MBA915 Q&A Wednesday: I have a course idea. How do I find a way to make it more interesting?

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Heyo. Welcome to the the $100 MBA show. Because your business is too important to you to not get better every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. You can check us out over at 100mba.net. Today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode where we answer your question right here on the show. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me directly at oma. Today's question comes from Jason and Jason asks, I have a course idea. I want to find out ways to make it more engaging. Specifically how do I structure the course and deliver it for more engagement? Great question Jason, who happens to also be a $100 MBA member. Well you're in luck Jason because I have a Master's in Education. I've taught in the classroom for over 13 years at the high school and university level. I've been teaching as an entrepreneur for over 10 years now and I'm gonna give you my strategies to making sure every single lesson, every single course, every single blog post, every single video I create is more engaging for my audience. We're basically gonna reverse engineer a successful lesson or A successful course. I mean, a lot of this stuff is gonna be pulled straight out of my teacher training. You know, teachers have a lot of pressure to make sure that they are engaging their students. Cause they see them every single day, sometimes multiple hours a day, and there's a lot on the line. They gotta make sure these students pass right or have a good chance of passing. Right? So I can't wait to get into this lesson where I show you how to create and deliver an engaging course. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So Jason specifically asked how to structure his course to have more engagement, not only in the content, but the delivery. When it comes to any lesson, any course, any blog post, any video, anything at all, you need to begin with one thing. And this is so important. A lot of people do not do this because, hey, they don't have teacher training. They don't understand how important this is. That one thing is a learning outcome. You have to define specifically what your learning outcome is. And a good way to come up with a learning outcome and to define your learning outcome is to ask yourself, what will the student, what will the learner know how to do by the end of your lesson or course? So say, for example, I was creating a course on how to play the piano for beginners. The learning outcome for the course is to be able to play a very basic song. If that's what we want them to be able to do. That's the learning outcome. Play a basic song, a full song that they can play on their own. You need to define what you want them to be able to do at the end. That's the learning outcome. This is so important because your whole mission is to make sure that your student knows how to do this by the end of your course. And, and this should be front and center at the first thing you do, so you know how to build upon that. Now you might be saying, what does this have to do with engagement? Well, in order for you to engage your students, you need to make sure that they're progressing towards your learning outcome. See, as students, as somebody who's learning something, you get motivated, you get engaged. As soon as you start feeling you're getting better, you're getting closer to the goal. So not only is it important for you to find the learning outcome so you know, as a teacher or the creator of your course, but you also need to make sure that your audience knows what the learning outcome is so they understand what the goal is of the course. The goal of the course is to Be able to play a song on the piano in my example. So that's the number one thing you need to do to engage your audience. Let them know what the learning outcome is so they know that they're progressing towards that. They'll see that as they're learning through the course. They'll see, wow, I am getting closer to that goal because I'm getting better and better. Number two, try to have as much engagement as possible in your course. If it's a video course online or an email course, get them to interact with you. This could be a comment section at the bottom of each lesson of your course or a open forum or a Facebook group. Or it could be, you know, back and forth via email with you if it's a small group. The point here is, is that you want to encourage people to do you want to encourage them to ask questions and to implement. So if I'm ending my lesson in learning a few chords on the piano, you can just get them to engage in any way by saying, hey, how long did it take for you to get these chords, to understand how to play these chords on the piano? Did it take you 15 minutes, 20 minutes? Let me know. So get as much engagement as possible from the audience. Number three, make sure you have visual aids. So if you're doing a video course, for example, and it's a talking head video, or you're on camera and you're teaching, that's great. But also make sure you cut away to some visual aid, some B roll, what it's called. So if I'm doing an introduction to the course and I'm introducing all the different types of pianos you can buy when you get started, I'll cut away to some images of these pianos, maybe some pages or images of pages on Amazon where they can order them. People like different visual aids to help them be engaged. They're just seeing the same thing over and over with no difference, no cuts, no B roll. It can get boring pretty quick. A good example of this, of how somebody does this really well with their videos, is Brian Dean. I mentioned him a whole bunch of times, but check him out on YouTube. He's the founder of Backlinko.com he does a lot of good cuts in his video to change things up. Sometimes he does some graphics, sometimes he does some different cutaways, different scenes. He maybe even changes his clothes and makes a little bit of a joke. Check it out. You'll know what I'm talking about. But change it up, up in your videos. Next, engagement technique. Make sure that you break things into micro goals. So say, for example, I have a course on how to learn the piano for beginners. It's save 20 videos. Each video is a module. I should have a goal for each video and I should state that goal again, like the learning outcome before the video starts so they understand that this is what we're trying to accomplish. And then you recap at the end of the video what they're able to accomplish. Now after that module. Again, people get engaged when they feel like they're improving and sometimes you have to present it to them, show them how much they've improved by showing them a quote unquote before