Institute of Learning Innovation Seminar 5th April 2013, The Learning Innovation Studio, 103 - 105 Princess Road East, 2 - 3 pm Virtual worlds in practice and theory A presentation of three examples of the use of virtual worlds in education and performance Disaster Management Communication Studies Digital Cultures Extract / Insert mixed reality installation The review of the examples will look at the rationale for the use of virtual worlds, the advantages compared to other media these presented and what lessons were learnt. This will be followed by an examination of what makes Virtual Worlds interesting as a teaching and learning tool, what requirements they make of learners and how they alter the learning experience. This will focus on three specific aspects. The role of identity Making sense of space The role of embodiment About Mark Mark Childs is a Senior Research Fellow for Elearning at Coventry University in the UK. Since 1997 he has worked on 40 educational projects mostly involving technology-supported learning; at Coventry and in previous posts at the Universities of Wolverhampton and Warwick, as well as a freelance consultant. In 2010 he was awarded a PhD from the University of Warwick for his thesis on Learners’ Experiences in Virtual Worlds. His main research interest is the user experience of synchronous communication platforms, with his most recent work including virtual teamworking and digital identity, but particularly learning and performance in virtual worlds.  

http://openclipart.org/detail/105295/brain-in-a-jar-by-feraliminal  Was chatting with someone today about why we like text chatting, what it offers over face-to-face interaction or a phone call. I chat a lot both on fb and Skype, with a select set of people (about a dozen). It’s a mixture of personal and professional stuff and there is usually a lot of emoticons and banter involved. I think there is something about the text medium, can’t quite put my finger on it. It’s definitely different from verbal communication. Interesting the way you convey emotions through emoticons, hashtags and putting things in brackets <just saying> <ducks> <looks innocent> Some people aren’t comfortable doing this. For one thing you certainly need to be able to type fast, otherwise the flow of the conversation doesn’t work. I can get totally lost doing this and then suddenly I emerge finding that I have spent over two hours chatting with someone. My friend was saying that for him chatting like this has enabled him to get to know people much better; he said he feels that people disclose more about themselves in the chat environment. Why is that I wonder? Is it because you feel freer because you aren’t face-to-face? Is it something to do with the anonymity of the medium? Now don’t get me wrong, I am very much a face-to-face sort of person, but I do love interacting with people online. I have found that I have really developed friendships in this way, getting to know professional colleagues on a personal level to the point where I would call them friends. It’s also a great way to spark off new ideas. Indeed this blog post is a direct result of my conversation on fb this morning! 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/redplastic/3749387903/  I’ve been meaning to write about presence for some time, but Mark Childs beat me to it. I agree with a lot of his points, but disagree that immersion and presence are the same thing. Presence is only realised in relation to others, whereas immersion is a personal state/construct. I like Mark’s analogy in terms of being immersed in water; immersion is also an important aspect of ‘flow’. So what is presence? Some dictionary definitions: The state or fact of being present; current existence or occurrence. Immediate proximity in time or space. Neither of these really captures what I understand by presence. I think it is something more than this. This definition comes closer: ‘the bearing, carriage or air of a person; especially stately or distinguished bearing’. I am interested in the difference between presence face-to-face and online. In a face-to-face context presence is related to a number of factors. It’s about someone’s aura, their stance. It might be that someone has presence because they are tall, attractive, have a deep voice or it might be related to their intellect. We have all experienced the feeling of being effected by someone, being very aware of them, feeling a connection with them on a sub-conscious level. In the digital world presence is very different, it is conveyed primarily through text. Presence is channeled through your words and associated emoticons, etc. I often wonder how I am perceived online. What people make of the things I say, the pictures I post. What is my digital personality and how is it different from the way I interact face-to-face. As I said in my previous post I find online interactions liberating and different to the interactions I have with people face to face. Of course technology plays a part. The affordances of different media enable or disenable certain types of interaction. So facebook is a good medium for sharing multimedia, Twitter requires you to speak in a certain way, with its limit of 140 characters. Virtual worlds provide a bridge to face-to-face interaction, via your avatar. The avatar you choose says something about you. Mine is very much the girl next door, with brown hair, wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Although I must admit I also have very nice wings Don’t know what this avatar says about me. Our digital presence is fragmented across these different media. The collective self is a culmination of these individual utterances. The way I speak on my blog is different to the postings I put on facebook or Twitter. They have different purposes and audiences. So what does ‘presence’ mean in a digital context? I think it is about how you are perceived by others through your interaction with them. Presence only has meaning in relation to others. It’s a social construct. For some people you will have presence, for others you won’t. It is all to do with whether your interactions have meaning for others.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmckible/5883298855/  I have been thinking a lot recently about digital identity and presence online (see earlier posts). Mark Childs has also been writing about presence, in particular, with respect to virtual worlds. I like his definition of presence: Presence is a combination of mediated presence ("being there" aka immersion) + social presence (projection of ourselves, perception of others) + copresence (being somewhere with others) + self presence (or embodiment). David Hopkins has blogged today about ‘The Technology of Touch’.  I think this takes the immersive experience of technology a stage further. David argues that: By introducing touch in this way you can bring any substance or texture to the classroom where it would not be possible (or safe) to do so. What does moon rock feel like? What does hard enamel tell you about the integrity of a tooth? What does the surface of a scarf feel like when it’s frozen in liquid nitrogen? How do you spot a possible failure in an engine block when it’s running at 9000 rpm. To experience these things can bring the subject, the science, the learning alive where you would not always be able to? So haptic technologies enable you to experience the textuality of things you may not be able to access in the physical world; either because it is not available or because it is unsafe to do so. It allows Medical and Dental students to practice and develop their skills in an authentic and textual environment, before unleashing them on the real world. So, through technologies, we now have a full spectrum of experiences; from the social and connected interaction with others through social media and the power of ‘text-plus’ (i.e. text plus emoticons, hashtags, brackets, etc.), through the ‘virtual physicality’ of Virtual Worlds, and through the touch-based experience of haptic technologies. As a result the boundaries between real and virtual are truly blurred. What do these various digital spaces mean in terms of presence, experience, immersion and identity? And how can they be harnessed to promote different pedagogical approaches?

  Leicester is the fifth institution I have worked at. It is a great place to work and the people in my department (the Institute of Learning Innovation) are fantastic. We have a vibrant community of PhD students and visiting scholars. So I feel very much part of the University of Leicester. However, this sense of community is secondary to the sense of community I feel with my wider network of peers through social media such a Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, the blogosphere and Skype. I love the variety of connections I have across these media, the comments and the banter, the intellectual debate, the serendipitous learning through links others provide or via blog posts. Indeed my last blog post on haptic technologies was prompted by a blog post by David Hopkins, which I came across this morning on Twitter. These technologies have truly transformed the way I work and even the way I think. Ideas are sparked through the postings of others, comments on my blog help develop my ideas and in turn spark new thoughts. The dynamic and immediate communication is so much more valuable than developing ideas through the torturously slow journal publication route, it can take years for publications to be published and then at best only a hand full of people might read the article and it is highly unlikely than anyone will comment or provide feedback on the piece. Through social media we now have an amazing way of co-constructing knowledge, we feed off each other.    I wonder if any research has been done on how this has changed the nature of research? There is of course the book ‘The Digital Scholar - how technology is transforming scholarly practice’ by Martin Weller, in which he argues that there are three characteristics associated with being a digital scholar: open, networked and distributed. Cristina Costa’s thesis (The Participatory Web in the context of academic research: landscapes of change and conflict) applied a Bourdieun theoretical lens on the concept of digital scholarship. The thesis focused on the use of participatory media to promote digital scholarship and foster innovative approaches in the communication and dissemination of research. A narrative inquiry methodology was used, along with the use of Bourdieu’s concepts of social capital, habitus, field and violence as a theoretical lens to understand the research findings. I think we need more research into the nature of digital scholarship and its role in developing research ideas. We need to better understand how social media are influencing our ideas and what are the implications for the taking forward of our research field. 

I recently did a review of the ‘e-Learning and Social Networking Handbook’ (Rennie and Morrison 2012). The book is an excellent introduction to social media and how they can be used to promote different pedagogical approaches. The authors state that the purpose of the book is to provide guidelines for integrating social networking into course design. They classify the tools as follows: Audiographics Blogs e-Books e-Portfolios Games and Simulations Instant Messaging Mashups Mobile Learning Online Forums Photo Sharing Podcasts RSS Feeds Second Life Social Bookmarking Social Networks Twitter Video Messaging Wikis Video Clips and YouTube Video Chat  For each tool they then provide: a description of the tool, discuss the educational challenges and the opportunities the tool provides for learning, the strengths of the resource, and potential disadvantages. They conclude with a chapter on the constraints on course design from the perspective of students, teachers and institutions. References Rennie, F. and T. Morrison (2012). e-Learning and social networking handbook - resources for higher education. London, Routledge.                

  Mark Childs gave a talk on Friday at Leicester. This blog post is a summary of the key points. His talk focused on his research on Virtual Worlds. He provided three examples. The first was the use of SecondLife for disaster management communication. This was in conjunction with Yung-Fang Chen and El Parker in Coventry. It was a conversion of a table-top exercise, where the students take on the roles of different agencies after a natural disaster. One students in pairs travels from office to office in SL and negotiate on behalf of their agencies. The other stays at base. The student found it a complicated environment. Note cards in SL were available with instructions, and the students could walk around the environments and click on different note cards. However, this resulted in cognitive overload, a solution would be to print out the note cards. Evaluation of the students’ experience elicited the following points. In terms of their avatars, they could play about with them and personalise them. Would it be possible to use the avatars to signify different roles, by using uniforms for example?  Interestingly, the participants didn’t identify with the avatars. They were characters as a means of interaction. And they found it difficult to identify with the roles of others in game. ‘In the computer, there is no extra talking.’ It varied as to whether funny avatars were a hindrance or a help.  The design of the world was fairly basic and students didn’t experience it as particularly realistic. In essence, it was ‘a fake real world’. They wanted more emotional resonances so it felt tense, time dependent, e.g. actual refugees, collapsed building etc. Finally, engagement was not through the design of world but through motivation to try out things they had learnt. The second example focussed on learning goals in a BA Media and Communication at Newman College and in particular, a module on media futures. Journal entries related to module themes and student were assessed on two entries related to one theme. Mark was a guest lecturer on the course in support of the theme of identity. Findings, included the value of text as a means of feeling connected, and the value of ‘para-linguistic’ things. There was both a standard lecture space and a sand box. The learners were given tasks of interpreting appearance of avatars and they used voice for presentation, and text for dialogue. In terms of student interaction, there was little participation - ‘isn’t anyone contributing today? Room seems very quiet.’ The students were asked to build an identity cube and volunteers can then discuss what this means. This is based on Carina Girvan Sleepy Littlething. They were given instructions on creating cubes and had to upload 5 images to add to the cubes faces. The theme was something that represented them and their identity. Mark argued that this gives them a way to focus on what they are doing, reification (thingness). And through this they can then get to their concepts of identity. The creating of the cubes gave the abstraction of identity a solidity, which provided a basis for exploration and it related to Wenger’s notion of reification or thingness.  The activity appeared to have energized the students and gave a springboard for their ideas. However, it can lead to distraction, discussion of abstractions still limited, but raises awareness of themes. The third example was around installation and performance, with the Artist/Performer Herbert Gallery in Coventry in Oct/Nov 2012. In this, three artists who work in design performance acting in virtual worlds and particularly mixed reality. It explores realities within realities, blurring of the real and virtual spaces; or rather a mingling of realities In the last part of his talk, mark explored some of the definitions and concepts associated with the virtual experience. The defined Virtual Worlds as: ‘synchronous and persistent network of people and programs embodied as avatars and agents facilitated by networked computers using navigable space to engage the user’s belief’. In terms of space: these are navigable consistent spaces with physics. All give rise to mediated presence. Similar to gamespaces ritual spaces theatrical spaces, bounded spaces in which separate rules and conventions exist and which have a heightened semiotic system that requires engagement of belief - fourth places. He finds the ‘Conscious Competence Learning Matrix’ www.cognitivedesignsolutions.com. He referenced Barrett 2002: 35 Cycle of disengagement and Caspi and Balu 2008: 339 Cycle of engagement.        

I recently read an article which described a conceptual framework for mediated environments (Childs 2010). The model augments Activity Theory (Cole, Engeström et al. 1997) (subject, objected, Mediating Artefacts, division of labour, community, and rules and conventions), with two aspects of  Wenger’s Community of Practice (Wenger 1998) (presence and identity) (Figure 1).  Figure 1 The paper reminded me of the meta-model for learning (Figure 2) we developed about ten years ago (Conole, Dyke et al. 2004). The model consists of three dimensions of learning: Learning individually or learning sociably Learning through information or through experience Non-reflective versus reflection learning.  Figure 2 Non-reflective learning needs unpacking. If I am driving across America, sub-consciously I am learning about American culture. If I am sitting in a bar in Spain, I am improving my Spanish through the conversations going on around me. It is what Jarvis calls ‘pre-conscious’ learning. The model can be used in two ways. Firstly, as a means of mapping an activity using a particular tool. For example a reflective blog would be individual, experience-based and reflective, whereas a group blog aggregating resources for a course would be social, information based and reflective. Secondly, it can be used to map different pedagogical models. Three examples are illustrated in Figures 3-5.  Figure 3                 Figure 4  Figure 5   References Childs, M. (2010). "A conceptual framework for mediated environments." Educational Researcher 52(2). Cole, M., Y. Engeström, et al. (1997). Mind, culture, and activity: Seminal papers from the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, Cambridge Univ Pr.            Conole, G., M. Dyke, et al. (2004). "Mapping pedagogy and tools for effective learning design." Computers and Education 43(1-2): 17-33. Wenger, E. (1998). "Communities of practice: Learning as a social system." Systems thinker 9(5): 1-5.                  

One of the sessions I attended at this year’s PELeCON conference was on ‘Digital literacies and work placement’. The first speaker was Nadja Gagsi, who presented on the digital literacy work at Reading University as part of their JISC funded project. They used Beetham and Sharpe’s digital literacy framework. She outlined ten key findings from the project:  Awareness - there was a lack of understanding of digital literacies and their importance for employability. Reflection and articulation - there was a need to bridge the gap between learning and applying digital skills in a professional context. The importance of monitoring and assessment. Tangible outputs - in terms of having something to show/evidence and development of a sense of ownership. The importance of having a positive online presence. The need to develop social media skills. That practitioners need time to develop and practice digital skills. The importance of continued contact with supervisors and co-workers during placement. The importance of promoting the digital placement experience. Developing a maximum digital benefit for work-based learning. The second speaker was Catherine Cronin who presented on ‘Enacting digital identities’. She quoted Stephen Heppell: More change will happen in Education in the next ten years, than in the past 100. She described a number of initiatives including CODER DOJO (a community to help kids develop coding skills), MOOCs and Google+. She argued that there was an inter-dependence between digital literacies, social media and digital identity. She listed Doug Belshaw’s eight aspects of digital literacy (cultural, cognitive, constructed, communicative, conflict, creative, critical and civic). She went on to describe a project in her own institution around a course on developing professional skills, which got the students to think about which tools they were using and how they were using them. She referenced Howard Reingold’s five social media literacies, danah boyd’s work on ‘networked publics’ and Bonnie Stwarts work on academic and networked learning . 

