How to Engage With Your Digital Tribe
Online learning is here to stay with the worldwide e-learning market projected to be worth USD 325 Billion by 2025.
Yes, you heard that right!
This is why at AirPreneur we’re so excited about online learning as it’s the way of the future.
With this strong trend continuing towards online learning, now is the time to create that online course for your raving fans. Although very exciting, it can be daunting as to what to consider when creating your new course, that’s why we are here to help you. At AirPreneur we have done the research and the evidence suggests there are key factors to consider when engaging with your digital tribe; autonomy, diversity, openness & connectedness.
Now let’s break it down for you. Autonomy Being able to fit the course into people’s busy lives in a structured yet flexible design is an important consideration for many participants. It’s important to consider:
Course Length
We recommend you offer several courses initially with staggered course lengths to determine what is optimal for your community.
Intensive (1-2 days) - usually over a weekend. Popular with time-poor business leaders who like to plan ahead to learn a particular skill they are lacking.
Standard (4-6 weeks) - is the most popular course length for online courses as it allows participants to build up knowledge incrementally and build rapport with both teacher & other participants.
Extended (6-12 weeks) - There aren’t many long online courses outside of formal education because participants can find the price point too high and struggle to maintain the self-discipline to complete the course. This type of course length works best when the topic is something the participant enjoys and is passionate about building a deep sense of community with the teachers and other participants.
Schedule
Participants need to feel a sense of purpose and achievement gained by reaching milestones during the course.
Summarise Success
Continue to tell participants what they have achieved at each milestone of the course to keep them engaged. Even intensive courses should continue to show participants the new skills they have developed. Flexible Windows - To maintain autonomy, try to identify the ‘core’ course material students must complete to meet the milestone and allow some flexible windows of less important material. This allows busy participants to save some activities for later without feeling ashamed or dropping out of the course.
Live Events
Having regular intervals where students are required to provide live feedback or interact is a good way to keep the group motivated to work through the milestones. Even if all your content is preprepared, you could arrange for students to solve a case study or have a Q&A session on an interesting topic. Try to not require too much preparation before the event to allow for all participants to feel welcome to join.
Diversity
Participants are often doing online courses in between very busy lives. It's important that the course has diverse and approachable content that can hold their attention over time. Don’t be afraid to use Youtube videos, infographics, and memes to break up any difficult material. Case studies are another great way to include ‘storytelling’ into their learnings. Wherever possible try to have a simple summary at the start and then work up to more detail. This way if the participant stops reading or watching your video, at least they will have gained some basic level of learning.
Openness
Try to ask your students for feedback throughout the course and if there's a clear gap that they feel is missing, be honest and try to fix it before the course has ended. If the participants can see that you authentically care about their learning experience and are genuinely trying to deliver good value, they are likely to end the course with a positive opinion of you, even if the course was not as good as they’d hoped for. Assume that much of your course content will be shared by your course participants with colleagues and friends if they like it. Instead of seeing this as a breach of your intellectual property, accept this as part of your business and refresh your course regularly. Ideally, you create some ‘universal’ content that is easily shareable across a broad audience and acts like a flyer to showcase the quality of your course. Participants often share material on public forums and could be a great way to generate future business.
Connectedness
People are designed to seek social connection and a big part of learning is the friends you make along the way. Wherever possible, try to encourage participants to get to know one another, share stories and experiences, discuss different perspectives and share useful information. These collaborative spaces could continue well beyond the course and be a strong basis for recommendations later. To achieve this, it's important to understand your participants' preferred digital ecosystems. Researchers have found that students seek support from a broad range of digital communities and it’s important to ask your participants at the end of each course what communities they relied on and then try to be present in those spaces including social media and forums like Reddit & Quora.