Incorporating an interactive digital workbook in your course - Tonner Jackson

Wow, you are now attending your 4th session of the Course Creation Summit today. So I would like to thank you for staying with us so far. It has been a long morning. We have Tonner Jackson Jackson now joining us from Wobo, who He's going to teach us all about creating interactive workbooks. And this is one of my favorite Thinkific apps for creating expertise and creating workbooks within our student experience. And following on from Rob Galvin's session that we've just done on creating student experiences that don't suck, this is an amazing tool to be able to have in here. If you are just joining us, welcome. My name is Linda Reid-Annover. I'm the founder of the Course Creator Circle. Tonner Jackson is the founder of, the founder of Course Studio, yes, and WOBO. He is now being introduced to our community the first time. You guys might have met Aaron once or twice before to talk to us today about creating interactive student experiences and workbooks along the way. I am very shortly going to hand over to Tonner Jackson to introduce himself. I'm going to duck off camera. He's going to duck off camera. We're going to pop his slides up so that he can show you how to create an interactive experience with a tool that we love in-house here called WOBO. I have just put the link in. Bogo if anyone wants to play along. If you're a Course Creation student of mine, you know that I'm suggesting that you build these interactive workbooks in along the way. So Tonner, thank you so much for joining us today.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Linda.

Beautiful. Fantastic. Well, I'm going to hand it over to you. I'm going to bring your slides up on screen. I'm going to jump off camera. I'll be here if there's any questions coming in from the group, but this is Cool.

Linda, can you hear me okay? Is my audio coming through? Hmm. Linda, I just want to test one more time. Is my audio and video coming through? Stacy, I see you can hear me. Okay, I'm just gonna wait for one more signal that you folks can hear me okay. So here we go.

Sorry, I turned myself off. There we go.

Hey, could you hear me earlier before? Was that coming through? No, I can't hear you. Sorry, now my audio is not working. I can't hear anything else. Here we go.

There we go. There. Is that coming through for you?

Yeah, that was okay. Um, and so could you hear me previously, Linda?

I could hear you previously, yes.

Okay, cool. I'm seeing a few folks saying they can, so hopefully I can jump in here. Um, okay, I will get to it.

Beautiful.

Awesome.

First of all, Share your screen again, Tonner. We need you to do that one.

Perfect. And Lindy, you in the crowd can see my screen as well now?

No, not yet. We need you to just share it again.

Okay, cool.

Sorry, guys, tech issues. I'm glad everyone can hear us both now. I maybe need more coffee.

All good. It's late in the day for me, so I'm like post-caffeination, so I should have at least neutral energy here. You guys should be able to see my screen now. Is that all right, Linda?

We can see your screen now. Yeah, you're all set.

Okay, perfect. Well, yeah, first of all, I just want to commend you for organizing this event, Linda. So much of the friction I think is starting an online course. I think you addressed those issues really well in this. So I'm happy to have a small contribution here to share with this crew a little bit more about WOBO and why you built it. So just to start, this is me. My name's Tonner Jackson from Vancouver, Canada. So this is actually where Thinkific is headquartered. I've had quite a few friends work there, and it's been an enormous success in our community. I'm actually living in Costa Rica right now, so that's where I'm coming to you from. I started a business called Core Studio about 2 and a half years ago, and throughout this presentation, I'll share, like, I'll share a little bit about Core Studio because I think there's a lot of valuable context for why we created Wobo. But effectively, Wobo, which is short for workbook, was a product that we built out of pains and insights that so many of our customers had at Core Studio. The last bullet here is I'm an avid reader and I'm very passionate about kind of the intersection of media and technology. So those are topics I just love nerding out about. If folks are interested in chatting about those, I'm motivated to do that. So here's just a bit of a high-level summary about our agenda. I'm going to share what Wobo is. I'll emphasize and be specific about how I view interactivity and in the context of online course, talk about some of the pain points that we think WOPO addresses, talk about some of our customers. I will show our product live, and then Linda, if we're cool with it, I'm obviously happy to have some time for Q&A, but that's kind of what we're looking at.

Will, guys, right?