  One of this year’s PELeCON conference keynotes was my friend Joyce Seitzinger from Deakin University.  This blog post is a summary of her talk, the slides are available online. She started by stating that winning a place for technology is easy, whereas winning people for technology is hard. The talk gave a nice overview of some new tools and how they can be used, as well as Joyce reflecting on her own use of social media. She referred to Hegarthy and Kelly’s work on staff development models. Other references included ‘The information diet’ by Clay Johnson and ‘Is Google making us stupid?’ by Nicholas Carr. She showed a really nice infographic  illustrating social media and how they can be used to support different activities. She agrees with Clay Shirkey’s assertion that it is not information overload, but filter failure. We can harness the power of our distributed social network of peers to act as filters and aggregators for us. She stated that ‘my network is my filter and my lifeline’. She described three types of interaction, team based, Community of Practice and Networked, which is similar to Dron and Anderson’s concepts of groups, networks and collectives (Dron and Anderson 2007). She also referenced Wenger et al.’s book ‘Digital Habitus’about the stewarding of technologies (Wenger, White et al. 2009). She when on to describe the Netprax project that she is involved with at Deakin, which is trying to help academics make more effective use of social media. The project is using a range of tools, include Yammer, fb, blogs and Twitter. She also referenced Dave White’s work  on digital visitors and digital residents and also Martin Weller’s book ‘The digital scholar’. She argued that becoming a networked learner was an example of a phenomenal experience, i.e. something that fundamentally changes you. She then shared a number of interesting sites, including: about.me, visual.ly, vizify.com and visualize.me.  She finished by quoting from John Naughton’s recent book (Naughton 2012) that we overestimate the short term impact of new technologies and under estimate their long term impact.  References Dron, J. and T. Anderson (2007). Collectives, networks and groups in social software for e-Learning. Proceedings of World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education Quebec. Retrieved Feb. 16: 2008. Naughton, J. (2012). From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, what you really need to know  about the internet.            Wenger, E., N. White, et al. (2009). Digital Habitus - stewarding technology for communities. Portland, OR, CPsquare.                

Donald Taylor, the James Bond of e-learning apparently ;-), gave the closing keynote at this year’s PELeCON conference. The title of his talk was ‘Does learning and development have a future?’ He began by asking us to think about how our roles have changes in the last five years as a result of technology. For me technologies have had a transformative impact on my practice. Blogging is an important way for me to develop or work up ideas or simply summarise interesting things I have seen or read. Some of the things others in the audience suggested included: the increasing importance of social media, the importance of fb, the way in which technologies enable you to have a higher profile as a research and hence have more impact, the importance of blogging, the fact that we are sharing more and the higher expectations or the 24/7 culture. He argued that a key turning point in terms of technologies was 1990 with the development of the web. He suggested there were three aspects of importance:   Intangible values - the fact that there has been a shift in companies from having a high percentage of tangible assets to a high percentage on intangible assets, i.e. it is no longer physical objects that are of value, but people skills and ideas. Globalisation - we are now part of an interconnected, distributed worldwide network, there is a shift from a Western perceptive to the increasing importance of China. He argued that MOOCs are an example of this global phenomenon; initiatives such as edX, coursera, the Khan Academy, FutureLearn, Udemy and Pearsons; providing free courses to thousands of people. He suggested that MOOCs are a milestone, indicating change; i.e. that education is being transformed. There has also been a shift from a position where information is power to information being free, what Martin Weller refers to as ‘an ecology of abundance’ (Weller 2011). John Naughton argues that in this world, economy makes no sense and that we need to be thinking in terms of shifting ecologies (Naughton 2012). He referenced the recent report ‘An avalance is coming’ (Barber, Donnelly et al. 2013), which begins with the controversial quote: Our belief is that deep, radical and urgent transformation is required in higher education as much as it is in school systems. Our fear is that, perhaps as a result of complacency, caution or anxiety, or a combination of all three, the pace of change is too slow and the nature of change too incremental. He gave some startling statistics in terms of investments in e-learning: $9.1 bn Pearson, $4.7 bn Phoenix University, $32 bn Endorsement of Harward University, $6.5 bn Cambridge University, and  $1.9 bn the global market for Learning Management Systems. He concluded by arguing that despite the potential of technologies to be transformative, there are barriers, in particular, digital inclusion/exclusion and a replication of the old boys network. So the key message for me was - will technologies be transformative or disruptive or both?  References Barber, M., K. Donnelly, et al. (2013). An avalanche is coming: Higher education and the revolution ahead, http://www.ippr.org/publication/55/10432/an-avalanche-is-coming-higher-education-and-the-revolution-ahead. Naughton, J. (2012). From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, what you really need to know  about the internet.            Weller, M. (2011). The digital scholar - how technology is changing academic practice. London, Bloomsbury Academic.                

I really enjoyed the PELeCON conference. I liked the format; in terms of the mix of themed sessions, interactive workshops and lots of keynotes. Unfortunately there were less people at the conference this year, which is a shame as it was excellent. It was good to meet up with old friends and to finally meet people I interact with on twitter and flickr, in particular the Irish contingent - Catherine Cronin, Mary Loftus and Pam O’Brien. There were lots of opportunities to chat and network. Great also to finally meet Don Taylor, Steve Bunce and Doug Belshaw (herby known as the bearded one). Digital literacies seemed to be a recurrent theme across many of the sessions, which was great as it aligned to one of the key themes of my keynote. I’m working up a paper to go alongside my presentation, which is turning into a mini-thesis! Will blog about in due course, but here is a summary of the main themes I covered in the talk. I began with a quote from Einstein that Joyce Seitzinger had posted on fb: Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think. I really like this, as I think it should at the forefront of our minds when we are designing learning interventions. I then described an elearning timeline, highlighting key milestones; from rich multimedia resources in the late eighties through to MOOCs in the last few years. I focused in particular on some of the key characteristics of social and participatory media, such as distributed, networked, open, dynamic, social, complex and participatory. I then summarized some of the findings from the MATEL study which has done an in-depth analysis of emergent technologies across four sectors: schools, tertiary, VET and adult learning. I then described the meta-learning model, I have recently blogged about and showed how it could be used to map different pedagogical approaches. I then shared four examples of how technologies can be used to promote different pedagogical approaches, namely: drill and practice, mobile learning, situative learning, and immersive learning. I then shared some of my current thinking on the relationship between identity, presence and interaction online. I argued that identity is how you present yourself online and how you interact and communicate with others. I used Mark Childs’ definition of presence as consisting of four aspects: mediated presence ("being there"/immersion), social presence (projection of ourselves, perception of others), copresence (being somewhere with others) and self presence (or embodiment). Finally in terms interaction I drew on Moore’s transactional distance work (Moore 1989)(interaction between learner and teacher, learners and learners, learners and content) and Hillan et al.’ additional dimension (learning and interface) (Hillman, Willis et al. 1994). The final part of the talk argued that despite the potential of technologies there is a gap between the promise and reality and that teachers need guidance and support to make pedagogically informed design decisions, that make good use of technologies and outlined our work on the 7Cs of Learning Design. I’ve posted my final slides on slideshare. Conole pe le_con_final from Grainne Conole References Hillman, D. C., D. J. Willis, et al. (1994). "Learner-interface interaction in distance education: an extension of contemporary models and strategies for practitioners." The American Journal of Distance Education 8(2): 30-42. Moore, M. (1989). "Three types of interaction." American Journal of Distance Education 3(2): 1-6.

 Arianna Mazzeo from the University of Catalonia  gave an interesting workshop recently for us at Leicester. The focus was on the ways in which people are using mobile phones these days. She had us working in two groups and asked us to draw a timeline to indicate how we used our phones over the course of a day. In our group we indicated the function used above the line and mapped what we were doing at the time underneath. There was a lot of overlap between the two groups; for example using the phone as an alaram clock in the morning, using it to surf the net, read articles, answer email, check Facebook and use Twitter, but also some differences. One member of our group is going ‘An audio a day challenge’, so uses his phone to take recordings, Others of us are doing something similar in terms of ‘A photo a day challenge’. What was particularly striking to me was a) the fact that neither group mentioned the use of the phone as a erghh phone… and b) the variety of ways in which the phone was being used and how it was an integral part of our lives.  Such an intimate relationship with the phone is a relatively recent phenomenon; arising as a result of the emergence of smart phones, such as the iPhone. The variety of functionality and Apps now available is truly amazing, providing anywhere, anytime access to support a range of daily activities we undertake. I remember years ago being in California with people from Apple. One guy was telling me that we would be able in the future to look up on a device restaurants in the area, along with ratings and then be able to remotely book a table. At the time it seemed like Science Fiction, but of course nowadays we don’t think twice about being able to do such things. It makes you wonder how we survived before such devices! And I can’t even conceive a time before Google and the Internet. Anyone remember ‘Yellow Pages’? For me the way in which we appropriate technologies goes back to Gibbon’s notion of Affordances; i.e. technologies have key characteristics but these are only realised in relation to an individual and their personal preferences, skills and context. It takes time to appropriate technologies into your daily practice. I was personally reminded of this very recently. I got an iPad in the Autumn. At first I was excited about it and played about downloading various Apps, but after a while I found I was no longer using it and had reverted to using my Mac Air. I was lucky enough to win an iPad Mini (I never win anything!) at the Ascilite conference at the end of November, but just somehow never got round to playing with it much. Five months on, just before I went to Saudi Arabia, I decided to make a concerted effort to give it a go. Whilst waiting in the airport for my flight I downloaded various Apps and in particular iBooks, along with some free books. I found a book I liked and started reading it… Soon I was totally hooked, the interface was nice to read and the size and weight of the device was much better than the iPad, which is just too heavy. Having made the breakthrough with using it to read books, on my return I started downloading lots of other Apps - Feedly for reading blogs I follow, Facebook, Twitter etc. of course, various curation tools, games, reference sites, a full Spanish dictionary, a range of work Apps (such as Office Apps, To Do lists, expenses Apps, etc.), various media tools etc. I can really see the power of the device now. As I said on Facebook this morning ‘Not love at first sight, but definitely a permanent partner now’.

I gave a keynote in Dammam, Saudi Arabia last week. It was an interesting conference with over 1000 delegates, mainly from across Saudi Arabia. The conference organizers had invited an impressive line up of international speakers. Here are some of the highlights Jim Cibulka started the conference off with a talk on international collaboration. He referenced Peter Drucker’s work on knowledge workers and argued that we have shifted from a data poor to a data rich context. He argued that there were a number of demands on Higher Education, including: the need to produce more high-quality degrees, the globalization of the workshop and mobility of students, and the need for cost-effective solutions to increase collage access to underserved populations. For the states he listed the following challenges: dwindling government budgetary support for public institutions, decrease in the proportion of young adults earning degrees, policy makers call for accountability, and technological advances challenging traditional modes of delivery (referencing Christiansen’s concept of disruptive technology). He described CAEP and their approach to accreditation, with an emphasis on outcomes and results. Helen Eccles’ talk was entitled ‘Skills and skills-based courses as a means of enhancing curriculum effectiveness’. She began by outlining the importance of 21st Century skills, in terms of: the increased importance of technologies and globalization, life in increasingly global, international, multi-cultural and inter-connected, importance of information over possession of facts and figures, and the economies of developed countries have shifted from a basis of material goods and services to information and knowledge. She showed a graph illustrating that in terms of jobs there has been a decrease in manual skills and an increase in cognitive skills. She listed the following as examples of 21st Century skills: collaboration, creativity, communication, IT literacy, citizenship, problem-solving, decision making, critical thinking and self-directed learning.  These can be categorised as follows: ways of thinking, ways of working, tools for working and living in the world. She then showed how these can be developed in different subject areas, mapping to the learning objectives for the courses. Eugene Rice focused on the changing role of academics and in particular the move away from research intensive institutions to a focus on student engagement. He cited Boyer’s work on the nature of scholarship, in terms of scholarship of: teaching and learning, integration, engagement and discovery. He suggested that there were three pedagogical innovations face institutions: active, experience-based learning, the power of relational learning through peer learning and learning communities, and technology-enhanced learning.  Beverley Oliver gave an engaging talk on the work they are doing at Deakin University to transform the curriculum, in terms of the development of generic learning outcomes, namely: fundamental skills (such as literacy and numeracy), people skills, thinking skills, and personal skills. Deakin are adopting an evidence-based approach for students to show how they have developed these skills. 

I thought I would share my experience of being in Saudi Arabia recently. Some people on Facebook were deriding me for going, saying going was tantamount to supporting the regime and that we, in the West, should be boy cutting such countries. I disagree for two reasons. Firstly, how can you make a judgment on somewhere you have never been? OK being there for only three days only gave me a bit of an insight into the culture, but at least I now have a better understanding of it. Secondly, why should the people there be deprived of international ideas, particularly the women? People are people, irrespective of the regime and culture in which they live. I found the people lovely, really hospitable and friendly. We were put up in the Sheraton Hotel in Dammam, I had an amazing big room, practically a suite! The food was fantastic and lots of it. I was given an Abaya when I first arrived, it is a requirement to wear one when in public, although Western woman don’t have to cover their hair, which was good. It was very frustrating seeing a lovely outdoor swimming pool and not being able to use it (men only).  It felt strange having to wear the Abaya, but I have to say it was surprisingly comfortable and elegant. There were over 1000 delegates at the conference, mainly from Saudi Arabia. Men and women were segregated; the men in a nice airy room, the women in a dingy room underground. The sessions were video conferenced into the ‘ladies quarter’. I was allowed into the men’s section when I was doing my talk and was then escorted back to the ladies quarter. They were not happy as the cameraman refused to focus on me, instead showing shots of the men in the audience. We were constantly offered food, dates and tea. The organizers couldn’t have been more helpful. I found the people lovely, particularly the women, who were really interested in the talks and were keen to find out more. It was good to have the chance to chat to many of them between sessions. The atmosphere in the two sections of the conference was very different; in the men’s section it was sober, with many falling asleep, whereas the atmosphere was more lively in the ladies quarters, not been seen by the men meant that we were free to move around and chat. Many of the women were interested in doing Masters and PhDs and I even met one lady who is coming to do a PhD with us in the Autumn and after hearing me talk she wants to focus it around our 7Cs of Learning Design framework, which is great! Also there is a chance that I will get invited back there, would be nice to run some Learning Design workshops. So on reflection I am very glad I went, I now feel I have more of an understanding of the Saudi culture. It is an interesting country and it is clear that Education is a fundamental priority for them.