and after the start of the lesson. To start the module, hey, this is where you are right now. This is the before but after this module is over, you're going to be able to do this, this and this, and this is where you're going to be in the timeline of your progression. And that gratification of, oh, in the next 10, 15 minutes, I'm going to be able to improve even that little micro step. It's motivational and it helps people stay on point, engaged with your course. Next, make sure you set up expectations. So it's very important to let people know how long each part of the course is going to be, whether it's a module or a lesson. This is applicable if it's written. If it's like a written course or an email course or a video course. So with videos it's quite easy because a lot of video players just show you how many minutes is in the video. Some people hide that for some reason. I would not do that. It's good for people to know how much time they need to allocate for this lesson. So if it says 10 minutes or 15 minutes or whatever. Now if there's exercises you have to do in addition to watching the lesson or going through the lesson, then you need to make sure they know that too. So say, hey, this is a 15 minute video, but with the workbook or with the exercises you have to do, it's going to take about 30 minutes to complete this lesson. So set up expectations so people can like block off time and understand that, hey, this is going to take X amount of time to get done with. This subconsciously allows them to focus and to dedicate that time to, hey, I need 30 minutes of focus to finish this lesson. Expectations are so important because when you set them up, people know what they're supposed to do. When people are lost or not really sure how long this is going to take. Sometimes they'll give up and not complete the lesson. If you're familiar with medium medium.com it's basically a blogging platform and one of the best features they have is at the top of the article. It tells you the reading time. How long would this article take to read? And people love this because it sets up expectations. Wow, this is a six minute read. No problem. I can read this article while I'm waiting for the bus. Whatever, you get the point. So set up expectations. Next, in order for someone to really understand what you're talking about, to see themselves doing what you're doing, you need to give them examples. I often give examples here on the hundred RMBA show. Every time I'm explaining a point, you've seen me give the example of the piano course, right? Examples are critical because some people don't understand things out of context. Most people don't. So you need to make sure you give some sort of context with examples. And it's okay to have some fun with the example. I like to challenge myself and see if I can come up with original new ideas for examples in my lessons, in my courses all the time. But examples are great because allows them to see it in action. Whatever you're teaching, put it into action, put it in the real world. And now another tip to keep people engaged is to keep things tight. Don't waffle. This won't happen if you script our outline your lessons before you shoot the video or write them out as a text form. Course. Keep things tight because when you start to waffle or go on and on about something or you start rambling, people start falling asleep. That's the opposite of engaging, right? So keep it tight. And if you can, even tighten it up even more in the edit, if it's a video or even if it's a written blog post, tighten it up in the edit. Make sure that it's constantly learning. There's no wasted time and people are not rolling their eyes in boredom.

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Before I wrap up today's lesson, today's episode, I want to give you some really great resources to help you when it comes to building an online course. We had a three part series here on the show called how to Create an Online Course. You could check that out if you subscribe to the show. If you hit subscribe on this podcast right now, whether using itunes, stitcher, whatever app, you'll have access to the archives. That means episodes that are older than 300 episodes and these episodes are 3, 25, 26 and 27. And these episodes are 325, 326 and 327. So in order to access them you have to make sure you subscribe. Then you'll see it in your feed in the options for episodes for you to download. Those three episodes are a three part lesson that really gives you a great overview of how to create a great online course. Also we have an episode 351 which is a Q and A episode about how to price your course. And we also have episode 511 which is another Q and A episode and this one's about a sales video. Do you need a sales video to sell your course? So make sure you check out those episodes and to access them. Make sure you hit subscribe so you can get it in the feed. Those are all in the archive. They won't show up as our last 300 episodes. So there you have it. Keep engagement high in your course and you'll have a higher completion and you'll have some happy customers that will refer you to other people that are looking to better themselves in your area of expertise. Jason, I hope that answers Your question? I hope I helped in today's episode. If you have a question, email me at omar00mba.net, I would love to answer your question directly here on the show on Q and A Wednesdays, every Wednesday. Thank you so much for listening. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Teaching is a skill. It takes a while to really get good at it, decent at it really. So allow yourself to teach as much as possible, whether that's via video or a podcast or blog posts. You know, before I launched the 100 MBA, I was teaching in the classroom for over 13 years. But I also wrote over 150 blog posts before I even launched the course because it was really helpful to be in that kind of instruction mode when it comes to my genre, to my niche, which was business lessons. So as many reps as you can get in is great. It's going to improve your ability to teach better on courses. And if you're launching your first course, congratulations. There will be more courses to come and this first course is going to help you build a better course in the future. All right, thank you so much for listening. Make sure you check us out tomorrow. In tomorrow's lesson, I'm going to be sharing with you a very special lesson, what you can learn from a 30 year old business run by one man. This is an incredible man that I met recently. I'm going to share you his story and how he's run his whole operation by himself. A very successful business hit subscribe and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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