Perfect. Cool. Sweet. So why do we make this? Yeah, I socialized that the Wobo was kind of the child of my agency called Core Studio, and effectively the thesis for Core Studio in our business was always to have a lot of like what I could view as like collisions with customers, work with as many customers in the course creator segment as possible to understand their pain points, understand the issues that their students have, and our goal was to like sell those folks mostly technical services, design and development technical services, and while we were doing that with our agency was to think about what product opportunities might exist so that we could create solutions that were more scalable. And Wilbo was by far the most acute issue, addressed the most acute issue that we experienced with our agency. And I'll summarize kind of what those things are. The first thing is that online courses are, from my view, and this is a bit of a straw man, like I think you could, you know, I would be happy to dialogue and have an argument on this, but online courses are doing a really good job of ingesting information. And they kind of followed the pedagogical approach that like we all grew up with, where like you are issued homework, you are issued exams and quizzes, and then you are to be evaluated on those, and based on those evaluations, you can kind of understand like benchmark yourself and benchmark your performance. My view is that in the digital world, that's not the way we think about learning. Frankly, actually, I think that's not the way we should think about learning at all. Maybe not at all, but certainly I, uh, I think that paradigm of learning is worth kind of questioning. And WOBO is kind of ideologically kind of aligned with this, which is to say that like we don't really have any way that your students, or there's no real sense of evaluation inside of WOBO. WOBO is a note-taking tool. It is a reflective tool, and it's very much just like you would, very much like the analog workbook you would have in the in physical space. It's a place for you to kind of house all of the things that you're learning about a piece of, about a course. The second kind of value prop that we heard from a lot of our customers is that they wanted a note-taking place and a reflection place, but they also wanted to be able to brand that in really compelling ways, and we use a lot of off-the-shelf tools that I'll describe later to try to like create something that was really branded and visual, but we knew that there was an opportunity for us to create a tool that would do this a little bit more easily. And one of the tools that a lot of folks use as a substitute for Wobo is fillable PDFs, which are still a great tool, and I think a lot of folks should still use fillable PDFs, but there's a lot of shortcomings with fillable PDFs. Obviously, there's no data, there's no analysis you can do with PDFs, and they're really problematic on mobile where a lot of our students are taking stuff. So Wobo is— we put a lot of thought into making Wobo responsive across a lot of different viewports and designs. And so that's a big emphasis for us. Cool. Yeah. Awesome. Jump into the interactivity benefits. Linda, just for awareness, I can't see your face or anything. So if I'm good, just keep scooting along. I'm happy to—

Yeah, just keep scooting along.

Okay, okay, perfect. So yeah, so okay, so maybe being a little bit more precise about what WOBO is, it's an interactive digital workbook. There's two different use cases for how you can use WOBO. I will discuss a little bit of both today, but one is to integrate it really tightly inside of your LMS. So like you might have prerecorded asynchronous video content, you might have assignments, WOBO can really be contextual, embedded and contextualized natively against that content inside of your online course. Our tightest integrations with Thinkific, which I think a lot of folks will have awareness of, but we have, we're building out more integrations with other LMSs, so that's kind of one use case. We have a second use case, which I'll share with you as well, which is like you can use WOBO outside of any online course, kind of like you'd use a Google Doc. You can send links to folks and they can access WOBOS, or you can add them to a document just like you would a Google document. And I addressed this a little bit, but one thing, like one inspiration, I know we have a speaker from Canva today, was that we wanted to make Wobo the best digital worksheet and workbook tool. And one kind of qualification we had for that was that it really needed to be easy to use. And so we put a lot of effort to making this as like really like a non-technical person to figure out how to make a nice and beautiful workbook really, really easily and beautifully. The last thing I'll say here is that one thing that a lot of folks love about PDFs is that it kind of gives their students an artifact of their learning experience, which they can take after their online course. And so that was one thing, one feature that we very quickly implemented after WOBO that we really like. So yeah, I think I heard your audio there, Linda. Were you going to react to that?

No, no, no, I'm saying the same thing. And look, WOBO in lots of ways really, really helpful with allowing editors also to see what's going on with our workbooks. As a student, guys, if you've taken my How to Write Available for Interview Profile or the release course, which is coming back out, you'll go through that exact experience with us along the way. And easy. It is so easy to build a workbook in, in Wovo. So I'm going to let Tonner Jackson keep going through the journey, but we are definitely, uh, it's one of those tools we need to have a look at.