The proposals from eLearning vendors are in and have been thoroughly reviewed and evaluated. Presentations were made. At this point, eLearning project sponsors may be tempted to simply pick an eLearning vendor and get on with the contracting process. What’s often overlooked? Checking references.

In the quest to find the right eLearning vendor, it’s all too easy for a project sponsor be seduced by a proposal that sounds too good to be true. That vendor who talks a good game may turn out to be a perfect match. But it’s not uncommon to choose a vendor who turned in an amazing proposal, only to feel let down once the project work begins.

Photo credit: underutilized, published under CC Some time ago I was privileged to attend an online discussion among veteran trainers who were exchanging advice on the profession and business of training. Here, I want to share the most important conclusions with you. I hope you learn something, but more importantly, put the advice to work for you. Professional Development Pam van Engelshoven has this to say, in answer to the question What helped you in becoming a trainer? I had no idea that I was going to be a trainer, but like Adrian I had the habit of studying trainers when I was in a course or workshop. I definitively had my preferences especially concerning attitude, and that is exactly what I am offering the participants in my trainings now, I saw what "belonged" to me! Furthermore when I started I was lucky to work for an organization that invested in their regular free lancers (NACSI), and this generosity - from both sides since then - is one of the important ingredients of a long term and successful combination. Robert Blaga adds this: "Spend time as a learner" - I find this to be a very good practice. Each year I take time to attend at least 3 sessions (last year I had 4). I also like you asking people what they’d have done differently. It shows you care about your clients and your work.   Growing Your Business Whether you’re a freelancer or a the owner of a training business, you face the same questions: what can I do for my customers’ organization and how do I grow my own business? Daryl has 3 inspiring and easily remembered rules: There are only 3 ways to grow your impact or your business: Help more people Help people more Help people more often To do this successfully you must help people with what they want help with, not just what you think they should want help with, and never forget that you can only continue to help if you help with what the guy writing the check wants help with first. Photo credit: Ståle Grut, published under CC Brian Carroll: Thorough understanding of the strategic plan for the business Understanding the capabilities needed by the business to deliver strategic objectives Ability to gain stakeholder support and resourcing for training and development initiatives that will address capability gaps (I know) Ability to demonstrate ROI to the business to retain stakeholder support Successfully Managing A Training & Development Department In the role of a corporate training manager, you’ve got different responsibilities. How do you deal with them? Craig Watkinson: Understand the impact of the training that you are responsible for. Have a team of well respected and capable SME’s for your content and delivery. GET FULL MANGEMENT BUY IN for all you do! Not in any order. Faezeh Firouzabadi sums it up nicely: Planning and program development is an important part of the training manager’s job. Since training offers a way of developing skills, enhancing productivity and quality of work. Therefore, training managers have to: identify the training needs of an organization to determine how to modify or improve existing programs and what new training programs would assist the organization in maximizing its use of information technology. come up with individualized training plans to strengthen an employee’s existing skills or teach new ones. determine the effectiveness of training programs and other instructors’ performance As a training manager, you also need to be up to date on the latest instructional methods, materials and training techniques. Photo credit: Jason Ortego, published under CC Laura says: Learn how to push back and insist on evaluation of a performance problem before just allowing others to throw training at every issue. Kate Cobb concludes the discussion: It’s great to see so many ideas. I have to agree with Brian and others who stressed the strategic responsibility. In my experience this is where most training managers get stuck - they may have very popular programmes running but if they’re not tied in to overall business objectives, then how useful are these programmes? Training managers often say that no-one listens to them so how can they get heard at the ‘top table’? Laura hit the nail on the head for me!   Share this post: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or Google+. The post Knee Deep in the Mud: Golden Advice from Veteran Trainers appeared first on TrainerTops Blog.

If you have thought about trying to make money with your own YouTube videos, the process may have seemed opaque to you. In this LMScast Joshua Millage and Christopher Badgett tell you how to monetize your YouTube channel, and it’s much simpler than you think. The conventional approach to generating income with YouTube goes something like this: Make a video or video series Become a YouTube Partner Allow pop-up ads before, during, and/or after the video runs Hope the video goes viral so you can rake in the cash from all those ad views The truth is, you aren’t going to realize much income from those ads unless you get hundreds of thousands of views, and the likelihood is that you won’t. But there is a direct way to make more money from fewer viewings without inundating your viewers with advertising: Create online courses. If you are already creating video content, then you have the basis for your online courses. You can also convert video dialog into text by getting it transcribed and summarized. Content is the hardest part, so if you have it already then converting it into an online course is not difficult, especially if you use a course development platform like our LifterLMS WordPress learning management system plugin. Using this approach to generating income with YouTube would look more like this: Make a video, or video series Offer a few introductory videos from your series as a lead generator for your in-depth online courses Receive payments directly when people sign up for your courses You create courses with a learning management system (LMS) like Udemy or LifterLMS, depending on whether you want to use WordPress. You simply put your courses together with the content you already have, and build from there. Also consider that offering beginner courses is a great way to expand your customer base. A lot of people start their course offerings at an intermediate level, which alienates viewers who don’t know the basics of a subject yet. If you offer a basic introductory course then you create new customers who are likely to continue into your higher levels of course offerings. Even if your beginner-level courses are free, you will still be ahead as users are then prepared to purchase higher-level courses they otherwise would not pursue. One other advantage to offering online courses in your subject area is demonstration of your knowledge and expertise, which can generate income from contract consulting and services you provide. If you have made videos to post on YouTube, then you already know how quickly and easily those can be produced. You could create an entire online course in a day and start making money from it almost immediately. And you don’t have to be a professional. In fact, often the best instructional videos include mistakes and problem-solving. That is realistic to any process, and it’s a great way to demonstrate how to handle challenges your students are likely to encounter themselves. It is also more engaging for students if your content is human and accessible. Whatever it is you do - contracting and services, products, entertainment, or information - you can learn how to monetize your YouTube channel by building an online course about your subject. Remember that you can post comments and also subscribe to our newsletter at LMScast.com for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. You can also try a demo of LifterLMS and see for yourself what it can do for you. Thank you for joining us. Joshua: Hello everyone, we’re back with another LMScast episode. I’m Joshua Millage, and I’m joined with Christopher Badgett. Today, we’re talking about how to monetize your YouTube channel. Chris, how do you do this? Christopher: We’re going to give you a counter intuitive way to do it. When a lot of people think about how to monetize a YouTube channel, they start thinking about making viral videos and then becoming a YouTube partner and monetizing their videos, so that ads display before, within, or after the actual video itself. The hope is always that your video goes viral, and the more times it plays, the more you get paid. You have to get huge traffic numbers to actually make any kind of real, decent income with YouTube, which is really hard to do. We’ve got a totally different thing to talk about here, about how to monetize your YouTube channel efforts with online courses. Joshua: Right. Absolutely. I think one other thing is, if you’re already creating this content, it’s not that hard to make it into a course. Christopher: Right. Joshua: Even if you have YouTube videos and you want to create text, get them transcribed, then have a blog writer put together the lesson material. You’re already half way there, more than half way there. I think it’s an easy transition. Christopher: Yeah, and if you’re looking to monetize your YouTube efforts, you have a really incredible advantage over a lot of people. When we talk about online courses and eLearning and learning management systems, a lot of people are stuck at the roadblock of creating content, but if you’ve already figured that out, and you have no problem getting on camera, or creating screen sharing videos, you have the skill set for creating a really nice online course, with the video component. Joshua: Yeah. Christopher: LifterLMS is the learning management system Word Press plugin that we’ve created. Joshua: Yeah. Christopher: On the lessons, there’s a little featured media box, and you can drop in a YouTube, a Vimeo, or a Wistia video, or you could put it in the regular Word Press editor. Maybe we can get a little more tactical, like different ways to think about your YouTube channel and transitioning to an online course. We could kind of give you some how-to scenarios. Does that sound … Joshua: Yeah! Let’s jump in, man. Let’s how-to ’em. Christopher: I’m going to take you back to what you said about, you already have all this great content. You can use YouTube as lead generator for your online course. One way to do that is to give away some videos for free on your YouTube channel but then there’s other, more premium stuff on your online course, that maybe goes into more detail. Joshua: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Christopher: One way to do that is to like, the stuff on your YouTube channel is all about the why or the what and stuff, but if you’re really teaching somebody how to execute on something … Joshua: Yeah. Christopher: … then that content would not be publicly available on YouTube, it would be in your online course. Joshua: Yeah. Christopher: That’s one method. Joshua: That’s awesome, yeah. What are some others? I know you’ve done a lot of YouTube, connected to Udemy, or not Udemy, but to learning management systems for awhile and courses. It used to be Udemy though, you’ve done … Christopher: Yeah. Joshua: … plenty of stuff on Udemy. What does that do though? Does it help Google ranking? What does bridging that gap really do? Christopher: Absolutely. Probably the strategy I’ve used the most, is for lead generation for client services. Joshua: Okay. Christopher: We’re co-owners of a web development company called codeBOX, where we build custom WordPress sites, often with deep Infusionsoft integration, and really advanced LMS builds and things like that. In the past, one of the ways I would generate leads, is I would create a beginner’s guide on how to build a WordPress website. I’ve actually just gone though the process of creating a new one of those … Joshua: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Christopher: … current to 2015. It would just be comprised of about an hour to two hours of content, screen sharing, showing how to build a WordPress website. Joshua: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Christopher: I would take those video and put them on YouTube. Right now on YouTube my original ones, collectively, those six videos have over ten thousand views of people. Some of those people find me on YouTube and have contacted me for client services. Joshua: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Christopher: I would also take those same videos and build a course on Udemy, make it a free course, and that is also a lead generator. I have, last time I checked, somewhere around seven or eight thousand people, in that course on Udemy. Then I also take those YouTube videos and have embedded them on a website … Joshua: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Christopher: … for client services for WordPress build. That’s another place where that course exists. Now, we’re in the process of creating another site called WP website in a Weekend, where those videos exist and we’ve used LifterLMS to create the learning management system or the online course for that. It’s going to be free and it’s just a lead generation tool. Add all that up, now it’s thirty thousand people have come in contact with these videos, many of which have contacted for services or bought LifterLMS and other things. It’s just massive what you can do. Those original videos? I just recorded them like one afternoon. Joshua: Yeah. Christopher: You just got to put them in a few places. Joshua: Yeah. Actually walk me through that. Let’s get super tactical. How do you go from … It’s one thing to create a video like this, right? We flipped on the Skype call recorder, we’ve got our mics set up, this is like creating a YouTube video, right? Free flowing, kind of unstructured, flowing. I come up with a question, I ask you. You come up with a question, you ask me. It’s fun, right? I know other people have a different process for their YouTube videos, but if someone’s watching and they’re like, "Yeah, that’s how I create my YouTube videos." Then they’re like, "A course. How do you get structure?" Do you create an outline beforehand? How do you take the production process down into a course production process? I feel like it’s just a little different when we create YouTube videos, opposed to when we create a course. Christopher: It depends what level you’re at, and the professional quality you want to go for. For me, when I first did that tactic, I went with a kind of like the amateur, wing-it route. Which is totally cool. Joshua: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Christopher: It has generated I don’t know how many tens of thousands of dollars in revenue over time, off the back end through client services or product sales or whatever. Joshua: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Christopher: For me, we have a blog post at blog.lifterlms.com, about the mistakes entrepreneurs when creating their first online course. One thing that Chris Coyier said, is that people try to be too professional and cover up their mistakes in their videos. Which depersonalizes it a little bit, makes it take longer and so on. Joshua: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Christopher: What I did, is I gave myself a challenge to create my course in one day. I sat down and I had it easy because it’s a screen sharing video, so all I had to do was use ScreenFlow on the Mac to record my course. That’s what I did over the course of just one day. When I would make mistakes I would not cover it up or not edit it. I just talked through what’s happening because you know what, the people who are watching it are going to make mistakes too. One thing I did with ScreenFlow is I turned on the camera. Ultimately when the video was done, the screen share was the top ninety percent of the video … Joshua: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Christopher: … but then there’s my little talking head at the bottom. Joshua: Yeah. Christopher: The reason I did that, is because it builds a real human connection. People can see me talking. It’s almost like if they just heard my voice, it would just be audio, but they can see me talking so it … Joshua: Yeah. Christopher: … builds a more human connection. Joshua: Cool. Christopher: Which makes you even more approachable when it comes time, if they become interested in doing client services. Joshua: I like that. I like that. That’s amazing. What if you’re a YouTuber and you’re monetizing and you don’t have client services, like all this still applies to products. Christopher: Yeah. Absolutely. Whatever your specialty is. Joshua: Yeah. Christopher: Consulting, Joshua: Whatever it is. Christopher: Products, a brick and mortar business, you can do all kinds of things. Joshua: I think too, the cool thing is the YouTubers out there who are doing more of the funny comedy stuff. Just teach them how to do that. Christopher: Yeah. Joshua: A lot of people get so wrapped up in it. It’s like, "I’m a comedy channel.", or, "I’m a lifestyle channel." Teach them how to be a lifestyle channel or a comedy channel. You guys are doing it, you know? Christopher: Yeah. The other pro tip I would add to that is, beginner’s markets are huge. People often forget what’s it’s like to be a beginner. Joshua: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Christopher: For example, we build really heavily custom, even web applications on top of WordPress, but there’s a lot of people who are just trying to build a simple three page website on a free theme. Joshua: Yeah. Christopher: I slow down. I’m not using the big words or the lingo, and just really teaching somebody from the beginning. That’s the other pro tip is, teach. If you’re doing it for the first time, you might try going after the beginner. Joshua: Right. Christopher: Just give yourself permission to make that course. Joshua: That’s awesome. I love it. Right on, Chris. Thank you so much, Man, for giving all this information. This is great. There’s so many YouTubers out there scraping the bottom of the barrel in the terms of income that could be making a lot more money if they just spend an afternoon like you said, and monetize that information. I think this is a great episode. Yeah, if anyone has any questions, you can reach out to me @JMillage or Chris at @ChrisBadgett. Our official LifterLMS channel is @LifterLMS. Hit that one up, because that’s the one where we’re more responsive. Hope you guys are having a great day, and we’ll talk to you next week. The post How to Monetize Your YouTube Channel appeared first on LMScast.

