming in glee or disappointment. The range of emotions experienced during the game are powerful motivators to stay engaged until the game concludes. This also depends on how well the game is designed. Another interesting feature of a game is its levels. Players love to complete a level and move on to the next one. The feeling of achievement and mastery propels them to achieve even more and progress even further. Notice the similarity between levels in a game and chapters in an eLearning course. If designed with the game mindset, training programs can have similarly impressive engagement, as games. The end-of-the-chapter quiz can be inserted after a topic or two within the chapter. The points accumulated can be totaled towards the end of the chapter to prove mastery. What about the music element of the game, does it have any place in the eLearning environment? Think about a short video or a case vignette as a chapter. You can use an avatar, complete with music and an attractive background, who talks directly to the learner. With the audio and visual elements as well as the level element implemented from the game to the eLearning environment, interactivity will inevitably follow. Posing riddles and providing hints to solve a question in the drill-and-practice section of the topic would easily satisfy the interactivity feature of the game. Incorporating games in eLearning is a not a new idea. eLearning developers have used premade games and integrated them in their courses for a long time. However, sometimes the flow and theme of a course may be disturbed by such external additions! When this is the case, such games interrupt learning more than they promote it! How can you plan for a game in your eLearning program? Let’s look at these 5 simple steps to designing games for your next course: 1) Explain the game clearly. Provide complete instructions for the game. Instead of displaying the game console in the beginning, encourage learners to walk through the instructions first. Then make instructions available clearly for display whenever they’re needed. The goal of the game needs to be very clear too. What is the learner going to accomplish by completing the game? Are your learners creating their own goals? Also, include hints and links to resources for information needed, in the game. Minimize frustration for your learner-players! 2) What is the role of the learner in the game? Define roles and state whether choices for roles are available to them. If there are characters in your game, what are their motivations, values and goals? 3) How will you learners start the game? The first step is always the hardest! Guide your learners to start the game through a strategy. Show them a message that instructs them what to do, for example, "Psst! check out your basket!" or "You’ve got mail!". Smoothly transition learners into your game. 4) What are the rules of your game? The idea for creating rules is to ensure that learners play in such a way that they achieve the learning goals for the section. State what is acceptable and how exceptions can be made. Encourage players to use the concepts recently learned. 5) How will your game operate? Label all parts of the game interface. How are real-world actions translated into the game? What do they click, drag, type and select to execute these actions? Include a Help facility within the game to provide guidance. Use these five steps to design games using your favorite course-authoring tool. Do share with us your game design experience! eLearning games can be created by anyone! If you have command over your course authoring tool and collaboration tools of your learning management system, you can create a game! The post 5 Great Ways to Design Games for eLearning appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

Throughout the west of Ireland, the landscape is scarred by strange criss-crossing roads that climb up into the hills then simply stop, incomplete, leading nowhere. These roads were the result of the forced labor of the Irish peasantry, who under the strictures of the Poor Law and the reigning discriminatory Economic theory of the day, were made to work in exchange for food during the Great Potato Famine. These roads remain, 150 years later, as visible marks in the Irish countryside, which in this as in so many things, still bears the scars of history and are known as The Famine Roads. Read the story here. I'm reminded of an interview I heard of a holocaust survivor. The women worked hard to capture their cultural recipes, and there are a few books similar. When asked how people could let the Holocaust occur, she replied on the interview "…one small step at a time." The Road to Abilene is a story told by Pat Murray, leadership guru. Basically, it's the tale of a group of people all getting in the car to go someplace no one wants to go but all are afraid to say that. Each, through their silence, agrees to go where they don't want to go. Pat says "You stand for what you tolerate. Every choice made is a speech to others."     When working with teams, Pat speaks of the words and actions seen vs. the inside moves that are not seen. Think of a time when you were part of team, and the words and actions in a meeting were neutralized by behaviors later in other places. How does your team see you? Teams need to know not only their individual purpose and values (non-negotiables), but need to implicitly establish the purpose and values of the team as a whole to feel fully vested.     Meetings are another complication that Pat Murray speaks of. I love his quote "We all attend the same different meeting." In my CEO group, we often talk about 'the meeting after the meeting.' The lack of authenticity in formal meetings, trumped by gossip by the water cooler is a cancer to a team. "There is no trivial act." Leaders must, as Pat says, "…act from the future. You stand for what you tolerate." This is true for every member on the team, not just the leader. Each member must be equally accountable. Watch every little move and behavior in yourself and others to ensure you are aligned to the future you are all vested in.