Yeah, for sure. No, thank you. That's excellent color for sure. Um, cool. So I'll talk about some of the interactivity benefits. So I kind of, I think one of the first slides I spoke to was that, uh, most online courses, again, they're, they're my views that a lot of them like do a really good job of like pushing information at the student. And taking in information. And effectively what that means is like, you know, a lot of courses are designed, they'll say like, here's an assignment, here's a quiz. A student will complete that assignment and complete that quiz, but when they come back to that online course, they so often won't be able to see their responses and their answers to those pieces of content. And a way to frame that from my view is that it creates— it doesn't create a very strong incentive for your students to come back to your course to engage with your content. And so WOBO actually saves all of student responses in the context of your course so that as they're typing, it's saving their responses. If their browser shuts down or if like they have an hour session and they want to come back the next day, it'll save all of the content that they've created. And my view is that— and there's a lot of actually like psychological research supporting this— is that there's a lot of benefits for actually enabling students to retain information with that approach. Reducing distractions, this continues to be an insight that's just super, super valuable. And then I'm sure you probably came to this conclusion sooner than I did, but it's so important to have everything in one place. If you have an online course and the more you can do to consolidate and keep content inside the course player, reduce the amount of distractions, reduce the amount of places you have to send folks, I think the better, again, coming back to student outcomes, I think the more positive the student outcome will be.

And the more engaged they are with that learning experience too, because they're not having to go from here to the workbook to all of those sorts of things. You know, for our use case, especially when we talk about interactivity, we have our full workbook for the students who want that full workbook printed out, do whatever they need to do using Moibo. But the ones who are looking at where we especially got a lesson and we need you to fill in this blank or we need you to fill in this this question or write where our interactive, they are doing more, or at least we're able to see that they're doing more.

That's a really good point. That's a really good point. Yeah, there's different customer segments, right? Like I think like the one segment, there's an enormous amount of benefit in keeping it inside the Course Player, but then to your point, and the reason why we built this like download the PDF feature, there's still an enormous amount of people who prefer the analog space. They want to have a pen, they want to, they they want to write stuff down. And we have a— we actually— and we can talk about kind of future feature releases, but we're creating some more tools to make that download to PDF a little bit even more reliable so that course creators can design their WOBOs to be downloaded and printed if their customers want that. So that's a good point to bring up, Linda, for sure.

That glads me.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Right on, cool. Yeah, course completion rates. And I know like, Linda, I know you and Aaron have had a good dialogue on this before. It can kind of be a red herring KPI completion, because like certainly my experience is like, I came to this space because I learned guitar. I really struggled learning guitar from local teachers in my area. I found some really wonderful online teachers, and I don't think I ever had a, was motivated to complete a full course end to end. It was more, there was very specific, components of a course that were really valuable to me, I would retake those. And that was like valuable for me and like that was a really positive student experience. I do think that coming back to the kind of the first point I made, WOBO creates a really strong incentive for students to come back to your course, which I think is a leading indicator of satisfaction. It's like the more they're engaging with your product, the more you can hypo— I think it's the more reasonable hypothesis that you're providing them a good experience. And we hear that a lot, like, for some of our more sophisticated enterprise customers, that they're like, they measure daily active users inside their product and WOBO really meaningfully drives that up, just because it's making their course more, it's more of a living, evolving thing, as opposed to, again, a thing that pushes information to students. So I feel really strongly about that and about that value that WOBO can add. Linda spoke to this already, but I'll just add to this. PDFs, which are a huge substitute product for this, like a lot of folks use PDFs, I mean, gosh, I mean, there's probably millions of different resources, whether it's an Excel workbook or just a design PDF. The downside with these is that A, they're miserable to work with on mobile, and I think all of us should be trying to organize our online courses for a mobile-first audience. It's worth actually just like, when you launch a course, just like monitoring that, but again, a lot of folks are taking things on mobile. The second big issue with those is that you can't get any data from this. You can't see like how much are folks completing very specific exercises or specific pieces of content, and with WOBO, we give you kind of full visibility. You can see how much, how many, how students are progressing through their workbooks. You can see how they're answering things, So if you actually want to like review student responses and see how, you know, get a sentiment check on how they're doing in the course, you— we give you that visibility with Wobo. We're also building some features here to like, if you, if you think that's a privacy violation or if you have something that's sensitive content, we can disable that. But I think for most of our customers, it's just a really nice feature to have. There we go. Cool. Is audio still coming through all right there?