In your consulting business you are accustomed to approaching each client with personalized services, but there is a more streamlined, scalable method that may work for you. Today our LMScast podcast with Joshua Millage and Christopher Badgett is about how to productize your consulting business with online courses. We will also tell you how to serve more clients and make extra income by down-selling. First, let’s define what we mean by productizing your services. If you look at what you do for most clients, you will see similarities in the services you provide. Most of the information you give them is static. Your expertise is in knowing how to apply what you know to their situation. Productizing your consulting simply means packaging solutions into sets of services that are applicable to specific needs and targeting each package to 80% of the clients who need that approach. Unlike the custom service you provide now, clients have a limited set of choices based on what most clients need. Productizing your services is an option that can save you time and effort while increasing your returns if you can standardize and package at least some of your services. Productizing will also give you a greater capacity for providing individualized consulting to clients who truly need it. There is another level of clients that you have simply lost in the past - those who cannot afford your professional fees. Offering online courses provides them with the option of taking your courses for a significantly reduced fee. Maybe they can’t afford to pay you $2,000 to personally assist them, but they can probably afford $200 to learn how to help themselves. Down-selling this way opens a new source of income for your business. You could even offer a free introductory course as a lead generation tool to help clients see why your service is well worth the fees you ask. Once they know what is involved in what you do, they will have a better grasp of the value of your expertise and will be more willing to pay you what you are worth. Building an online course is not difficult, especially with a course development platform like our LifterLMS WordPress learning management system plugin. You can put together a complete course in one or two weekends and start generating extra income. The learning management system takes care of processing payments and progressing users through courses. Once you set it up, your direct involvement is minimal. For further information about how to productize your consulting business with online courses, you can hear an interview with Damian Thompson about productized services at Tropical MBA. You can also try a demo of LifterLMS and see for yourself what it can do for you. Remember that you can post comments and also subscribe to our newsletter at LMScast.com for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us. Josh Millage: Hello, Everyone, welcome back with another episode of LMScast. I’m Joshua Millage, and I’m joined with Christopher Badgett, and today we’re talking about how to monetize your consulting business if you are a consultant. So, Chris, take it away, Buddy. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Well, we’ve created three other podcast episodes about how to monetize your "X" with online courses. So, what we’ve done already, we have an episode on how to do it for book authors or authors, we’ve done it for bloggers, and we’ve done it for podcasters. So this is for the consultants out there, of how to monetize your consulting business with online courses. But I think the conversation starts around productized service, and defining what that is. A productized service is a more repeatable, scalable version of your custom client work, if you will, where you can plug other people into the process. You say ‘no’ to things that are outside of the scope, whereas in your previous version, you may have said ‘yes’ to anything or whatever. You can really define and package up your service offering and make it really black and white. That’s kind of what productizing a service is. Do you have anything to add? Josh Millage: No. I mean, I think it’s really hard to productize a service, but actually the best productized service I have ever seen in my life is when I got the intro recorded for Infusioncast. Tim Paige, TimThePaige is his website, he has a really awesome process, where he had his VA call me and do a pre-interview, and then I’m sure they’re using a Trello board or something and picking out music, and then they ping me to pick out the music, and then went back to him, and then he recorded. It was really well done. So I think there’s certain productized services like that, which are pretty linear. I think a lot of consultants do a lot of exploration and discovery on how to solve their clients’ problems, and so, in those situations, what I would say is that, "Shoot for 80%." And then when you make the course, speak to that 80% and talk about caveats. In this lesson, there’s a portion where it’s on you to kind of figure out how you apply this. There’s nothing wrong with saying that, it’s making it known, because when you don’t say stuff like that, then you get into the shady internet marketing world, where it’s like, "You just copy and paste my methodology, and it’ll do x, y, and z for you." And a lot of times, it doesn’t always work that way. So I think when you’re open and honest about how, "Hey, I’m telling you this, now it’s on you to really work through how to apply it," people respond well, and it works well. That’s my two cents. Chris Badgett: Absolutely. That’s cool to think about a productized service in that way, and I want to just mention another one I saw from the people over at the WPcast podcast. It’s for WordPress folks. One of the hosts of that show has a productized service around building websites that run podcasts, and it was a new thing he was exploring, he’d just launched it, I forget the name of it, or I’d give you the URL. Josh Millage: Was it podcast websites? Chris Badgett: Yeah, websites for podcasts. It was a productized service, I believe it cost $1,000 or $2,000 or something. If you want to see an example, I think it’s called PodWP or something, go check it out. So, if you’re a consultant, and you want to productize your service, there’s a couple of reasons to do that. One is to make your business more scalable, and two is to make it so that - Sometimes in the work we’ve done and as a web designer, if somebody can’t afford our services, or someone can’t afford your services, or whatever, it’s cool to send people to an online course that can still add value to what they’re trying to get done. Now that could be a paid course. It could be your cheapest service offering instead of hiring you directly to do something is to teach that person how to do something through a paid course, which isn’t as good as the custom, "I’m going to work with you directly" thing, but maybe your paid course is still pretty good and helps them achieve the desired outcome. They’re just going to have to do more of the work themselves. Or it could be a free course that you just give away, and now that becomes a powerful tool for lead generation. It gives you a platform to demonstrate your expertise. It gives you an opportunity to educate your customers on what it actually is that you do, which often helps in closing a sale, because they may not realize the complexity of what it is you’re offering, and are wondering why you’re so expensive, and then once they get into your course, they’re like, "Oh." This has happened to me before where someone has gone through a web design course I’ve created, they build it up to a certain level, and then they’re like, "All right, I need to hire the professionals now to do it." So that’s been my experience with using online courses as a consultant. Josh Millage: That’s awesome. No, that’s a really good idea, and I think what’s cool about a tool like LifterLMS is you can actually make it a pretty dynamic sales funnel, because you could have an email triggered when they complete certain pieces of the course, and so when that email is triggered, you could actually be pushing them to sign up for a phone call or something like that. And you’re doing it based on their behavior, so you can offer a certain offer at the beginning versus an offer at the end, because you know, "Well, someone who’s at the end of the course is more engaged than someone who’s at the beginning of the course," and so you can do different things when you start to think through it that way. So it is a very - I mean, LifterLMS is … Beyond being a learning management system, it’s a way dynamic follow-up/sales funnel tool, just depending on how you think about it, which is really, really cool. I think it’s amazing, man, and I think a lot of consultants are sitting on a gold mine, if they could just make the time, take the time, I should say, to create the course. If they could take the time to create the course, they could see their income rapidly increase, because they’re using the power of the internet to scale the knowledge that they have. Also, the other thing I want to say that consultants never think about is down-sells. So we all know about up-sells, like in the sales process, how do we up-sell you into some other product or service offering that’s a little bit more premium, or a cross-sell, where it’s a complimentary product. No one thinks of down-sells. No one thinks, "Oh, Chris, I can’t afford your service." Well, you’re right, you can’t afford my service- Let’s just imagine the conversation. "Okay, so you can’t afford my retainer package, two grand a month. Well, I have this course for two hundred dollars." It’s a tenth of the cost, but it’s still the same amount of value, the difference is you have to do everything. You’d probably- I mean, you’re letting money go if you don’t have something like that, because a percentage of the people are going to go, "Yes," and that’s two hundred bucks that you grab and put in your pocket. Chris Badgett: That’s a really good point. Everybody thinks about the up-sell, but not the down-sell. Josh Millage: No one thinks about the down-sell. I’m always thinking about down-sells. I get- In sales, the "yes’s" and "no’s" are what you want to hear, "maybe’s" kill you. But- Chris Badgett: That’s a great point. Josh Millage: Yeah. "Maybe’s" do kill you, because you never know where you sit. You just want to know. It takes energy to sit on a ‘maybe’. I always push people, like, "Hey, Chris, let me shoot you straight." This is actually how, when I get to a point where I’m in a ‘maybe’, I just go for the jugular. "Chris, let me ask you a question. What’s it going to take to earn your business?" And I’ll just say it like that, and people will be like, "Whoa, okay." I don’t think it’s disrespectful when you ask it like that, because you could say- I mean, I’m a business owner, you’re a business owner, I say, "From one business owner to the next, what’s it going to take to win your business?" And they’re like, "Well, the cost is off." Perfect. Cost is off? Not a big deal. "Well, okay, I’ve got a course for $200 where you can buy, and you can have your assistant go through that course. You don’t even have to worry about it, she’ll get trained up and be able to execute what I’m talking about. Now, you don’t get me at two grand, but you get all the knowledge that I have, and the difference is, you need to execute on it with someone in your company, but I’ve seen your company, I think you’ve got some talented people, and I really think this would be a great option for you." "Wow, okay." Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Josh Millage: So you took them down. And again, you’ll still have "no’s" there, but to not try that is crazy. For most consultants, that’s a Saturday or two Saturdays of putting that course together, and that could be a huge profit center in their sales process. Chris Badgett: Well, cool. Just to give people one more action of what you should do if this episode is resonating with you right now, I give you two steps. One is check out the demo of LifterLMS, that’s at LifterLMS.com, and if you’re feeling it, grab yourself a copy of the plugin. The next is to- I want to refer you to another resource. We’re a part of the WordPress community where people share, and we help out on other podcasts, and that sort of thing. I want you to check out- You’ll just need to do a Google search and look for the, "Tropical MBA podcast" and look for an interview that was done with Damian Thompson about productized services. It’s a great resource to really get your head wrapped around that. So if you get a copy of LifterLMS and go listen to that episode on the Tropical MBA with Damian Thompson, you’ll be ready to take this idea and run with it. Josh Millage: Awesome. Well that’s a great way to end this episode. Thank you everyone for listening. Hit us up on Twitter, @LifterLMS, or you can reach me personally at @JMillage, and Chris, what’s your Twitter handle? Chris Badgett: @ChrisBadgett. Josh Millage: Right on. All right. Have a great day. The post How to Productize Your Consulting Business with Online Courses appeared first on LMScast.

