Online learning doesn’t have to be a solo activity! Online education can deliver highly social and collaborative student experiences. With some attention towards shared activities, you can set the stage for a strong community for your students. Stronger student communities result in improved learning outcomes as students are more engaged and more likely to complete each lesson, and engaged students are happier students! Foster long-term friendships among your students with community building real-time activitiesClick To Tweet Long term friendships often form as a result of taking classes together, and the same can absolutely be accomplished in online groups when instructors build in the opportunity for students to interact. Ideas for scheduled group activities for your class: Set up a private live chat with up to 150 people or a video call for up to 10 people using Google Hangouts Host a Twitter live chat with your audience. Pick a hashtag, ask starter questions, and chat away! This one gets bonus points for making it easy for students to connect 1v1. Schedule a live teleseminar. Calls are a great way to meet your students, and to literally give students a voice with some open discussion time. Tara’s got a great primer on setting up your calls here. Plan a webinar. Webinars are a way to combine live chat with visual slides or a screenshare. We are fans of GoToMeeting and Easy Webinar, and we’ve heard good things about AnyMeeting to get you started. Make it social with community chat during the call. Meet face to face. When setting up a blended classroom, you can combine face to face classes and meetings with online content for an integrated student experience. Schedule formal classes or even social activities. Take a virtual field trip. There are so many valuable learning resources online, you can get REALLY creative with online learning activities. Combine a google hangouts live chat with another online activity, like a virtual walk through an art gallery. In this example, you could post a link to an image of a painting and prompt the group to discuss for 5 minutes before moving on to the next painting. The sky is the limit! Ever heard of a virtual field trip? Get creative with rich experiences for your online students!Click To Tweet Setting Up Your Thinkific Scheduled Class Scheduled classes allow a cohort of students to all start and go through the course at the same time. These classes are well suited to coordinated marketing launches to maximize the number of students in the group. From a technical perspective, scheduled classes are best setup with the use of Drip Content. Drip Content lets you set your course lessons to be released on a certain day. You can choose to either release all of the content on day one, or to release individual lessons on specific days. This encourages your students to work through the course material together, which improves discussion and keeps everyone on the same page. Have you used online group activities with your courses? How did it go? I’d love to hear what you did, and if you have any great ideas to share with other instructors for real-time ways to interact with your students online. Leave a comment! The post Blended Learning & Scheduled Class Activities appeared first on Thinkific.

The use of next and back buttons in elearning is a huge […]

Are you a course owner looking to grow your customer base? There is never a single way to do that, but one method is certain: social media. One of the most successful and cost-effective ways to promote an online course is just by being social, and a great place to do that is Twitter! We’ve pulled together 5 must-do habits, along with actionable tactics you can employ today. 1. Post Valuable Content There is no better way to disconnect with your followers than constant, relentless self-promotion. Give your readers a break! Think of Twitter like a party - if you walk in the door and start shouting about your course, you’ll be led to the door. If you focus on teaching rather than selling, you'll build followers and come out on top.Click To Tweet Instead, show your readers that you are an authority in your area, and that you are capable of teaching them. A great rule of thumb is to post 30% of your own content, and the rest shares and re-tweets from your community that will be valuable and of interest to your reader. If you focus on teaching rather than selling, you’ll build followers and come out on top. COURSE OF ACTION: Do a twitter-audit. If you’re shouting more than sharing, draft out your next tweets with shared content that you didn’t produce (retweets and web-finds included!) 2. Engage with Your Followers Your audience wants to know that you care - we all want the reassurance of knowing that we matter to you, and engagement builds trust. Engage with others as though they were already your friend. By reaching out, they soon will be!Click To Tweet Engagement can come from simply commenting on or re-tweeting content by your followers, or engaging folks in back and forth conversation. As you build your reputation, your future customers may even tweet you with questions or want advice on what to do next. One pitfall of many businesses here is that they ignore questions or comments with silence. Learn from this mistake and engage with your followers: answer their questions, tell them what you know, and thank them when they are appreciative of your work. COURSE OF ACTION: Go into your Twitter mentions and send a reply or retweet every user who has interacted with you in the past two weeks. Still growing your following? Search for tweets related to your niche and dive in as though they were already your follower. By reaching out, they soon will be! 3. Join Conversations One of my favourite features on Twitter is the hashtag, denoted by the # symbol, where people from all over the world can start a conversation and weigh-in to the topic at hand. Popular hashtags in the past include #JeSuisCharlie, #ALSIceBucketChallenge, and #TheDress. By joining business-specific conversations, you can increase exposure for your online courses. Hashtags are an excellent social media strategy, categorizing your tweets and making them easily accessible through Twitter searches. If that isn’t enough, you can also opt to start your brand’s own hashtag. COURSE OF ACTION: Join the #FF (Follow Friday) movement by tweeting a list of users you enjoy following every Friday. To see it in action, just search #FF on Twitter! 4. Start a Twitter Chat Twitter Chats are very similar to conversations, except that users will meet at a predetermined time and a host will ask questions to encourage responses and interaction. They usually last an hour and are very fast-paced - so be prepared! Like conversations in person, Twitter Chats are handy for expanding your network through similar interests. Some helpful resources to get you started are http://chatsalad.com and http://tweetreports.com/twitter-chat-schedule. COURSE OF ACTION: Find an upcoming chat in your niche, and join in a Twitter Chat today! 5. Promote Your Courses Do you want people to know about your courses? Then tell them! Once you’ve got an audience you’re engaging with, you’re sharing more of other people’s content than your own, and you have a growing follower base, you’re in a great position for a launch. Now that you have a loyal audience on Twitter, there’s no better way to share your courses than to get the message across directly. You’ve built a relationship with your followers, and they now trust that what you give to them is worthwhile of their time. Pro-tip: Keep an eye on your unfollow rate, especially as you introduce more self promotion content. That will let you know if you’re off-base. COURSE OF ACTION: Plan out a simple posting calendar to balance self promotion, sharing your own teaching and knowledge, sharing valuable content created by others, and engaging with your audience. Once you’ve got a plan to keep a great balance, go ahead, now is the time for you to self-promote! The post 5 Must-Do Twitter Habits appeared first on Thinkific.