Yeah, no, it's still coming, still coming through fine. We're, we're going through fine. I'm just dealing the backend side of things and, and responding to chats and a few things like that. So you're all good. You keep going your way through.

Yeah. All good. Appreciate it. Cool. Yeah. And this is like a higher order thing, but, and I'll share this like with the way our business uses Webull, like we use it actually for a non, in a non Thinkific LMS use case. Where I think most folks who engage with online learning, like, this isn't like a high school, this isn't a university thing. Some folks maybe are chasing kind of accreditations, I think that's another good use case, but a lot of this is like people looking to like better themselves. And Wobo is just a really good tool to do that. There's this notion of like of state changes, which is like after you have ingested a lot of information, say someone just watched a 5 to 10 minute prerecorded video, You want them to take an action about something they learn. So like imagine right following a video on, you know, again, just to keep using the kind of guitar use case, if I'm watching a 10-minute video on theory, it's like, okay, the WOBO use case might be, okay, right now write down 5 different ways or write down like the key of C and write down whether or not there's sharps or flats in that key. And like I can write that down and let's say the next day I wanted to come back to that insight that I had there, I could see that, I could, and I could take notes in the context of that. I think that's a really good use case for, I think most online courses should have that and a lot of them don't because again, a tool like Webu mostly existed in kind of PDFs before we launched this product, but reflection is a huge part of why we made Webu. Cool. I'll speak to a bit of the pain points. I can gloss over this because I know I've talked about this already. But this is kind of like, that's butter or bust, is you can make a fillable PDF. One thing that I will address with this slide as well is imagine you did make this fillable PDF and you had it integrated into your online course. And let's say you had 1,000 folks who had taken this course and you wanted to make one modification to that PDF for folks who'd already taken the course, it'd be very difficult to do that. One of the— again, and I heard this insight yesterday from one of our larger enterprise customers— one of the reasons they really value WOBO is that they can— let's say they have a workbook that's distributed to over 10,000 students and they needed to make an edit to a master file, a master WOBO. Via our cloud editor, you can add questions or move questions, and it will immediately, like, with a click of a button, distribute to their whole student base without you having to, like, again, recreate a PDF, re-inject it back in your course, which can take a lot of time. The second thing that Linda addressed, and I've commented on as well, is that, again, like, oftentimes you'll need a designer to make a really kind of on-brand fill a PDF. And with Wobo, we make that— we've invested a lot of effort into making designing Wobos really easy and beautiful. For Google Documents, so I mentioned that Wobo was a product from our agency. The one tool that we did use a lot prior to making Wobo was Google Documents. And effectively, what would happen was we would we would have a lot of our customers would want to create a cohort-based experience and let's say like you have a sales academy and you have 20 students that you do every 2 weeks, someone would sign up for Thinkific and we'll use Zapier to send all the folks who had signed up for the course a branded Google document that they could use for note-taking that was on brand that kind of checked a lot of the boxes and a lot of the features that we wanted to make with Lobo. What we've really quickly found was that, and we've talked about this before, is that one, having it integrated, having your workbook integrated in your Course Players is super, super important. Like, students hated having to go back between a Google document and a Course Player. The second pain point is that branding breaks in a Google document. So like, if you wanted someone to write in a very structured area in a Google document, it's going to break the page. It's going to break the formatting and editing that you had. And that was a big pain point. And the last pain point, which I mentioned before, is that again, if you send out a Google document to 20 people and you want to make an edit to all of them, you have to touch each Google document independently, you can send an update through a master file and have that distributed kind of across the whole cohort. So those are things we very thoughtfully address with Wobo. The last one that we get a lot is like, I had this email last week, is like, why wouldn't I use Google Forms? And it's like, it's been so while, like a lot of folks use JotForm and Typeform, I think, for a similar use case. And the primary thing is that like these things are intended to allow a surveyor to like analyze information. They're not intended for a student to reflect, to note take, and effectively like answers are not saved. So like if a student submits a Typeform, they can't get their information back. And there's certainly a lot of restrictions for like how you can design a Typeform or Jotform. So we do get this objection a lot, but I think it's, I think folks who use WOBO really quickly kind of are able to see the value there relative to a form-taking tool.