Last week, Team Trivantis® headed down to sunny Orlando, Florida, for the 2016 Learning Solutions Conference & Expo. It was an exciting conference packed with great presentations, including keynote speaker Bill Nye the Science Guy, an illusionist and puzzle expert, and more. John Blackmon, Trivantis Chief Technology Officer, also presented, sharing his expertise on responsive design with a packed crowd in the expo hall. Thanks to all the attendees who stopped by our booth—both current customers and future customers—we loved seeing you at the show. If you picked up a free t-shirt, be sure to tweet us @Lectora when you wear it. Nothing wrong with a little eLearning #ootd, right? Inspiration (and free shirts) at booth 314! #LSCon2016 #LSCon pic.twitter.com/YPPmlVMUgK — Lectora (@Lectora) March 16, 2016 And don’t forget to check out the #LSCon backchannel on Twitter, so you can catch up on all the inspiration and tips that attendees shared through the conference. Plus, find out what our eLearning "superhero name" would be in this video! See you at the next great eLearning conference! (Hint, hint, it’s the 2016 Lectora® User Conference.) The post Learning Solutions Conference 2016 Recap appeared first on .

There are few things that give us greater joy than to shine the spotlight on successful online instructors who are using Thinkific to create and sell their online courses. Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed countless individuals from around the world build successful online businesses by creating online courses to share what they know with others. We’ve seen people create courses on how to use Microsoft Excel, how to train your dog, money management, and pretty much everything in between. And just when we thought that we’ve seen it all, we met Deanne Love, a former primary school teacher turned online instructor who has been busy inspiring and teaching thousands of people around the world how to dance with hula hoops (aka hoop dancing) with her Hooplovers online school. Inspired by her success, we reached out to her to learn more about her incredible journey, and have her share her insights to help other online instructors succeed. Here is her story: An inspiring story of a primary school teacher turned online instructor. @HOOPLOVERS #teachonlineClick To Tweet From primary school teacher to online instructor Before she became an online instructor, Deanne Love worked as a primary school teacher in Australia for several years. She later relocated to Tokyo, Japan to live out her childhood fantasy of being on the streets of the busiest, coolest city in the world - as she describes it. "I just had this overwhelming desire to move to Tokyo in Japan, so I did that", says Deanne. She arrived in Tokyo in 2003 after accepting a one-year teaching contract, but after falling in love with the culture and lifestyle, she decided to stay longer. She ended up living in Japan until 2011, at which point the frequency and intensity of the earthquakes became enough to convince her to move back to Australia. During her time in there she also met her husband, who is now her business partner at Hooplovers. Deanne’s interest in hoop dancing started in 2007, after she randomly discovered a YouTube video of a woman dancing with a hula hoop. Deanne has always loved to dance, so naturally she was inspired. "I discovered a woman on YouTube, and she was just rocking out", Deanne explains. "She wasn’t a skilled gymnast, she was just having fun and dancing to this really crazy dance music, and in that moment I was just completely mesmerized. I was like, if she can do this, I can do this. I love dancing. This is going to be great." That same day, Deanne purchased her first hula hoop and started practicing. As she researched and practiced her newly discovered passion, she realized that there was actually a large community of passionate hoop dancers around the world. "I was practicing and I realized that there was a whole world around the plant of adults who were enjoying this contemporary style of hoop dance, particularly in California, like in L.A. and San Francisco", says Deanne. Unfortunately for Deanne, Tokyo wasn’t exactly a hotspot for hoop dancers. In order to connect with other hoop dance enthusiasts, she relied primarily on the internet and social media. She even flew to Australia and the U.S. on several occasions to learn from and practice with other hoop dancers. "It was in those early years living in Japan that I personally felt really isolated, so I was looking for ways to reach out to the rest of the world, to first of all, as a student, learn and then naturally as a teacher, teach", says Deanne. "But because we were geographically separated from each other, the idea of starting to build online lessons or ways that I could really succinctly and clearly teach others online was really bubbling." Quitting her job to teach hoop dancing full-time By 2009, after honing her skills as a hoop dancer and instructor, Deanne decided to quit her job to focus on teaching others how to hoop dance full-time. She admits that this was not an easy decision for her to make. "I was working at an international school and I really loved it," says Deanne. "It was actually a hard decision because I really enjoyed my job." But this new direction did allow Deanne to combine her passion for teaching with her passion for hoop dancing, so in that sense, it was an exciting transition for her. "I was a teacher so naturally I was still going to continue my career but if was just in a different mode," says Deanne. In the beginning, most