36 Things Every 21st Century Teacher Should Be Able To Do. Some of this is clearly subjective (and a few are rather faddist), but it’s a nice touchstone. It’s also a lovely list for people in Ed.Tech. I think an … Continue reading →

This was my second year presenting at Philadelphia&#821 […]

Known for kickstarting brand recognition, website traffic, and credibility, webinars are fantastic resources for you to build relationships with your audience. But, one of the greatest challenges can be conversion: the number of people who actually go from viewing to buying. The chief purpose of a webinar is to generate sales, so it’s no question that producing a high converting webinar is your top priority. Here are five tips to help you be successful: 1. Find a Balance Between Content and Selling There is no bigger faux pas than constant, in-your-face self-promotion. If you want your viewers to leave, then self-promotion is your go-to. Otherwise, you want to find a respectable level of content and selling. Taki Moore, a webinar marketing wizard, aims to inspire people to go from "curious to conversion." This means spending the majority of your webinar teaching your audience something worthwhile rather then merely pushing sales. Build the conversation, build the value, and only at the end do you introduce your product as the solution. As a result, viewers will be more inclined to trust what you have to say and take your word for it. 2. Make Your Viewers a Part of the Experience The worst thing about any webinar is having disengaged viewers. Every lost viewer is every lost customer. Webinars 101: Make your viewers a part of your webinar experienceClick To Tweet A simple way of preventing this is creating a sense of community. Interact with your viewers by asking questions ("What part of the world are you all from?"), encouraging them to give live input ("What are you thoughts on this?"), inviting them to share what they’ve learned using a designated hashtag, and even calling them out by name. Your goal is to keep them engaged until the end of the webinar and beyond. 3. Urgency Urgency is your friend. Webinar-specific discounts that will be available if viewers buy within the next 24 hours, or that are only live until the end of the week. You need to make the offer so irresistible that they have to do it right that second. Sellers love impulsiveness, and buyers hate the fear of missing out. 4. Give Immediate Rewards Show, don’t tell. Show that your product is amazing, instead of saying that it is. Give your viewers a taste of what your product is like, and present them physical, viable results that they can experience on their own. Webinars 101: Give Immediate Rewards. Show, don't tell!Click To Tweet You want to convince them that your product is right for them, and they want to ensure that it is as good as they think it is. There is no better way to secure sales than selling to someone who is committed from the start. 5. Follow-Up Stay in touch with the viewers who buy your product. Show them all the perks they’re going to receive and the untold secrets behind your product. They’re the ones who have the power to share your success story, so you want to continue having ongoing engagement. Remember, no matter how good your webinar is, there will always be people who choose not to buy it. Instead of letting that get to you, follow up with them and ask for feedback. Why did they not buy your product? What can you do differently next time? Tell them that your offer will still on the table for when they need it. You want to treat your non-buyers as prospective customers, or else all your hard work would have been meaningless. Want more webinar tips by an instructor killing it with webinars to sell his online courses? Check out the case study here.   The post Webinar Design 101 appeared first on Thinkific.

To use a player, or not to use a player, that is the qu […]

Evolution of educational technology infographic - Irish Innovation News - Siliconrepublic.com. First, this is a very US centric view. Also, it is focused almost entirely on devices rather than their uses. That’s part of the whole problem with Ed Tech … Continue reading →

In this week’s E-Learning Heroes Challenge we wer […]

We’ve hit a milestone and I thought it would be a good opportunity to reflect on where we came from over the past ten years and where we’re headed next. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Jim Breen - the Chief Executive Officer at PulseLearning. I hope… More