Absolutely.

For sure. Cool. Cool. So a couple of the things that we're really focused on in terms of the instructor experience, so like this is like to the crowd that like we're speaking with here, like course creators, are kind of north star, some of the north star values we had for the product. So the first thing, like really easy to build, really easy to update. Again, like, we want someone who's like no technical to be able to do this. Protecting IP is something that comes up for us a lot. We have a lot of customers, both in our agency and for Wobo, who this is like, this is like a meaningful thing for them, right? Maybe they wrote a book, maybe their whole livelihood is kind of based on the knowledge and the content that they share on the online course. So we have quite a few features in Wobo that help to protect intellectual property. You can see student progress and responses, and we have a bunch of new tools for team collaboration. So like if you want to have, you know, different folks participate and review WOBOs, you can do that. There's like partner support, a partner, uh, there's, uh, owners who kind of own the workbook, and if you want to partner, just kind of help edit and manage your WOBOS, there's features for that as well, which is, which has been helpful for a lot of different use cases. Cool, sweet. So the kind of framing here was like from the vantage of the instructor. On the student experience, because like we kind of view Wobo to have two different customers, right? We kind of have like the course creator, which is like this audience, and then there's your customers, the student experience and the value that they— and the experience that they have. So the first thing is that what's— what I really love about Wobo is like you might have whether it's Thinkific or another course player, you might have a 15-module course and let's say that you wanted each one of those modules to have a WOBO component. You could embed sections of your WOBO into your course player, but at the end of that student experience, that student can download their whole WOBO to PDF and they can take that whole thing away from them. One of my partners at Course Studio used to work at a company called MasterClass, which is like a well-known e-learning provider. And one insight they got really early in their business was that this notion of like tangible artifact of learning experience allowed them to charge a lot more because the perception of value is so much higher for the student. And Woba just like kind of does that on steroids, which I really love. So—

It's how we use it.

Yeah, for sure, Linda. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's how most folks do. And we, like, maybe we would have hypothesized that before we launched, but it's definitely been, like, very validated, that use case. It's super accessible. So Aaron, who is our lead PM on this, definitely kept reinforcing this to us. And we've seen a lot of, we've got a lot of feedback on this too. But, like, everything is kind of available and can be read by screen readers. So that's kind of an important piece. This third bullet, which I've touched on a little bit, is the mobile learning. I can't like— it's like the one thing that's shocking to me is like how high adoption PDFs are even in the mobile context because like they're just so frustrating to work with. Like I can't remember ever having downloaded a PDF on my mobile phone and using it. Wobo is like really mobile optimized and again really can enhance that mobile student experience, which is helpful. It's obviously just as like on web, it's wonderful as well, but I think that's one way it really differentiates And then this last piece is the seamless course experience. I can't overstate, like, getting everything consolidated into one view is just better. You want to reduce complexity for that student, and Wovo's integration with the LMS is a really useful thing. Anything to add, Linda, or does that cover it?

No, I think Tonner Jackson's got it 100%. And guys, you know, the big thing in with this process and in this journey about creating interactive experiences and why we chose Wovo not just because, you know, they're partnered with Thinkific and all of those sorts of things, was to allow our students to get an experience. That mobile accessibility was a big one for us, but also the ability to be able to create, collect the work in the final effect, but also deliver the workbook in a way that would allow these students to engage with it as they were taking on the content. Because imagine if you pop— and, you know, we do this, some people love a massive workbook, but if you're overwhelmed by that workbook, you're not going to progress your way through that, let alone watch the videos within the courses within those areas. So we've done a little— we, we included our workbooks to underneath the videos, but in the workbook we've also referenced back to the lesson. And that was one of the features that Erin and I worked with. We're saying, you know, let's link back to the lesson about where they need to— in this section you need to watch this video here, or do those sorts of things. So not only does your student experience in the lesson become interactive, but your workbook becomes interactive as well.