of her teaching was done offline. "We didn’t have the platforms to share as succinctly as we do now", Deanne explains. "I was doing a lot of teaching in real life. I was doing workshops and a lot of classes, so that was a major support for community and income and my teaching skills in dance." She also started publishing free hoop dancing videos on her YouTube channel, which helped her to build her brand and audience online. "We started with YouTube and we still have a really strong YouTube community. I teach on YouTube every week, and obviously that’s free", says Deanne. "So we were like, ok well, if we want to have a sustainable business and we also want our students to see the value and feel really connected, then we need to start filming online courses." Creating her first online course When Deanne and her husband created their first hoop dancing course, they sold it together with their live classes from their website. It was essentially a collection of videos that their customers could download and watch as a complementary resource to the live classes. "We just shot some basic videos, like the foundations of hoop dance, and we put that into a video file", says Deanne. "Then we had a really simple link on a very simple website that combined the sales of my real life classes with this one download." Looking back on that first set of videos that they created, Deanne is proud to say that they’ve definitely come a long way. "It was so terrible compared to what we do today. Today it’s like ‘lights, camera, action!’ and it’s a formal setup, and we have invested a lot of time and energy and funds into how we shoot today versus back then", says Deanne. "It was embarrassing, but the crazy thing was that it was working because there really wasn’t a lot of that style of online teaching, particularly in the niche market that we were working in. So I was able to successfully build my popularity as a teacher." When Deanne and her husband left Japan in 2011 and moved to Melbourne, Australia, they decided to re-shoot the videos that were included in that download package. "We re-shot the whole download file package in the corner of a warehouse with a crazy graffiti backdrop. There was no lighting, there was no studio, there was no microphone or anything, and it was all voiceover", Deanne explains. "In those days we were really just doing what we could with what we had." Those early videos, although imperfect, helped them acquire their first customers and generate revenue that could be re-invested into their business. "Those early day videos helped us to build capital, to build funds so that we could improve", says Deanne. "And I think that because we were supplementing our online courses with weekly YouTube videos, we were giving a lot of value. Our customers from those early days are still with us, and because we share things for free they don’t mind re-purchasing new things because I will always add value each time." Creating their first course also helped them learn more about the needs of their customers based on the feedback that they received. That feedback helped guide their decisions as they created new videos for their customers. "It didn’t happen overnight, but the teaching, the online business, and the building of community all started to come together", says Deanne. "We learned so much from those early days." Using Thinkific to set up their online school As their business evolved, so did the technology that they used to create and sell their online courses. In the beginning, they packaged their videos into a single file that could be downloaded from a simple website. They later switched to WordPress, but found it difficult to create a website that provided their customers with a user-friendly experience that was consistent with their branding. "I was looking for something that was more flexible and beautiful. It’s hard enough to learn movement online, so I wanted something that was really flexible and accessible so that my students could learn step by step, chapter by chapter, and really take their time if they needed to, or have the option to rush through it", says Deanne. "I have been a student my whole life as well as a teacher so, and I also get a lot of feedback from my students as to how they like to watch things and how they need things really, really simple, so it has to be super user friendly." According to Deanne, many of their customers didn’t actually want to download entire video files to their computers. They wanted to be able to watch a little bit at a time, and stream videos instead of downloading them. It was also important to their customers that the course interface be easy to navigate. That feedback from their customers became the criteria that guided their search for a suitable platform to host their online courses. That’s when they discovered Thinkific. "What we were looking for was something that would support all of our students and that I would love the look of as well", Deanne told us. "So when my husband found Thinkific, he was like ‘I think this is the one’." It was also important to Deanne to be able to customize the look of their online school to match the branding they had on other platforms such as YouTube and social media. "I really wanted a fresh, modern, clean, not clunky interface", Deanne explains. "It was really important to me that Thinkific could match our branding, so that it didn’t look like this really old-school business package; that it was going to allow us to shine the brand that people were really familiar with that would make our audience