If you are a music instructor, you should know that offering online courses can increase your income and expand your teaching options. In today’s LMScast Joshua Millage and Christopher Badgett discuss how to sell music lessons online. Music lessons are especially suitable for online courses, as so much of music training consists of hours of concentrated practice after the student has been shown a new technique. Music training is also a step-by-step building process, and teaching it online can be as effective as teaching in person. Your greatest advantage with online instruction is that you can teach more students in less time than you can in person. There are already a significant number of music instructors presenting online courses in a variety of ways with demonstrated success. You can produce a complete online training course series that takes students from beginner to advanced training, or you can use online teaching resources as an extension of your in-person instruction. Building online courses — especially for music — is not hard to do, so your primary question might be why you should consider trying it yourself. How many more students could you reach if you could meet with each of them for just an hour a week in person, and supply them with resource materials online for their practice sessions the rest of the week? This way they have the benefit of your personal hands-on direction to show them a technique, and then they can practice on their own using a course outline that employs audio, video, musical notation, and drills, plus testing and incentives to signify their progress. Then you can evaluate their new skills in your next in-person session, determine what their next steps should be, and refer them to appropriate online training for their next week of practice. Online courses also allow you to connect with students worldwide that you otherwise could not teach. With a complete course series you can share your musical knowledge and passion with students who might not otherwise have that opportunity. You can even do live instruction on the internet through your learning management system. Beginners are often overlooked in online instruction. Offering a free online introductory lesson for aspiring musicians is a great way to demonstrate your teaching style and expertise and to get prospective students excited about taking lessons with you. For more advanced students you could offer banks of jam session audio and video demonstrations for them to encourage improvisation. This way you can add variety to their practice sessions and boost their engagement. An added benefit for you is the income you will generate through your online courses. A complete course development platform like our LifterLMS WordPress learning management system plugin lets you build courses from content you already have and uses an intuitive and creative process for you. And the system handles your marketing and sales for you, so you can focus on your students and the music itself. You can learn how to create and sell music lessons online quickly and easily, and you can start right now by trying a demo of LifterLMS. See for yourself what it can do for you and your students. Remember that you can post comments and also subscribe to our newsletter at LMScast.com for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us. Joshua: Hello, Everyone. Welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Joshua Millage. I’m joined today with Christopher Badgett. Before we get into it Chris, one of the things that I love to do is chat with people, and I’ve realized we never told people our Twitter handles. It’s kind of crazy, right? I am @jmillage. Christopher: I am @chrisbadgett. Joshua: You can always hit us up at @lifterlms too, but I think if you’re driving in the car and we said something that prompted you to ask a question, hit us up @jmillage, @chrisbadgett, @lifterlms. We’re very responsive on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you. We both interact in that way. I had an epiphany, Chris. It probably takes people a minute to pull over the car, go to LMScast.com, register to leave a comment, it’s too much work for them, but Twitter is a little easier. Christopher: Absolutely. We want to make episodes about exactly what you want us to make an episode about, so just let us know and we’ll make an episode just for you. Joshua: Exactly, exactly. Cool. Today’s episode is all about how to bring your content online if you’re a music teacher. The reason that I wanted to create a piece of content around this or an episode around this is because myself and my head of growth at LifterLMS have called every single customer over the past month and tried to connect. We can’t always get everyone on the phone, but I’d say we got about 10-15% of people who bought on the phone. A majority of them, a lot of them were music teachers, which surprised me, so I think there’s a huge opportunity for music teachers to bring their training online as either a value add to their in-person music lessons that they give or to go fully online so that they can travel around the world. One of my favorite LifterLMS customers, Doug, is a music teacher I believe in Florida, and he’s using LifterLMS to do things. It’s exciting stuff. I think music’s interesting, because I’ve played guitar, classical, upright bass, and piano my whole life, and the thing is, as I go back to my early days, it would have been so useful to have an in-person lesson which happened every Tuesday, I think after school, and between that Tuesday and the following Tuesday have sub-lessons or things that I could have gone online and watched to continue my craft because it gets boring to practice the same thing over and over and over and over again, so to have some variation. The other thing that would have been cool too is to have just jam tracks where music teachers are just playing a bass loop line or something and then me when I was practicing solo guitar could solo over that so I could flip his track on and be essentially playing with my teacher but doing it over the internet. That fires me up man. That’s cool stuff. What about you, Chris? What do you think about this? Christopher: Well, I think I’d start with the why. If you’re asking yourself how to teach music lessons online with WordPress, why do it? I think the motivation is there, because music teachers can make more money if they create a scalable online product, so there’s the money driver, but then the other driver is just being able to teach worldwide. I have a friend who teaches music lessons online through Skype from Hawaii. I don’t know where all his students are, and he also teaches live in person at the local music place. It’s not like you have to give up your in-person classes. It’s also just a way to augment, to make more money and reach more people and create more impact or maybe supplement your live teachings that are already going on. I think that’s the big why. Joshua: Yeah, I think so too. I think you’re right and I think that it adds more value and it gives the teacher more flexibility. It’s a double whammy in terms of what it can do for people. I want to give something very tactical, like a step by step. Is that okay with you? Christopher: Sure. Joshua: Yeah, because I’ve got this in my head. I think for music teachers, the first step is to get, in my opinion, the fundamentals down. I might speak specifically to the style of guitar that I played, but I’ll let the audience modify it for their own use cases and what they want to teach. I played solo guitar. I was a solo scale like Jimi Hendrix style guitar player. I’m not a rhythm guitar player. A lot of that training happened from two places. One was learning the basics, learning certain skills, pentatonic scales, so forth, blues scales and that sort of thing. In this example, if you created a course around pentatonic scales, that would be a killer course. It’d be a killer course that you could sell for 30, 40, 50 bucks, maybe more, and then at the same time … Christopher: It would be entirely passive, right? Joshua: Right. Christopher: That one doesn’t necessarily have to have a live or blended interactive … Joshua: No, because a pentatonic scale is a pentatonic scale is a pentatonic scale. I think that you could create that sort of course, you could put it out there and structure it and then what I think would have been good is add assessments. This is how you can make it different than someone who could go to YouTube and find that, because that information is available on YouTube, but adding in an assessment and asking, "If you’re at this position, and you want to switch to this position, what’s the progression?" Instigating them to internalize the information would be really good. I think giving them badges, so you’re the pentatonic scale master after they complete it. That would be really, really cool. Christopher: I love the niche focus of that idea of just pentatonic scales. Joshua: Yeah. Christopher: There’s totally a market for that. Joshua: You could go to your in-person classes and say, "Hey, I do lessons for 50 bucks an hour or something like that, but I also have if you sign up in a package and you buy four lessons at once, I’ll give you free access to all my online library," or you could structure the business in such a way that I have regular lessons, I have premium lessons, premium lessons are 70 bucks instead of 50, but you get these at-home, online lessons too. As long as you’re coming in here paying 70 bucks instead of 50, you’ll have online … Christopher: You get the membership. Joshua: You get the membership and then you can revoke access if they stopped and that sort of thing. That would be pretty cool. The other thing in addition to that is I would have a course called Blues Jamming or Rock Jamming and it would just be a bunch of 5 to 10 minutes where the teacher is just recording himself jamming out. Maybe he’s using garage band to put a bass track down or a rhythm guitar track down, and then he’s playing drums over it or something, and he just posts these ten 20-minute tracks where then the student at home could jam with him. That to me, when I was learning how to play solo guitar, that’s where I learn, because a lot of that, yeah you learn the tactics and the scales and all that, but you really got to feel it. How do you feel it? Well, you feel it by playing with people. Well, you can’t always just drop a hat and play with people, especially if you’re a kid at home and it’s midnight and you can’t have your friends over. You can’t even play that loud, but you could totally put in your headphones and plug in your guitar to a little amp and run it on through your headphones and just be rocking out, and everyone in the house isn’t hearing you. You got to give that value. Those would just be like … If I was a music teacher, that’s how I would start. I’d start focusing down. Then of course you’ve got those super basic intro courses. Christopher: Beginners’ markets are huge. Joshua: I would be more inclined to give some of that away, like really push the free line on the beginner stuff. There’s someone who I really look up to, Jermaine Griggs, who’s a big Infusionsoft user, and he gives a How to Play By Ear course away for free, but he talks about it when he’s like at the end of that video, which is a 15-minute video, you can be able to hear - like walk up to a keyboard and play Amazing Grace. It was like boom, done. You can actually do that. You gave them a song that they could go home and sit in front of their family and friends and play. That’s so valuable. Jermaine is like, "Hey I’ve got this $7 deal or $20 deal," and he has an ascension model. It starts out with only offering low priced items and upsell, upsell, upsell, upsell, upsell. They’re like seven bucks. What’s seven bucks? That’s like coffee or a little bit more. Here in California at the coffee shops I go to, it’s a coffee. I think hopefully that’s useful to the music teachers who are out there, but there’s so much you can do. With a product like LifterLMS driving it, you can do all that. You could create one-off courses and sell them. You can group them in memberships. You could give away coupon codes so that people could get those memberships for free for a certain amount of time and that sort of thing. You could really add a huge component to your in-person classes or in-person training or you could just forget that component altogether and do it all online, which is what some guys are doing. What do you think man? Is that a good idea? Christopher: Totally, totally. Joshua: Awesome. Christopher: As we’re talking about the music teacher niche, I’m just thinking about why they’re such a good niche and I think what it comes down to is anybody who’s learning to play an instrument or learning to sing or whatever, if you’re a teacher of music, you’re used to the marathon. It’s not something you master in one shot or one class. Music teachers are uniquely positioned from their experience to make a course about step one, a course about step two. They’re just really used to teaching slowly, because it takes a long time to develop musical talent, which also means there’s a lot of opportunity for course material there. Joshua: Totally. Christopher: Go ahead. Joshua: All I would say is it’s so easy. People often ask, "How do you create courses?" It’s just running a parallel line of thought next to what you’re already doing. What you’re already doing is you’re meeting people, you’re training them, so all you have to do is you need to activate a second parallel line of thought saying, "Why did I do that, and how do I capture it? Why did I teach them that way, and how do I capture that in a different medium whether that’s audio, video, or text?" Once you start to capture those, you’re good to go. Christopher: Yeah. Awesome. Well, I would encourage everybody to head on over to demo.lifterlms.com to see what it’s all about. One other thing, we’re constantly evolving the product based on customer feedback, and one of the things people have asked for is to have a little mini sample course setup on install so that they can start tweaking it right away and learn it by looking at an example that’s already there. I believe our example is going to actually be how to play piano, like a really short basic course. Joshua: That’s great. Christopher: If you’re a music teacher, and you want to get in there and get rolling, we’ve even got a sample course for you to start with. Joshua: Sweet. All right. Well, until next time. We’ll see you then. The post How to Sell Music Lessons Online appeared first on LMScast.

If you could spend more time with your kids and still make a living, you would do that, wouldn’t you? Today our LMScast podcast with Joshua Millage and Christopher Badgett is about generating passive income for stay at home moms and dads. By creating online courses and charging fees for people to take them, you could earn part - or possibly all - of your living income this way. And it’s easier than you think. Your first thought might be that you’re not a teacher, and you don’t know enough about anything to teach a course. But we’re here to tell you that you have more shareable knowledge than you realize. Just being a good parent makes you an expert in lots of subject areas that other people want and need to know more about. But maybe you’re not a computer genius and don’t know the first thing about software, web design, or teaching online. Well, you don’t have to be. If you are here right now watching this podcast, then you already have the technical skills you need to build an online course and start generating passive income. All you really need to do is decide what you want to teach and start building your course with a simple, intuitive learning management software platform like LifterLMS, which also handles marketing and fees for you once you set it up. Are you a great cook? Do a course about it. Know about camping? Do a camping course. Do you have a special needs child? Offer a course around vital skills you’ve learned that other parents in the same situation can benefit from. Are you traveling? Do a course about traveling with children. And you can decide how passive or involved you want to be with your students. Flexibility is another significant benefit of having an online source of income. Stay-at-home parents can be defined in many ways, from a family living in a neighborhood, to homesteading off-grid, to traveling the world with your children. Home is wherever you are, and with passive online income you can live anywhere, or everywhere. Imagine the experiences you can give your children with those kinds of opportunities. Online courses are also a great option for parents of older children who want or need to be home while their kids are at school. Or if you need some space away from the kids, use your online course as a diversion. If you have been keeping a blog, a lot of what you have been writing about for free could be the basis for a fee-based course. Take a moment to sit down and list your strengths and subjects you know about. Once you start writing this down, you will be amazed at how much you have to work with. Start out with something small and specific that you feel comfortable managing. You can always add material or create more advanced courses. Establishing passive income for stay at home moms with online courses is not difficult, especially with a course development platform like our LifterLMS WordPress learning management system plugin. You can try a demo of LifterLMS and see for yourself what it can do for you. Remember that you can post comments and also subscribe to our newsletter at LMScast.com for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us. Joshua Millage: Hello, Everyone. We’re back with another episode of LMScast. I’m Joshua Millage, and I’m joined with Christopher Badgett, and today we’re talking about passive income strategies for stay-at-home moms. Chris, you got to help me out with this one, man. I’m not even married. I don’t have kids, so I don’t know where to start. Chris Badgett: Right on. Let’s just start with the why. One of the reasons that I do web design … If any of you know my story, I’ve probably spent more of my adult life sleeping outside and camping than most people. I’ve spent eight summers on a glacier in Alaska, run sled dogs a lot, and have spent a lot of time on the back of a sled dog. I’m actually kind of a minimalist when it comes to technology. How did Chris get involved in web design and WordPress plugins and all that thing? That’s a whole other story. One of the driving things for me of how I got into online courses, how I got into WordPress, why I love having a web design and custom web development business is that I get to work at home, and be around my kids, and set my own schedule, which is a huge thing for parents. We said stay-at-home moms, but we’ll shout out to the stay-at-home dads out there, too. Yeah. You get to be by your kids, and then the holy grail of working from home is actually creating passive income so that it can just keep going while you’re sleeping, or teach while you sleep, in the case of using a WordPress LMS system to generate revenue. Joshua Millage: That’s awesome. I love it, because you do a lot of things that are I would say slightly alternative, which I appreciate, and being around your kids, being able to live this lifestyle and have this business has allowed you to do some really cool things from an education perspective for your children, which I … Just to rep you up a little bit, I think Zoey and Hazel are probably the two smartest little girls I’ve ever met in my life. Yeah. If you walk outside with them, they can identify pretty much every tree in wherever you’re at, Whitefish, Montana. It’s cool. It’s cool to see what happens with the flexibility that this business can give you and how that plays down into your children’s lives, because of the education flexibility. You can take them all over the world. You took them to Costa Rica, right, about a year ago or so? Chris Badgett: Yeah. This is a great little story in terms of a journey with, first, the stay-at-home family, stay-at-home moms, stay-at-home dads, and passive income through online courses. It almost feels surreal to me when I think back about it, but we traveled to Costa Rica, and I just continued to work doing web design and that kind of thing, web development, but one of the main reasons we went there is to film a gardening course with a world famous permaculture expert, that we would then sell over and over again. I can tell a little more of the story about that. Joshua Millage: Yeah. Chris Badgett: We went to Costa Rica for three months. We rented a house that was cheaper than the place we were renting in the US, so we actually did a little geo-arbitrage there on currency. I would work during the day, and I had meetings through Skype and the internet, like I always do, but I was also there to build my passive income online course. Now, I took the publisher mindset. My wife’s a gardener and an expert in her own right in gardening, but we went straight to the top, so we partnered … My marketing experience, business, web development experience, and my wife’s interest in gardening in connection with the way she can connect with leaders in this space, and we made a deal, we struck a deal with this expert. Then the really interesting thing happened, which is we started to realize there’s something called a permaculture design course. It’s known as the PDC in the gardening community, but they’re intense. They’re like ten days programs. We realized we can’t … It’s going to be really hard for us to go there and film all that and manage the kids at the same time. At this point we had moved out of the house in the mountains of Costa Rica and moved to one on a beach in an area called Nosara. What we did is we actually put an ad on Craigslist. Hired somebody from New England. We paid to fly that professional videographer without kids. It was like a dream come true. I just knocked on his door and was like, "Hey, can I fly you to Costa Rica for a permaculture design course?" and this is a person who was also really into permaculture and a videographer looking for work. Joshua Millage: It was just meant to be, Man. Chris Badgett: Yeah. "Hey, we need some help. We’ll fly you down here. We’ll pay you this X amount of money to film it, but we need you to capture all this stuff." Joshua Millage: Yeah, totally. Chris Badgett: That person flew down. We actually didn’t attend the event. I was on the beach with my kids playing in the tide pools, while our videographer was filming and capturing the event. Now, what we did do is we rented a car, and we drove to the event for the very end of it to make the human connection with our videographer and the subject matter expert and the community who is the class … There’s like twenty people there. Joshua Millage: That’s rad, Dude. Chris Badgett: That was awesome. We camped out, and everything was great. Just to complete that story, it’s not easy. We had to invest up front. We realized our limitations, so we brought in an expert. We’ve even been having trouble editing all that video footage. Ten days of video is a lot, and we got bottlenecked. We actually now hired a guy who is from Ireland, and he was actually living in Taiwan, to actually edit the content, to edit the video, and this is a professional video editor, and we just got that hard drive in the mail literally this week. This whole process has taken a year, and if I did it again I would do it much, much faster, but this is a big course, a high value course. Joshua Millage: You guys can make a significant amount of passive income. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Joshua Millage: I mean are you willing to share what you’d sell a course like that for, and the nitty gritty details? Chris Badgett: I’m not comfortable sharing … I can share it, but without some specifics, and here’s why. I would totally share but … Joshua Millage: You have someone else involved, right? Chris Badgett: I have other partners involved, so I just want to be respectful of that arrangement, but in terms of how much is a course worth, it varies greatly. There’s an article on the Udemy blog that I think it’s ten dollars for every twenty minutes or something like that, is one mindset about it. Really big courses on the internet, like if you look at a high end membership site, they usually sell for around two thousand dollars or fifteen hundred dollars. This course that we’re making is going to be a passive course, meaning the instructor is not going to be taking questions. There’s not going to be conversation. It’s just going to be totally passive, which means if it’s all passive, you can’t charge as much as if there is live interaction or assignments and things like that, but we’re actually going for the passive model. That’s how we designed it for this case. It’s not worth as much as something that also includes other stuff and so on. That’s that, and that’s kind of an extreme example. Yes, we’re stay-at-home, but we were traveling the world doing that. You can also just do it from home. Joshua Millage: We’re all over the place on this, but that is such a good example. Let’s bring it to the end here for the moms who are listening. Who are going, "Yeah, okay, Chris. That sounds great. What about me?" Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s where we ended up. Joshua Millage: Can I tell you a little caveat? I think that what you told me earlier is … Or I think Jon, when we were talking to our head of growth, Jon Beck, who just a wild thinker. He’s like, there’s a lot of moms who have had kids living in their house for twenty years, and it’s like bing, bing, bing, like all over the place. Managing all these schedules, all this stuff. Making food, doing this, doing that, and then the kids leave for school, or maybe they have two kids and one of them is out to school. They have a little bit more time, and they’re like, "What do I do with all this time?" They’ve got some good knowledge. Maybe it’s around crafts. Maybe it’s around cooking. Maybe it’s around a specific type of cooking, because their child had some sort of dietary restriction. Like course, course, course, because there’s going to be someone else in the world who is in that situation or something similar, where they can take that knowledge and share it with them for free or paid. It’s up to them. I think that moms don’t give themselves enough credit for what they know. My mom’s a genius, Man. I think she should make a bunch of courses. I’m pushing her, because her gift is teaching kids how to read. We all know that literacy is a worldwide issue. It’s 2015, and I think my mom could be creating some amazing courses on how to teach kids how to read better, to bring in a little Zoolander quote. Chris Badgett: Yeah. I would say what’s the first step if you just want to test the waters and try out this idea, as a stay-at-home parent, is to, like you said, take an inventory of your strengths. It’s no surprise that the stay-at-home mom community in the blogosphere and blogging is huge. It’s massive. It’s these parents who are home. Maybe they’re a little isolated, so they get … It’s one way to network, and comments, and also have a life outside of kids, because kids can be a little intense. Sometimes you want to blog and do your own thing in some specialty that you care about. I think stay-at-home moms are really using blogging as an outlet for that, but why not monetize it, and instead of just writing free articles, create courses? Start small and start with something really specific. Like you mentioned, parents have lots of skills, and they’ve overcome certain things, and it doesn’t mean you have to make a course about parenting, but I guarantee, there’s all kinds of things that you’ve discovered during that time as a parent, where you learned how to teach, and you’ve solved some kind of problem or helped somebody move closer to some kind of desired outcome. The sky is the limit for what you can make a course about. I would just encourage you to be really specific, start small, and niche down. Joshua Millage: I love it. Awesome. I think that’s going to cap off this episode. I bet a lot of people have questions. I hope you find us either at our LMScast, you can go LMScast.com, find this episode, and leave us a comment, or if you want to hit us up on Twitter, I am @jmillage. Chris, you are? Chris Badgett: @chrisbadgett. Joshua Millage: Or you can hit up our official LifterLMS Twitter feed for questions about LifterLMS, and I would encourage you to follow LifterLMS just because we’re putting a lot of awesome content out on that channel. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you have a great week. The post Passive Income for Stay At Home Moms appeared first on LMScast.