Yeah, big time. We'll summarize for sure. Um, big time. Cool. So I'll speak a little bit to some of our customers and, um, that we're really proud of. And, um, I had a couple I wish I could share today, but they're not quite live yet. But, um, I, I will share a couple things. So the first is the Obama Organization. Um, so this is actually for one of their products called My Brother's Keeper Alliance, and they, uh, primarily exist to help young men of color excel in life. and they have the most beautiful WOBOs. Like maybe we can try to circulate kind of a little bit more about what they look like, but a lot of goal setting, a lot of like both from like the micro and macro. So I think the kind of beginning of their course is kind of set up to let, you know, what's the next, what, what are the next, what is something you can do next 60 days to help accelerate, you know, maybe some higher order goal. A lot of their students are interacting with WOBO on a weekly basis and it's something they're coming back to. Really good use case for Robo and they've been a really great customer and partner for us. So I'm pumped about them. World Relief Foundation, global humanitarian organization. I think this is a name a lot of folks will work with. This is an interesting one, use it a lot for culture training and team onboarding. One of the things I love about making tools for course creators is that like the use cases are just against stuff you wouldn't necessarily have hypothesized. They're using almost exclusively for onboarding, like helping folks walk them through how getting up to speed with like working at World Relief. I don't know, Linda, have you seen this use case as well?

Oh, absolutely. And we've used it for different things like onboarding, but also coaching programs and those sorts of things to guide people through that. So there was big use cases that we saw not only just within our courses with Wovo as well.

Yeah, big time.

Cool.

This is one of my favorites. This is like with our, one of our, in our agency we work with a course creator named Kat Norton, who's kind of publicly, public-facing known as Miss Excel. Really wonderful human being. Like, she's an extraordinarily enthusiastic person. If you wanna follow her on social media, she's Miss Excel on TikTok and Instagram. And the use case for Kat is that she adds a lot of free resources for her customers in the form of Excel spreadsheets and shortcuts to using different Excel features. Macros for kind of being more productive with your keyboard using Excel, and she uses it basically for that use case. So effectively, she'll have a list of different shortcuts you can use to be more productive in Excel, and she uses WOBO for that. And when she wants to add new features to her WOBO, she can do that with just a couple clicks, as opposed to having to like find a PDF, upload it to all of her courses, which has been really great for her. So also just would plug Kat's content if you want to get better at Excel, she's really excellent. DailyOM is again another customer in our agency. I think they are the most— they utilize Wobo almost as much as anybody. They have tens of thousands of students and they were really validating for us because DailyOM was actually using a legacy course platform and they had a kind of a custom-built version of this. They do a ton of goal setting, a ton of reflection, a ton of journaling. And I'll say candidly that they've actually, they've pushed us a little bit to expand our journaling tools because they have folks writing like 1,000-word essays. And we didn't, we didn't realize we had a character limit on Wovo, but we found out because of DailyOM had all these customers like writing really long kind of journal entries.

Yeah.

And to accommodate that, which is, which is again, really cool and a really great use case for it. A second thing Deeliam really valued was just how beautiful we could make Wobles. And I'll demonstrate a Deeliam Wobble in a second, which will be helpful. Awesome. Yeah. Last is— and my image wasn't working here— but is Simon Sinek. So he's a well-known author and corporate personal development thought leader. Again, has a big emphasis on goal setting and is using Wobble in some really interesting ways. They're actually using it for their Spanish customer base as well, Spanish speaking, which is kind of interesting. So I wish I had a little more visual representation of that, but again, I just thought I'd socialize a couple different folks who were using it. So with that, Linda, I was gonna jump into a product demo. I mentioned that I was struggling with my Thinkific site to get it up, so if you actually, it'd be cool to kind of see you demo the Thinkific use case at one point. Would you be comfortable doing that, Linda?

Yeah, I'm just looking at our internet here, it's not gonna manage this stream and all the chats that we're managing, unfortunately, Tonner Jackson. That's what caught us up with the audio before. But I mean, trying Mobo itself will give you a bit of an indication. I might be able to get one lesson up. Guys, we do have a replay with Erin where I actually went through all of that. So I'll put the replay link in where we showed you all of those use cases of how it's going to go. I'm just running out of internet speed and tabs here to be able to do this. I think my poor computer is cracking it. Julie has a really good question and it's a really interesting one and one that I had came across with me at the same time. Do you have to type into the workbook or can you freehand draw and write throughout the process? So I know how we work around it, but I'm interested to see Tonner Jackson's cases and the workaround. I don't know.