really comfortable." @Thinkific lets you customize your #onlinecourse website to match your branding. #teachonlineClick To Tweet Another reason why they made the switch Thinkific is because it allowed Deanne to create curriculums for new courses quickly and efficiently, without getting frustrated or delayed by technical challenges. "It was important to me that as new workshops and courses came to me creatively, and I was developing them, that I could put them online and that I didn’t have to have these huge barriers", says Deanne. "My development of courses could be translated really quickly to Thinkific. I could have the courses up really quickly, and they were accessible, they were branded, they were just neat, perfect, and beautiful." Marketing Hooplovers and attracting students Deanne has created some incredible courses, but she also knows that simply creating courses and hoping people will find them is not a strategy for building a sustainable business. She has spent a considerable amount of time building her audience online and testing different marketing strategies to promote her courses. We asked Deanne to reveal which of the marketing strategies she’s implemented have been the most effective for her, and it turns out that the majority of her sales have come from just 4 strategies. In no particular order, here they are: YouTube Most hoop dancing enthusiasts flock to YouTube to search for videos to learn new dance moves. For that reason, creating a YouTube channel was a no-brainer for Deanne. It didn’t happen overnight, but she now has over 55,000 subscribers on YouTube, and most of her videos receive thousands of views shortly after being published. Her video How to Hula Hoop for Total Beginners, for example, has been watched over 800,000 times since it was published in 2013. Very impressive! The two things that have contributed the most to the success of Deanne’s YouTube marketing strategy are the quality of her videos and her consistency. She publishes high quality videos on her channel every single week. She also includes a link to her online school in each video description and on the homepage of her channel. "What we do is we create a new YouTube video every week, and that’s obviously for free, and with that, link to other value points, either a blog or lesson downloads, or printed out downloads that they can use", says Deanne. Her videos are great resources for her existing customers, but they also help attract new customers by sending traffic from YouTube to her course website and email newsletter. Quality and consistency are important factors in #YouTube marketing. @HOOPLOVERS #teachonlineClick To Tweet Discount codes for courses Offering occasional discounts on specific courses has helped Deanne experience sudden increases in student enrolment each time she runs a promotion. She offers these discounts primarily to the subscribers on her email newsletter, although she sometimes offers a course discount to her social media followers as well. "Thinkific has allowed us to give discount codes which is really great for us as a business, and it is wonderful for our customers too because we can give them rewards for being so beautiful and loyal", says Deanne. "From time to time we have really great sales, and we can give just our newsletter readers a discount code, so it’s like a special code just for them, or sometimes it might be for our Instagram followers." Creating discount codes for your #onlinecourse is great for rewarding loyal customers. #teachonlineClick To Tweet Email marketing Every successful online instructor knows that having an email list of people who are interested in their course topic is extremely important. When you have a list of email subscribers, you have the power to promote your latest content and courses to people who have literally requested to receive information from you. So when Deanne told us that email marketing is something she has been focused on since the beginning, we weren’t surprised. Today, there are over 13,000 people from around the world that are subscribed to her newsletter. "My email marketing is really strong, so we have worked really hard to build a solid email list and we do that through all the channels of social media but also by offering and trying to create really valuable opt-ins", says Deanne. "For example, last year we shot an incredible video called 15 Hoop Dance Moves Your Body Will Love and we shot it on this gorgeous island in Queensland in Australia. Then we came back to Melbourne and I shot a small tutorial for each of those moves and that is available for free when people sign up for our email list. So that is definitely my strongest and clearest connection with the audience or with my community and my students, because I chat to them like every week through the email." Successful online instructors know that building an email list is very important. #teachonline…Click To Tweet Social media The two social media platforms that Deanne spends the most time on are Facebook and Instagram. "I love Instagram", says Deanne. "It’s so playful and it’s got this whole other circle of movers and shakers and it’s fun for me. It’s a really personal brand. My Instagram is like my own style, even though it’s connected to Hooplovers, I can just be super authentic on Instagram which I love and videos are really great for any movement/practice. Between Facebook and Instagram, Deanne has close to 50,000 followers, whom she shares videos, articles and images with on a regular basis. She sometimes takes advantage of Facebook’s advertising capabilities