Tim Ferriss is an icon and an oracle to many, and in this LMScast Joshua Millage and Christopher Badgett discuss his 5 tips for accelerated learning. If you have read Tim’s books, you know that he processes tons of information at an unbelievable pace. For the record, Tim Ferriss is a New York Times best selling author. His books include The 4 Hour Work Week, The 4 Hour Body, and The 4 Hour Chef. Now he has a TV show called The Tim Ferriss Experiment based on his ability to learn any skill quickly and in-depth, and he recently released an episode about accelerated learning. Naturally this is of interest to users of our LifterLMS WordPress plugin, and anyone else who is developing online courses. Tim uses five basic principles to meet any challenge and make learning faster and simpler. Those principles are as follows: Deconstruction Selection Sequencing Stakes Simplify Principle 1 is deconstruction, meaning to break down overwhelming skills into units in order to process and execute them piece by piece. You can do this when starting to put your online course together. Principle 2 is selection of key elements of a subject - what Tim calls a "minimum effective dose" - to focus on. Based on the Pareto 80/20 Principle, selection can keep your online course design from becoming too complex. Include only the 20% of information that is needed to move the student 80% forward. Principle 3, sequencing, encourages you to find different approaches to learning than are generally used. In other words, make failure less impactful so that students are encouraged to try. Principle 4 involves stakes, or setting a goal with consequences. For online learning that can involve quizzes that determine whether you progress or not, or for which you will earn a badge of success - or a badge of failure. Principle 5 is to simplify, which is key. For online learning, it means to focus on one subject, or one element of a subject, at a time. In Principle 1 you learned to deconstruct the subject into units. Simplifying would mean choosing one unit to master before picking up the next one. Obviously these 5 principles of accelerated learning work for Tim Ferriss, and they will work for you as you develop your eLearning course. Our LifterLMS course development platform is designed to help you build your courses using these methods. You can try a demo of LifterLMS and see for yourself what it can do for you. Remember that you can post comments and also subscribe to our newsletter at LMScast.com for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us. Joshua: Hello, Everyone. We’re back with another episode of LMScast. I’m Joshua Millage, and I’m joined today with Christopher Badgett. Today we are talking about Tim Ferriss’ five accelerated learning principles for your LMS and online course. Chris, what the heck are we talking about? Who’s Tim Ferriss to start off with? Christopher: He’s a New York Times best selling author. Back in 2007 or so he wrote a book called "The 4 Hour Work Week." If you get into online entrepreneurship or trying to generate passive income online, those kinds of things, eventually run across Tim Ferriss. He’s also done a lot in the body hacking and getting strong. He has another book called "The 4 Hour Body." He has another one about cooking called "The 4 Hour Chef." Recently he released a TV show about rapid learning, about accelerated learning and since we’re all about creating learning environments, that’s what’s our WordPress LMS plugin LifterLMS is designed to do. When we see good ideas out there on how to make engaging online courses, we like to share them with the community. Tim’s TV show came out. It was on iTunes. I think it was $9.99. It’s totally worth it. You get to watch him … I won’t go into every single episode, but three of them that come into mind were he played drums with a professional rock band on stage. All within like a week of never having played drums before. He learned how to do some open water swimming. There was somebody who he actually helped coach in a week to figure out how to swim in the open water who did not know how to swim. In just one week. The other one which was also really interesting, he learned some basic urban survival skills like how to escape custody and avoid detection and evade authorities and things like that. All in one week. It’s just a great show. He has a framework that no matter what the skill is that he can use to breakdown and learn these things rapidly. It was really cool to see that as a show. Joshua: Absolutely. That’s really cool. I’ve read everything that Tim has come out with. I’m an avid reader of his books. If I had enough time, I’d probably soak up every single podcast he has. I do love his content. He just has a unique way of extracting information from people as well as just teaching. Let’s walk through these principles for people. What’s principle number one? Christopher: The first one is just deconstruction. He says that most skills are overwhelming, and in order to successfully acquire new ones, you need to break them down into pieces or units. Then ask yourself why have I failed at this skill or why might I fail? Then study those potential failures so that you can avoid them. It’s like eat the elephant one bite at a time, not necessarily in order and look for problem spots. That’s deconstruction. Joshua: I would say that comes hand-in-hand with executing that, too. The key there is figuring out what it is you could fail at and then diving deep into that. Christopher: Yeah, and in the TV show a great example is when they were learning how to swim. Even what they just called the Superman glide. It had nothing to do with the whole swimming maneuver. It was just starting or just breathing. One thing at a time. The next part of rapid learning is called selection. This is where Tim gets into something called the minimum effective dose. An example of that would be … there’s four chords on the guitar that make up 80 percent of songs. It’s selecting what is the most valuable part of that skill that gets you to where you need to go. Joshua: That’s huge. It’s boiling a bit down then. Christopher: Yeah, and selecting what are the key things. We tend to like … and if you’re building an online course or you’re looking at optimizing the engagement in your learning management system, maybe you’ve over-complicated it a little bit. Maybe you’re over-thinking it. Maybe you’re giving people too much information. What is the minimum effective number of lessons or subject areas you need to cover to take someone from where they are to where they want to be. Joshua: Right. That goes back to the whole Pareto principle and the 80-20, which I know Tim is a big proponent of. I apologize for the clicking I wanted to actually read the actual definition of the Pareto principle. I think it’s important when you’re thinking about your courses, what to give first, second, and third. I think if you can give away the thing that’s going to have the 80 percent of the impact, starting there, it’s really important. I’m struggling to find a definition per se, but it’s essentially Pareto showed that approximately 80 percent of land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the population. Pareto developed this principle by observing that 20 percent of pea pods in his garden contained 80 percent of the peas. The idea here is that 80 percent of your sales will come from 20 percent of your clients. You can break it down according to whatever your subject matter or focus is. I think that’s what Tim’s doing there. He’s focusing on what’s the 20 percent of things that I could learn that could give me 80 percent of the results. He might even break it back down to 95/5, because that ratio still will take effect. I saw the one where he was learning Tagalog, the Filipino language. That’s what he did. What’s the most frequently used words. The 20 percent of the words that are used 80 percent of the time sort of deal. It’s a great way of looking at things for sure. Christopher: Absolutely. The next skill is called sequencing. This is sort of a counter-intuitive one where you ask yourself what if you did the opposite of best practices? He gives an example of if you want to learn how to flip food in a frying pan, don’t it with hot food and a runny egg in a frying pan. Do it with dried beans in a frying pan while you’re watching a movie. If you want to learn how to chop onions really well, do it with just lettuce and a butter knife while you’re listening to music. Try to find a different way to train a skill then at this high stakes just jump right in thing. Try to get your subconscious mind working on it. Joshua: That’s really good. That’s really helpful. Christopher: The next one is pretty big, and I don’t see a lot of people doing this one. It’s to have stakes. For example, we mentioned that Tim Ferriss learned how to play the drums with a real rock band. I forget the name of the band, but they sing the song "Hot Blooded." It was a real show with 2,000 people in the audience. He knew that in one week from having never played the drums, he would be on stage with a rock band with a real audience. The stakes were very high. Joshua: That’s huge. Christopher: I’m just trying to think of an example of how you could do it with your online course. One of the simplest ways to do stakes is to actually put a monetary consequence. For example, you don’t get some money back, or you have to pay a fine if you don’t complete this thing, or you have some kind of public shame. Of course not over the top. One simple way to do it is to just commit to something publicly. Joshua: I just did this recently in a mastermind that I’m a part of that meets once a month. I’m going to be waking up at 5:00 A.M. every day this month. I really want to focus on my morning routine and getting that dialed. I’m just tired of not succeeding at it, so I publicly have said that I would do this, and if I didn’t, people in my mastermind would be able to donate $100 to any charity that they want or charity that I don’t want to be a part of, or whatever. (laugh) They all know that I’m pretty much a very free will, free spirit, free everything. I’m very much a libertarian, so they’re saying that they’re going to make me donate to the Communist Party of America. Christopher: You just went on the record again. Joshua: I went on the record again. Philosophically I’m not a communist at all, but I will be donating to them if I don’t wake up early. That is a pretty high stake for me. Christopher: That’s a great example. The fifth and final principle is to simplify. If you’re trying to do rapid and accelerated learning, you should try to focus on just one subject at a time. Saying yes to too many things is a problem. To really break it down and simplify the task at hand can help. I remember from the example in the Tim Ferriss show where he was learning how to drum. He tried at one point to learn to read music. Then he ended up simplifying to don’t learn how to play the drums, learn how to play the song. He kept breaking it down. Simplifying. Trying different things. Seeing what stuck. Then finally just committing to just that one song. Joshua: It’s a great show. I really enjoyed it. How have you done that? I’m curious. Christopher: How have I simplified? Joshua: Yeah. You’re a minimalist so you’re constantly simplifying a lot of things. Christopher: I’m trying to think. Minimum effective dose and simplifying. For example, I love eating healthy. In the morning I could make a really fancy breakfast. One way I simplify and get jazzed with energy is have Yerba Mate and a fruit smoothie with organic fruit and lots of kale or chard or greens in there, too. It’s just super simple. I eat that breakfast every single day. It never changes. That’s an example. It’s not necessarily super relevant to online courses, but if you’re looking to claim back a little bit of time in the morning that could work. Joshua: And that fires you up. That’s cool, Man. Well I love keeping these episodes a quick hit for everyone. Let’s leave it there with them. Any final thoughts before we close it out? Christopher: I would just say, Josh, that I would really appreciate it if you guys would leave us a review on iTunes or give us 5 stars, 4 stars. Honest review. Whatever you want. That kind of thing motivates us, so we’d love to hear what you like. What you don’t like. How we can improve, or what you want us to do the next episode on. We really appreciate it. Joshua: Absolutely. All right, Everyone. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. The post Tim Ferriss’ 5 Tips for Accelerated Learning appeared first on LMScast.