Yeah, it's good. Well, maybe I'll just like show you. I'd love to like demonstrate a little bit of like how it can work. So this is actually from my business Core Studio. There's something called Entrepreneur Enablement System. I think it's called EOS. And we use this for our leadership team to like help us kind of align as a group. And so we have, like, you can see on the left here, we had different sessions. We had one in October and another in— or, pardon me, both in October, just kind of weeks separated. And so effectively, like, I could send this to our leadership team, and we used kind of some features just for— just to kind of use them because— oh, that's weird that our preview's not working. Give me one second.

We're both having internet issues.

Yeah, I think so. Yeah, cool. Give me one second. That's weird. The previous— this was not work— this was working right before. Give me one second.

Live teaching, guys, is so much fun. Andrea's asked a question, and I don't know if it's possible now, so I'm going to ask while you're trying to find that, uh, one way. Um, yep, I, I'm like, I'm liking this one. Uh, bear with me. Uh, can you convert a current fillable PDF into WOBO?

You cannot. I would love to have that feature, and we've had that come up a few times, but at present you cannot do that.

Andrew, it's been one I've requested too. Don't worry, I'll keep requesting and I'll keep nagging away for you. Tom's asking us— we've got— WOBO is very affordable month to month, guys. I cannot stress that enough to you. Tom, he's asking us for our special lifetime membership for attending the session today, but it's an affordable platform for you, for the insights that provide you with your students. I'm going to say this to everyone who— like, there are lifetime passes out there and they are all those things. The reality of it is, and I say this to people who ask for stuff for free all the time, it's the same as the, the tech team and the developers that Tonner Jackson has here putting together a program and a software. They're the people that are going to be looking after you throughout this journey. So if you're, if you're able to make money out of it, you're able to— it's a good tool within your business, paying month to month is not a bad thing. Paying fees for software because you're earning income is is not a bad thing because you're increasing your students' experience. Every time we ask for something free out there, and this is my number one opinion, or we ask for lifetime discounts, we've got to be prepared to give that back out of our business as well.

For sure. I definitely have a strong perspective on this. I think it's really important to pay monthly for software. And I say that maybe there's some selfishness there being someone who sells software, but Even for me as like an agency consumer who uses a lot of software, you want people to be improving, to be working. Software depreciates, like it deprecates, it gets worse over time. And if you are motivated to sell a product, I think it's good to align your incentives, whereas like you want the software provider to be improving and making that thing better, just like you wanna make your content better. And I think you should pay for that. I think we all should pay for that. Yep. So I, I think it's a good thing.

Whether you're a software developer or not, it's all about the investment into the technology and the investment can't grow. If we don't have people investing from somewhere, and that's part of our journey.

Yeah, big time. Cool. So maybe I'll just demo a couple things here. So like, this is it. This is, this is a table view. Um, this is one thing that we get a lot of positive feedback on. So again, I use this for my leadership team at Core Studio. We're saying we want to identify our target market. Who are, who are ideal customers? Um, where are they? What are they? So as a team, we say the GF characteristics of our ideal customers, where are they? My legitimate answer here is they're everywhere. The internet doesn't discriminate on location, which is a true answer. Now, what's interesting is like I can see my responses saved here and I could, as like, as the owner and the instructor of this WoWo, I could go to our leadership team and see how they all answered this question. And see the differences and see how misaligned we were about who our customers were, which is kind of a really fun use case to do as a leadership team. Yeah. This is kind of the note-taking tool. So, you know, this can— this will stretch with your browser. This is one, as I mentioned, DailyOMN had broken because they basically pushed our character limit, which I think is really funny.

And Andrew, when I— to answer Andrew's question about— sorry, Julie's question about freehand, that's where we include our freehand bits in those boxes. We just make them big enough to allow someone if they wanted to physically write.

Yeah, exactly. And sorry, I'll address that really. We have had this come up, the freehand thing, and it's not something we prioritized, although I'd love to do it. Like effectively, like even like if you could use your magic, like if you're using a MacBook or an iPad, like freehand write stuff. I think it's actually quite technically challenging and it's probably candidly not something we're gonna prioritize for a while. Yeah. So cool. There's also this fill in the blank feature, which is a really important one. So anyways, maybe I'll jump out of this and go into the— I'll show you guys how you add sections. So these are all of the different ways you can create an interactive workbook. So you can see there's question and answer. And we have this kind of interactive— or pardon me. Live image on the right to kind of show you.