by running ads to promote her courses. "Facebook has always been there since the early days so I do use it", says Deanne. "We do put our posts on Facebook too to advertise our Thinkific courses." Helpful tips for other online instructors Deanne has certainly learned a ton of valuable lessons as she built her business. For those of you who are just getting started as online instructors, or thinking of creating an online course to share some of your knowledge and experience with the world, here are some friendly pieces of advices that Deanne would like to share with you: 1. Become the face of your business Don’t be afraid to become the face of your business. Build a personal brand around your area of expertise and make sure that brand is consistent across your website, social media channels, email marketing, etc. People are less interested in following specific companies, and more interested in following specific people.  Show your audience the person behind your business. Having a strong presence on YouTube and social media, for example, has really helped Deanne build a personal brand, which she admits has had a dramatic impact on her business. "When I really stepped into that role of being the face of the business, it’s just made the branding so much stronger", Deanne explains. "So not only was it Hooplovers but there is also this woman, which was me, Deanne Love, who people could communicate with and could speak with and it felt like they had a connection with." Don't be afraid to be the face of your business. Build a #personalbrand. @HOOPLOVERS #teachonlineClick To Tweet 2. Don’t wait to create your course Don’t let perfectionism keep you from creating your first online course. Accept that your first course may not be perfect, and just get it done. Yes, there is a chance that not everyone who takes your course will love it, but until you actually create it and get it out there, you’ll never know. "If you have an idea, and you have an audience or you’re growing an audience that is connect to that idea, then don’t wait", says Deanne. "If I didn’t put out any of my content, if I didn’t create any of my courses, I wouldn’t be able to get that feedback. Just start now." Don't let perfectionism stop you from creating your #onlinecourse. @HOOPLOVERS #teachonlineClick To Tweet 3. Listen to your audience As you build your audience and enroll students into your courses, pay attention to the feedback you receive from them. Feedback, whether positive or negative, is invaluable. Listening to her audience has helped Deanne to better understand their needs and frustrations, giving her with valuable insights to create more content and courses that can help them."Contemporary hoop dance is always moving forward, there is always something new", says Deanne. "I listen to my customers really carefully, and I always ask them to open up conversations. So I do have a lot of connection with our customers and I listen to them and I provide them with what they really want. "Start creating. Start moving forward. Start listening to your audience." @HOOPLOVERS #teachonline Click To Tweet Training the next generation of hoop dance instructors After enjoying several years of success as a hoop dance instructor, Deanne decided to create a second online school, Hoop Love Coaching, to help other hoop dance instructors build successful businesses. She created this course in response to all the requests she was receiving from people in her community who wanted to learn how they could generate an income by teaching others to hoop dance. "For the last two years since we have been powering along with our online courses, there’s been a demand for other teachers or other hopeful teachers around the planet to also do some similar stuff to what we’re doing", Deanne explains. "It’s my largest course and it’s training teachers, so there’s a lot that goes into it. I really love it. It’s probably like my biggest passion because what I’m doing is not just supporting teachers to facilitate hoop dance classes and workshops and parties, but also to start their own online business and their own community business, so I really get to like pour both my passion for business and my passion for hoop dance movement into this training course." Living a life of freedom and fulfillment Building a successful online teaching business has enabled Deanne to live a life of freedom and fulfillment. Today, with a total of 9 online courses (2 of which she offers for free) and over 1,600 students from around the world, she is living her passion and helping others to do the same every single day. "Making the shift to teaching online through Thinkific and Social Media has meant we have the time and financial freedom to travel and meet hoopers around the world while still creating and sharing our passion", says Deanne. "Our income has substantially increased. The ease of course delivery has exceeded what we ever dreamed of, Thinkific has changed the way we create and share." Teaching online through @thinkific means we have time and financial freedom. @HOOPLOVERS #teachonline Click To Tweet The post Success Story: From Primary School Teacher to Online Instructor (The Inspiring Story of Deanne Love from Hooplovers) appeared first on Thinkific.

From guest writer Judy Bloxham. We are now at a point two years on from Feltag, so has anything changed? The Feltag panel discussion at Jisc Digifest, whilst it revealed some examples of good practice, returned to many of the pre-Feltag issues we have long observed. There are three main areas that need to come together […]