Today on LMScast we’re starting an interview series with people who we admire in the learning management system space, and who are just altogether incredible people in online education. Listening to customers’ feedback and measuring results is important for moving a business forward the right way, and we value the feedback from our LifterLMS customers. Today Joshua Millage discusses LifterLMS and online education with Diana Young. Diana is a LifterLMS customer, and she shares her experience setting up a course with LifterLMS and her initial surprise with how easy the software made the process of creating the course. She was skeptical at first, because all softwares say that they’re easy to use. But she was pleasantly surprised that LifterLMS really delivered and made it easy to set up her course! Some people think online education and internet marketing are all about making money. While other people want to teach in order to help spread knowledge and make the world a better place. Those two perspectives can exist in harmony, and an online entrepreneur can make money at the same time they’re teaching and helping other people. It can be easy to get confused by the difference between beliefs and values. In Diana’s mind, a belief is a way that you think the world is. Whereas a value is a vision of a way the world could be. So what we believe tends to shape our behavior, but what we value tends to shape our choices. We have some amazing members of the LifterLMS community. If you are a customer listening to this interview, and you have an incredible story that you’d like to share about what you’re doing with LifterLMS, we’d love to hear about it. You can reach out to us at joshua@lifterlms.com, and we can schedule a time to tell your story here on LMScast. If you don’t own a copy of the LifterLMS WordPress learning management system plugin, you can purchase a copy at LifterLMS.com. We’d love for you to be a part of our community and share your wisdom with the world. You can also post comments and subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us. Joshua: Hello, Everyone. Today we’re doing something a little different. We’ve decided to start an interview series here on LMScast with people who we admire in the learning management system space, and who are just altogether incredible people in the online education space. Today I had the opportunity and the pleasure of interviewing Diana Young. We met Diana through an online group, a Facebook group. She has been one of the most passionate, generous people who have come into our world here at LifterLMS, giving us feedback on how we can improve our product and do a better job with our branding. I asked her to kick off this interview series with me, because I think that what she has to share with the world can benefit everyone who’s in the online education space, as well as anyone who has purchased LifterLMS and who is looking to create an incredible course, and we go through so many different topics - everything from values and beliefs into why you should be okay with making money and making any difference, and while these two ideas are not … why they aren’t mutually exclusive ideas, I should say. I had such a fun time interviewing Diana. I think that you’re really going to enjoy this interview, and I’d love to hear your feedback. If you can head over to LMScast.com, check out the blog post with Diana and leave me a comment, and let’s start a discussion there. I hope you’re having a great day, and thank you for listening to LMScast. Yeah, let’s start off with this question. What attracted you to LifterLMS? Let’s just start from the top, I guess. Diana: Great. We’ll, the first thing that attracted me was the combination, actually the split personality, because that’s who I worked with, and it took me a long time to figure out that that’s actually me, too. I have an interesting combination of having very high comprehension and very low execution. I can do … Apparently, the stuff I can do is really technical. It feels to me like I’m always just flailing in just like, "I don’t know what I’m doing here." But compared to other people, apparently I’m pretty effective at figuring things out. That combination of easy for someone who is starting from zero, and responsive and designed for someone who wants to do expand and build on and do things, those are the people I most enjoy talking to about technology. It was really intriguing, but the problem was I didn’t believe it. Nothing personal. Joshua: No, no, no. Diana: After two years of flailing around buying everything, I did, I bought it all. I pay everyone. What I found was that things were not as described, and I was shocked and disheartened and discouraged. I didn’t realize how complicated it was in a lot of ways, but the problem was I never really knew what I was getting until I got it, and then it wasn’t usually anything like what I had expected based on what I read, if that makes sense. Joshua: Right. Diana: The second thing that what really attracted me was when I was hearing Chris Badgett, I was describing that. I said, "This sounds great, but man, everything says it’s easy." Every single thing I’ve ever bought, the first thing it said was that it was easy. I won’t name the product, but I spent three months, and I cried, and it was a $300/month product. It was supposed to be easy, and I was supposed to just do it myself. It was not easy. I could not do it. No. That’s fine. Just tell me that. Right? Tell me I’ll need to hire a programmer. Tell me I’ll need to spend three months. If I’d known that, I could have made a better decision that would have worked better. Joshua: Right. Diana: Anyways that was my problem was I didn’t believe, but then I tried it, and I was shocked. It really was that easy. It was ridiculous. I did all the whole course in a weekend. Now, I probably couldn’t have done that. Wait a second, I probably couldn’t have done that except I’ve been writing courses for a year. That gave me the course part comes easy now. Joshua: Yeah. Diana: The sequence is in my head before it hits the … That took me a year to really get there. If I was starting from absolute zero, I’d say get your course ready first. Joshua: Right. Diana: You have the course ready, either in your head or someplace else. Man, not only just a weekend, but a weekend of constant interruptions. Joshua: Yeah. Diana: Like I probably could have done it in four hours, had I had four uninterrupted hours. It was a really … A lot of other stuff going on that weekend. Anyway, I was happy. Joshua: That’s amazing. Diana: I have to touch it, I have to see it. I have to … Joshua: Yeah, that’s where we’re headed, too, because at the time of this recording we’re really in kind of version one, and we have a really cool update to make even to the course builder side of things even more streamlined and the user experience more robust. We’re constantly just trying to listen to our customers and watch how they use our product, so that we can improve it and make it simpler, and I think you’re right. Congruency between the message that a company puts out there, and then the execution of that message through their product or service is so important … It’s so important to keep those in line. I think that, because I do have a background in internet marketing, I see how the internet marketing world gets very excitable, excited and they’re excitable about the possibilities, but then after that sale is made, they’re just on to the next sale. They’re not really watching. Is the information that they sold or the product they sold implemented and used in the way that they had sold it? There’s a disconnect. I think that’s what’s unique about our team is we … This is something I actually want to ask you about is, because we have these tension between the idea that the make money online idea and the make impact idea. That’s what’s driven us to the LMS world, because we see people who want to teach and have a huge impact, and that’s deeply rooted inside of me. My parents were both educators. I come from a long line of educators. There is this whole like, "Let’s educate the world," that’s ingrained in me, but I am also a business person and an entrepreneur, and I want to feed myself and provide for my family, too. Diana: Absolutely. Joshua: It’s like today, I feel right now like the flag that we’re trying to raise in a way is like those things don’t have to be mutually exclusive, and to be completely frank and vulnerable, I don’t want them to be polluted. I don’t want people to go to LifterLMS and say, "Oh, those are the make money online guys, and that’s what their product is." We want to enable that. We want to make that easy, but we also want to give you tools to make an impact, too. It’s not one or the other. Diana: Oh my gosh, I want to address that so badly, but I also want to go back. I think once I start talking about making money and making a difference as one single thing that cannot be separated, I will not stop talking. Joshua: Let’s go. Let’s rewind, and then we’ll go forward. Diana: Right. I think what I learned after I did more study and more research, more just hooking into how things work. I learned that many companies have marketing as it’s almost its own separate thing. Even if it’s the same company, it’s a whole different thing. It’s a separate thing. It’s not connected. They hand this thing over to the marketing, and they just say, "Sell this." They give a really a quick idea of … And then the marketing department just goes to town. And the marketing department considers that their job, if you ask them, this is usually what they’ll tell you if you ask them, and no one else is listening like I did. You know what I’m saying? You go where they hang out, and you go ask him. We’re entertainers. Our job is to get you excited. Our job is to get you excited, so you will take your money and put it on the dotted line. It’s basically like the circus bunker or something. Right? They think that’s the game. They think that’s the game we’re all playing, so that’s their expectation, is that I know it’s entertainment, and I’m just there to be entertained. You know what I’m saying? I’m there to hear a good pitch and give them my money and have a good time. Right? That’s their world, but my world is … My dad’s an engineer. How does that work? Is it going to work for me? What’s it made out of? How’s does that operate? I need to know these things. The marketing department. That may not be something they know anything about. You know what I mean? It’s not necessarily going to to translate real well if that makes sense through this. I think that’s one way that the marketing is just happening in an alternate reality of hopefulness and enthusiasm, but is not entirely grounded in product reality, if you know what I mean, because that does sell. God, we all want something that works, and it’s wonderful, and it fulfills our desires and does everything we want, and we’re like, "God, that thing, absolutely want to buy it." And then is the problem, relationship. Joshua: Right. Diana: People bounce from thing to thing, and no one really ever gets any feedback, and I’m just going to … I’m sorry to go here, but it’s like dating. What if you dated somebody, and you went out for a while, maybe a week, and then you dated somebody else, and you went off for a while, maybe a week. Then you dated somebody else. Nobody will get any feedback. The power of relationships, and the reason they hurt sometimes is because it’s commitment. You start seeing yourself from the other person. You start learning from them how you are and how you operate, and then you make adjustments, and the whole thing is when a relationship works, it is the best thing. It is so good, because the two have formed a super being, and it is … Yes, and it’s something that you don’t get if you skip the pain and skip the learning from relationship. I’m not trying to run people down to do this. I’m just saying there is a layer of growth when you commit to something. Joshua: Right. Diana: You got to commit to the right thing. Or else it’s just going to be just a pain, a horrific pain that shoot you. I really think values is the … I married someone who shares my values, because even our beliefs are different in some ways, beliefs change. We actually have both of us changed our belief many times during our marriage, and it’s been okay, because we have this common values that grounds us in the relationship and makes us both want to be there and both keep trying. The second thing, this was really early on. I met Chris Badgett, then I tried the product, and then of course, I had a million suggestions, because I can’t help it. I’m fascinated. There’s this emotional trajectory that … It’s navigating a physical space for me. "Oh, here’s the door. I’m walking in and out." I never read the manual first. I’ve been walking in … "Oh, okay, I’m turning right here. Oh, this is the living room. Great. Living room. Okay, cool. I put my stuff down here. I’m going to start setting up my class." That how was Lifter was. It didn’t take me that long to navigate and get in there and be able to start. I was like, if you get a new house, and you’re able to just put your stuff down and unpack and fix a meal. Make the bed and sleep. Or in a house and you’re like, "The attic is where?" The attic is … "But the attic, it’s in the middle of the bathroom. I can’t get this. This isn’t going to work." And then you’re like, "Excuse me but your attic, it’s in the middle of the bathroom. Did I make a mistake?" "I don’t know. Hold on. I don’t know what you’re talking about." You know what I’m saying? Things can really go wrong on a number of levels, but what I loved was that, "Man, you guys were like … You are interested in my experience. You cared about my experience. You want to know more about my experience." Oh yeah. Joshua: We look at it like we’re on a journey. The only way to have a successful journey is to get feedback from people who are on the journey with you, who are ahead of you, who are behind you, who have a different perspective, they’re on a hill behind you, so they can see a different vantage point, and it’s important to not put yourself in a box and build in that box, because you’re not going to build something that resonates. When we met you, Diana, it was really fun, because you are able to give us really good feedback and feedback that propelled us forward. I think in a lot of ways is going to propel the entire WordPress learning management system industry forward, because of what we’re trying to do and connect the dots for teachers and make it easy for them to build, sell, and engage their students. It’s really exciting to me. One of the things I want to ask, you said it just a minute ago was values and beliefs. For those of us who are listening, help me think about those things. What is a value versus a belief, in your mind? Diana: Great. Okay, this is actually in my brain enclosed, because I feel like we start here in so many ways, but we don’t think about it very often. A belief isn’t something you think is true. It’s a way that you think the world is. I believe that people are … I believe that life is … That’s a belief. A value is a vision of a way the world could be, so I guess you could say I believe people can be, and it’s just a value is bigger and it’s more about the future. The reason values are important is because belief is still our filter or auto pilot. What we believe tends to shape our behavior, but what we value tends to shape our choices. Joshua: That’s good. Diana: Right. When I have a choice, my value is what helps me make the choice, because when I am talking about my values, I’m talking about creating something. I think what I recognized with Lifter really early, like in the first five minutes or maybe ten minutes, because I was deeply skeptical actually for the first time. It’s too good to be true. I want it to be true, but I don’t believe that it’s true, and there’s belief again. I became a believer. When I used it, and it works. Right. When I did actually put my class online in one very busy weekend that mostly wasn’t spent at the computer. That was the one I believe, but the values that I sensed immediately that made me feel like, "I don’t need you to be perfect. I just want to know that we’re aiming for the same place." You know what I mean? And the fact that you care of what I thought and cared about my experience, that is something I want to create in the world. I want to create a world where we care about each other’s experience, listen to each other. That is the world I believe. I believe that already exists, but I have to choose to continue to make it so for me. Does that make sense? Joshua: Absolutely. Diana: I could usually make choices that would short circuit not for me, even though in the largest sense will always be true, and can’t be changed in a smaller sense like an insulator, isolate myself even from something that’s true by turning myself away from it persistently. I always want to turn myself towards listening, and because they sustained, I study with, what would you call it? The mechanic systems that go in your brain. Right? One of those things that I keep noticing in myself is … There’s a name for it. It’s cognitive bias. It’s just this little core of us that makes us always return to something even when … Actually, we have evidence. I know I’m not the only person in the world, and I know I’ve got many perspectives, but man, over and over again I found I’ve only looked at my own piece. Joshua: Yeah, absolutely. Diana: I couldn’t even realize it. Joshua: Yeah. Yes, it’s you getting myopic with your own view. Diana: Yes, and that can be all right, provided that I’ve got some other way of bringing in the inputs that are important in this situation. What’s funny about this is I do great facilitation, which means we have people, we have a group, we have a problem, and we’ll going to get to the bottom and that we’re going to solve it. Right? There’s two ways I could be in that group. One is one of the people, but I found what really works better. We actually want a problem solved, and that’s not my problem. If I’m the one who helps everyone connect, so everyone’s perspective gets into this thing. Then you look at it to the other people’s perspective, and suddenly you start seeing solutions. It’s almost like these little windows, and you got to remember to look through all the windows, because as you move around to the different windows, things starts to look real different. Joshua: Yeah, totally. Diana: Yeah, also the problem, the solution is already there, but what needs to happen is we need to see it from someone else’s perspective or from an entirely different perspective, so it’s funny. Even though I feel like I’m super good and get a lot of what I do is about perspective taking and helping people take perspective. It’s cognitive bias that I’m just as terrible at it than every other human being. Joshua: How do you deal … That’s such a great perspective and when you apply that to a brand that has what I would call like a split personality, how do you make those personalities isolated so that people can resonate with one or the other? Diana: Yeah. Well, I want to talk to people about their experience. It is more complicated when you’re talking about two very different people with two very different experiences. With Lifter, you have this interesting dual level thing. Someone who specializes in implementing LMS systems and WordPress, for less technical people automatically needs to protect the perspective of that less technical person in order to do good work. Can you see, it’s like a circle nests in a circle. Joshua: Yeah, right. Diana: I think I would start with … They are already probably looking for that. They’re already probably looking for the thing that is easy for their users to use, because it hasn’t helped us. It’s like books. They’re sending you books, but people don’t really always read them, and sometimes they get confused, and sometimes they don’t read very fast or their comprehension isn’t good. We think that by throwing a book at somebody, we’ve already delivered to them everything that’s in it, but it’s just not like that. People are designed to learn from other people, not from books, and honestly not from software either. Joshua: Right. Diana: They aren’t. Joshua: Here’s the dilemma. Diana: Here’s the dilemma. Exactly. People actually learn from other people, and not just how we are, biology has made us that way and not the other way. Reading was considered an arcane art until fairly recently to something that rich people and … It was just not necessary for the average person until recently, now it’s essential. Software is relatively a new thing, too. I mean, "Wow." We’re still sort of figuring it out, and I think how people learn, but anyways, someone who’s implementing is already having a look at it. If they’re doing something that’s going to be effective. They’re looking at it from