I need to give you a 5-minute warning too. We need to wrap in 5. Okay, okay, cool.

Um, there's fill in the blanks, there's notes area, there's all sorts of radio, uh, different interactive tools, sliders. A lot of folks get value out of this. Um, and then there's the module links that we've referenced a few times. Um, maybe I will, uh, jump into, um, I mentioned the Daily OM Workbook a few times, so just give folks one example of how this looks. So this is— I don't know what's going on. I've never seen this error before. Um, let me try here. Uh, bear with me one second. Okay, maybe I'm not gonna be able to demo it in the preview version, but, um, basically they were basically completely able to align their brand values to and their visual identity inside of Wobo. So like when this is embedded in Thinkific, they asked us like, hey, listen, can we just use Wobo instead of Thinkific, which is kind of a funny thing for us to hear. But because their visual design team wanted so badly for this to be like the whole course player to look like this, and obviously for a number of reasons that just wouldn't make sense, but that's maybe one, they're kind of a customer that's really pushed us and that we've been really glad to support. So anyways, I know we're almost out of time, Linda. I'm happy to maybe do some Q&A now, or—

Yeah, guys, anyone's got any questions? We'll take some questions from Tonner. We've got some really handy resources in the Course Creator Circle website. We've got another session where Erin and I went into some other use cases that we can share with you. Technical every time and time again. Can you give an example of the student upload option for the— is Tom's question to us.

Yeah, so I could, I don't know if I could demo this, but I'll maybe, maybe I'll just kind of describe the use case. The reason why we need to charge more for the student upload is that actually like fix, there's, there's costs with hosting images. Hosting images is like kind of one of these things we take for granted using Facebook and other tools, but like it's expensive. Like Amazon charges us a lot to host images. So the use case here is like you might see your student, hey, you know, draw something that's meaningful to you about this course. I'm spitballing here a little bit. And you give them opportunity for them to— they can write out an image, take a photo of it on their iPhone, and they can upload it to their workbook. And again, it contextualizes something they did via pen or whatever that is inside their workbook. A lot of folks do this, and it's been pretty effective, I think. So I hope that answers that question.

That's a— it's a good point. from, from that point of view of, yeah, there's cost for storage. Um, I haven't used the student upload feature, guys, so I can't even show you a bit of a demo and those sorts of things. So, um, yeah, taking a picture of something and uploading it, yeah, there's an image storage just like on our website, just like on our Thinkific schools, all of those sorts of things. Every time we load an image or a video, there's storage space that kicks into, into there. Um, but I'm fairly certain, Tonner, is it just like a little upload box standalone upload.

That's exactly right.

You can provide feedback on that. Fantastic. Other way, guys, if you wanted to do that slightly differently, and this is a workaround, and that's what, you know, Thinkific experts come up with the hack, is to use your Thinkific community. If you want people to upload something, then link to your workbook that they're going in and uploading that particular area to their Thinkific community, especially if you want group feedback, because that's a great way to get group feedback in the process, you know, having the community or the cohort working with you. Okay. We are at the end of our time. I'm going to say thank you. Tonner Jackson is in there. I think he's joined our Facebook group now. Aaron used to be in there all the time. Um, if he hasn't already, he'll jump into the Course Creator Circle Facebook group later on today. We will be answering more questions. We have one more session for today. You have been here since 8:00 AM this morning. We're about to go to 12. This is 4 hours of training. You guys have been amazing doing this. We have Rebecca, um, uh, we have Rebecca coming in and and doing her next session with us yet from Canva. Julie just said, I'm teaching math, so asking kids if they can do equations, tables, sketches, etc., is a no. Julie, are you wanting to see the handwritten version of the process? If you are wanting to see that, maybe not. But if they're wanting to, like, enter what the equation is, you definitely can do that. They're working out in typing it in. You can definitely do that. I'm happy to jump on a use case with you on that one if you want to one-on-one and you and I can have a chat from there. Okay, we better wrap up because we need to be back in 10 minutes. So take a nice break everyone. We'll see you very shortly. Tonner, thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate it. I know it's late where you are and we will see everyone very back soon for Canva and we'll see you in the next little while. Bye.

Thanks, Linda. Cheers.