their user’s perspective. I would say they’re going to be able to see both. I would lead with the simple and then add, and if you are also or if you are. The people who are looking for simple, they’re not going to want to read that, because they don’t need it. We have to, in this culture, we have to shield ourselves from the constant information overload all the time. It’s so funny when I get a new operating system on the phone or something, it will auto update. I have just decided to delegate that to my children, because … Not because I can’t do it, because at this point I have stuffed so many … Especially when I was testing software. I would probably test four or five different kinds of software at the same time. I didn’t have any brain bandwidth left. I don’t have any informational digestion left to figure out why my phone had just moved my call button from this side of the screen to that side of the screen, but the kids were so wooo though. They were into it. They we’re doing that all day. It was a holiday for them. This is my pet one, my pet peeve is feeling like I’m never not working, because every time I interact with software, I’m evaluating it. Joshua: Yeah, you constantly critical … Diana: My dream is where I can just feel like, "This is working." Joshua: Yup, I understand. Owning a development company, that’s a big issue for me, too. Diana: Yeah, I imagine that happens to you, too. Hey, can we go to making money and making a difference? Joshua: Yeah, let’s do it. Diana: Good, because I care about that. That’s another thing that looks like it’s split in half. It looks like it’s two things. A lot of people you talk to, I just saw a guy on the internet who posted, "I’m not even going to deal with people who say that making money isn’t their primary purpose." It’s funny because to me it read, you care about people? You care about them first? You fool. Making money is in the name of the game, and I’m going to do it, and if I have to step in your face to do it. Consider yourself stepped on. Joshua: Yeah, isn’t it funny that people have this guilty conscience around it. Yeah, people I think when you say money either you’re completely … It’s like you either you have to be this raging bulk capitalist, like we just got to squeeze all the money out of every single thing we can, or you have to be like a 1960’s throwback hippie which is like, "I don’t need money man. We’re just going to …" Diana: I’ll just live in my van, man. Joshua: We’re just going to live in my van, and I grow some herbs and stuff and chill. Diana: I’m just going to eat, I don’t know, wild plants and stuff. Grow some herbs. You know what? That is totally fine. If you are totally fine running out of gas, if you’re totally fine when it gets to be winter, and then some of herbs didn’t make it. You know what I’m saying? In India, there are two paths. The easy one and the hard one. Let me tell me you about the easy one. The easy one is when you take off all your clothes, you might have a piece of cloth wrapped around your waist, but probably not. You take the top of somebody’s skull. You just wander around, and people give you food, and if they give you food, you eat. If they don’t, you can’t find anything, you starve and die. That’s it. You pray all day. That’s your … It’s between you and God what happens to you. It’s up to you and God. No one else is really involved. People can be involved themselves, like feeding or caring for you, but they’re free not to do it. It’s up to this between them and God. Right? That’s the easy path to … Are you looking ahead and guessing what the harder path might be? Joshua: I have an idea. Yeah. Diana: Yeah, it’s making money and supporting your family. That’s a much harder experience. It also considers spiritual path, but it’s much, much, much more challenging. Joshua: That’s actually cool. I’ve never heard about that from an Indian culture perspective, but … Why do you think that people put these things in categories? Why they can’t exist together? Diana: Here’s what I think. I know that guy didn’t really mean it. I know he wouldn’t actually step on my face. He wouldn’t, but we have different number. I talked about the different roles. We have different ideas. His idea is that we are competing, that it’s a competitive game. In order to win, he needs to make a lot of money, and if he has to step on my face to do it, well that’s fine. That’s part of the game. I used to play basketball, and man, part of the game was it was psychologically intimidating your opponent. It was part of the game, we all agreed to it. I didn’t say anything, but bring some with my body language, and they were not getting around me, and I also didn’t let them around me, because that was what made me good. That’s competition. That’s a perfectly good game. If everybody agrees to it, and everybody’s happy with it, good, play and enjoy. My kids are playing chess right at this minute. That is the game they agreed to compete at, and they’re enjoying it. Now, the problem is when this guy is competing, and I’m going in there, and I want to cooperate. Right. Did you see what a disaster that’s going to be? Joshua: Yeah. Diana: He’s going to think I’m a dummy. He’s going to think I am the biggest … He’s going to think I’m that hippie guy in a van, and the funny thing is that people who are willing to play the game as it is culturally understood generally do make money faster, but I think that there is another game, and I think my problem was I was trying to play a different game … You know what I’m saying, I hadn’t really found people who said, "Hey, let’s play our own game. Let’s make the rules. Let’s decide them, and let’s play about them." And my rule is I want to play with her cooperative rules. As long as everyone else is cool with it, we’ll just play that game. Joshua: Yeah, I love that. Diana: We get super brain. Joshua: Which is the best part. Diana: We get super brain. We do. With super brain, we can solve anything with all these perspectives. We can solve anything, because the answers are always inside the problem. It’s like the plants, and it’s like the seed. A problem is just this amazing puzzle waiting for us to figure it out, and it’s got a gift for us in it. Joshua: Yeah, I love that, because I had studied Stoic philosophy, and you know the idea in the nutshell. The obstacle is the way. Diana: Yeah, yes it is. Joshua: The rock in your path is the path. That’s the whole purpose, is figuring out how to get around the rock. Diana: Let me tell you. When I was working with people, and the pain was the rocks. The suffering was their rock. We could not go around it. Boy, we could not numb it. They had already tried numbing it, trying to get out, using surgery. These are people who the medical establishment had said, "I’m sorry, there is nothing more we can do for you." That’s why they came to me, and we did. We sorted stuff out, and that was how, because everything surgical is trying to get around the rock. Without doing anything different. Anything. You got to figure out. Okay, I’m sorry. There’s actually a lot of really cool movies that I haven’t seen, but I think are sort of getting at this. The way it is with pain is almost like you hear about these people who can put their hand right through a wall or walk on fire, and it always sounds thorough, I used to trigger my skepticism so badly, but really in a lot of ways problems and difficulties are like that. We have to both see them and not see them. They’re both there and not there. I think it’s more taking our perspective to where we see opportunities. When I was banging against the wall, I thought I had to go through that, but what I realized is I just wasn’t creating a right container for myself yet. With the reason that one was hard, it’s because I want to help everyone, and I got the wake up call. Some people do not want me right now. They do not like my game. They do not recognize that it exists. They think I’m just a crazy person who doesn’t understand the rules. Why on earth would I not manipulate people? This one guy, and he said, "Well, why do you do this? Why do you sell other people ways to manipulate?" You know what I’m saying, it was like a manipulation machine. He figured out … He was good at psychological manipulation, and so that was what he sold. He sold to other people who had left scruples about how to use to, and he did, and I just asked him. He said, "Why not? Because I’m good at it." I don’t know what to say, but I’m good at it, too, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to sell it, because I don’t think these people really are going to use it in ways that are really going to bring us all pretty much just … There’s a lot of … It’s like people are hypnotized, or they’re just in so much pain, and they’re so desperate, and they’ll just do anything, they’ll believe, and he thinks he’ll buy anything. It’s not that hard, because I just want that moment of relief. What he told me, he told me something that just … For weeks I was terribly upset. He said they don’t expect it to work, and I don’t either, and then I was just like my heart like you could hear the crack, is it broke? What? Neither of you … Excuse me, but no wonder it didn’t work. I mean hello, if these are our expectations, these are really, really low. Joshua: Right, yeah we spend the money, because we want … That’s the easy way out in a way. We spend the money with that brief moment of hope that it’s going to change things. Diana: Right, and I’ve certainly been on that roller coaster and taken that ride. I bought things that didn’t work, and I think it was a combination of me deluding myself in that way, in that specific way, and also people not being very careful about where they led me, as long as they got my money. Like you said, they’re not examining the results. I remember I had … I take a lot of online courses and try a lot of software, and then I have a lot of feedback, and I was shocked that people weren’t interested. Just really shocked, because I’m interested, but then I realized, "Oh, okay some people aren’t … How could they not be …" It was a really long time for me to absorb that some people don’t care. I have your money, and I’m done with you. I really don’t care about your experience. I really don’t care what you think could be different, or where you think this should go, or what you think the possibilities are. I’m satisfied. I thought that’s who I just need to not … I could not do that. I could be … I’m supporting this, but I could stop supporting it. Right? When I gave you money, what I want is for you to do more good things for other people, and for me, and that’s why I gave you money. When I thought that wasn’t going to happen, man, you never get my money. Joshua: Yeah, absolutely. That leads into the next question I want to ask you, which is … This is because I want to start a public conversation where I’m asking you in a public forum. How can we better serve you? You’ve seen the initial product in what we have, where should we take this, in your perspective? Diana: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so where I think the world change is going to happen that you were talking about. You said, I think it’ll change the entire … I think it will, too. Definitely, keep moving towards this ability. More testing, more listening to people, people from different … get a little more … I would try to get a little more specific, I think who you want to help as a person has a very particular nature. They want to help others, and they are maybe feeling a little bit torn by that make money versus help others thing. I would love to see you develop some support or community. Honey, uh-uh (Negative), No. Joshua: The chess game is over. Isn’t it? Diana: Sorry, we got a little visit from the rest of the house. Okay, the dog wants to come in. All right, the dog is going to assist me here to answer this question. Thank you. Okay. Joshua: I love it. Diana: They’re a little bit torn on the rock of, I want to make money, and I want to do the right thing. Their little business training that I have found, maybe I just missed it, but so much business training is about how to do the wrong thing, but pretend you didn’t. How to do the wrong thing and justify it to yourself. How to do the wrong thing that hurt people a little bit, but you don’t really examine that, because that’s not part of the process, so what I would love to see is you keep on just like you’ve been doing, make it easier for developers, make it easier for the average people who they help and who help themselves, and then help those people do … Help those people get all the way. That’s the other weird dynamic of online marketing. Is there’s like this … Everyone makes the strong start. They’ve got a little money, they’ve got a lot of enthusiasm, and then they … You know what I mean. Stuff doesn’t work, it takes forever. It’s not that clear. They’ve shockingly discovered that some people aren’t honest and aren’t really telling them the useful stuff. You know what I’m saying, and it just so much potential momentum for good have been … The competitive game would say, "Oh, some people that aren’t good enough or aren’t tough enough." What if they are? What if they’re just not good at this particular competitive game? What if what they really need is an atmosphere of support. So that would be one thing is create an atmosphere of support, create groups, communities, the super brain, the human part of and also function as a screen. This is a tough one, and this is hard for me. This still hurts me even to say. People, when you sell to anyone with the polls and the credit card, you get just everything. When you’re trying to grow a culture in a dish that has certain qualities, you got to keep it really clean and only put in, figure the garden. If you want to have a garden and you want certain things in it, and other things aren’t going to work, you’re going to need to try to sort them out constantly and so functioning is that filter both of the things that are effective and will create results, because that’s a huge filter. Stuff that’s going to create results. Values and ethics. Values are the way we imagine the world could be, but ethics are the rules that we make between the agreements you make between each other of how we’re going to make it. I think for the rules that we agree to play by. If you created a space that was bounded by ethics and had a common goal, "Wow" That would be amazing. Joshua: I love that. Diana: That will be super. Yes, here’s some of the other things I realized. I had just spent ten years learning to get actual change. It hurts. It’s hard, and it is the only way through going straight through the rock, and then I realized, "Oh my gosh, these people are selling it. It looks like he went to the rock, but he didn’t." And I realized, okay, well that’s fine. Sell it. But let’s just be clear what it is. This isn’t a way to appear that you went through the rock. For instance, this is a way to get marketers speaking. This is a way to get somebody to tell you all their pain points, you don’t even have to know them in advance so you can sell them something, and I’m just sitting there like, I have been doing it the hard way. I created an entire product around there and what their pain was and how to get them to the other side of it. Almost everything will turn. How am I going to sell that? Because it sounds exactly the same from the outside as the other thing that doesn’t, but it gives the illusion that the problem has been solved or that solved part of the problem and never goes back to check. Hey how you doing with that? That container in which relationships can occur. Joshua: Yeah. No, that’s a really important thing I think, especially because I think there’s this individual that we’re talking about who doesn’t have a great forum right now to find friends and people in a community, because they have to choose the box, a box. Internet marketing box or some other box. Diana: Yeah, any box exactly. Let’s choose an ethic, valued, more than shared goals box. That’s fun. Joshua: I’m into it. Let’s do it. Diana: Seriously. Joshua: I’m sure we’re going to have some Facebook group or something pop out of this. That’s an excellent idea. That goes in to my final question. Where you see the biggest opportunity in the online education space, and I think it has to do with that. Diana: Yeah, that you’re right. That is actually my answer to that question. I think our unprecedented opportunity is to sort ourselves by values and what we want. The world we want to live in and into the games we want to play and create that actual change in people enrolled and do it really effectively. It doesn’t have to be several lifetimes or ten lifetimes. What if they could do it one lifetime, because we decided that that’s what were going to do. We aren’t going to spin our wheel. We’re just going to get attraction. We weren’t going to work together. We were going to solve our incomes and other people’s problems. We are going to do this. We were going to create this world. Joshua: I love that. I think that now is a perfect time to do that, because of where technology has gone, and it’s cheap as it’s ever been to be able to spin up a WordPress site with a plugin and put information there and then go connect with your tribe of people. Diana: Anyone in the world who you share a common language with, you can connect with who has internet. You know what I mean, provide a bunch of listing you mentioned internet connection. That’s a lot of people. Joshua: That’s a lot of people. I think that’s the most exciting thing to me is now that we’ve brought technological barriers down and geographic barriers down like, what’s going to happen now through the intersection, the super brain as you would say, that can form. Diana: Yeah, and you know it’s funny. I actually spent some time … A lot more time with my neighbors sometimes on online stuff, just because everyone’s so busy, and the online stuff lets us plan efficiently and then execute in person. Joshua: Oh, that’s good. Diana: I actually feel like the internet allows me to see more people in person than I ever was able to without … Of course, I wasn’t so busy then, but this thing that allows me to do the things I want to be doing, and it’s just so efficient. You can gather a lot of support. You can gather money. I know a local farmers market just got completely redone, and it was an online fundraiser that did it. Joshua: That’s amazing. Well Diana, this has been an incredible interview and one in which I think a lot of people are going to gather a lot of value from. If someone has a question for you, what’s the best way for them to get in contact with you? Diana: You can email me diana@immancy.com, or you can friend me on Facebook if you can use that address from Facebook and ask me. And if you don’t get me the first time, try again. Not notorious for checking email exhaustively. I also look right at it and don’t see something which is just a strange quirk of mine. Joshua: No, it’s all good. Well, thank you so much for doing this interview. Just so the listeners know that we’ve … I would say you’ve become a fast friend of the LifterLMS team, because of your very powerful feedback and heart for where we want to go, and I think that resonated with you and vice versa, and so we’re excited that you’re on this journey with us. We want to do more interviews like this, and we want to do more community building efforts in the learning management space for the people who are not afraid to sit on the line of the make money and make impact. At the same time do share those values that of ethics and doing things above the bar. That’s really, it’s really, really important to us, so thank you so much for coming on and doing this interview with me. Diana: Thank you so much. I have so enjoyed this. I just, I really appreciate what you’re doing, and I’m really excited about it, too. Joshua: Cool. Hey, thanks for listening to the end of the interview. As you can tell we have some amazing members of the LifterLMS community. Diana Young is a phenomenal individual, and if you are a LifterLMS customer, you can interact with her in the Facebook group, and if you are a customer listening to this interview, and you have an incredible story that you’d like to share about what you’re doing with LifterLMS, I’d love to hear about it. You can reach out and find me at joshua@lifterlms.com, and we can schedule a time to tell your story here on LMScast. If you don’t own a copy of LifterLMS, well, get on it. We’d love for you to be a part of our community and share your information with the world and hopefully do an interview like this one. You can go purchase a copy over at lifterlms.com and select either a personal or development license. If you have any questions, again, feel free to reach out to me directly. My email is joshua@lifterlms.com. Thanks for listening. The post Diana Young on LifterLMS and Online Education appeared first on LMScast.