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🏛 Course Creators Weekly #48 🗓 May 24th, 2021 - First principles, pillars, and brain dumps

Andrew Barry shares some behind the scenes from building ODCC, Wes Kao talks with Rohit Malhotra about everything from learning communities to the future of education, and Marie Schacht talks with Ish Baid and Will Mannon about building altMBA!

How I created the curriculum for On Deck Course Creators How I created the curriculum for On Deck Course Creators
📹 Video 🧩 Structure & Design

How I created the curriculum for On Deck Course Creators

Andrew Barry takes us behind the scenes of creating the curriculum for On Deck Course Creators.

  • 🧱
    Think in first principles: reflect, deconstruct, reconstruct
  • 🚩
    Start by defining pillars and high-level buckets of knowledge—these are milestones
  • 🧠
    Brain dump a list of topics under each pillar—this is ever-changing, so keep iterating
  • ⏳
    Define the steps on the learning journey—consider your constraints, especially time
  • 🎭
    Treat the learning journey as a story arc (e.g. following the Hero's Journey)
  • 🪡
    Pull topics into each step, adding more topics if necessary—also, some may repeat
  • ☑️
    Make sure to define learning outcomes + prompts to action for each topic/lesson
  • ✍🏼
    Jot down your ideas and thoughts for each lesson—use it to produce your content
  • 📋
    For each lesson, consider stories and examples, worksheets ideas, breakouts + more

Check out Andrew's video for more details, and to see how he does it in Notion! 👇🏼

🔗 Andrew Barry via youtube.com
Wes Kao from Maven on making online courses more accessible Wes Kao from Maven on making online courses more accessible
📹 Video 🥗 Mixed Salad

Wes Kao from Maven on making online courses more accessible

Rohit Malhotra talks with Wes Kao about online courses. They actually talk about a lot more than making them accessible.

Here are my biggest takeaways—as brief as I could make them! 😬

  • 📣
    Learn sales, marketing, and copywriting—as a creator, it's your job to convince buyers
  • 👨🏻‍💻
    Build a community + environment for people to learn together by producing real work
  • 🤘🏾
    Be deliberate about community-building, e.g. attract "weird in the same way" people
  • 🧭
    Be the guide in your students' transformation journey—let them be the heroes
  • ✨
    Don't get hung up on production value—people value transformation + community
  • 🧩
    Design the student experience around your students' unique needs—and your own
  • 🔃
    Iterate—your first course doesn't have to be perfect as long as it delivers value

On pricing

  • 💵
    Realise that people often underpay and overpay based on their perception of value
  • 💎
    Understand what your ideal target audience finds juicy, valuable, urgent and important
  • ⚖️
    Consider what your product is being compared to—not just courses but all alternatives
  • 📈
    Given enough credibility, the only price cap is people's willingness and ability to pay

On completion rates and student outcomes

  • 🎯
    Optimise for student outcomes + long-term transformation, not short-term inspiration
  • 🏁
    Completions matter too—transformation won't happen if people drop out too early
  • 😓
    Transformational learning can be hard, painful and discouraging—design for that
  • 💪🏻
    Put systems in place (e.g. accountability groups, coaches) to encourage perseverance

On standing out with spiky points of view

  • 🗣
    Stand out by sharing opinions you truly believe in, but not everyone will agree with
  • 🌵
    Check out CCW #46, or Wes' original article to learn more about spiky points of view

On the future of education

  • 🌟
    Unbundling of education has created new possibilities, e.g. self-directed learning
  • 📍
    Physical proximity is no longer a limiting factor
  • ✅
    Portfolios + proof of work > degrees + credentials

There was so much more I had to drop for sake of brevity (yes, I know.)

Check out the video for more details, examples, and a few book recommendations! 🤓

🔗 Rohit Malhotra + Wes Kao via youtube.com
Marie Schacht on Building AltMBA Marie Schacht on Building AltMBA
🎙 Podcast ✊ Cohort-Based Courses

Marie Schacht on Building AltMBA

Marie Schacht, Will Mannon, and Ish Baid talk about altMBA, cohort-based courses, and the future of education.

Here are my biggest takeaways:

  • 🕔
    Consider grouping people by timezone—caveat: you'd need a fairly large cohort
  • ☑️
    Use project prompts and peer-to-peer learning to scale + encourage accountability
  • ⏱
    Be clear about the time commitment you need from students—communicate it early
  • 🗓
    Encourage students to block off time for group meetings and coworking sessions
  • 💭
    Educate students on how to give valuable feedback and ask insightful questions
  • 🙌🏾
    Create a generous culture by encouraging and celebrating the act of giving feedback
  • 👋
    Enable students to build new relationships—happens organically, but you can boost it
  • 👣
    Create a space for students to reflect and share daily progress, #buildinpublic style
  • 🔄
    Always be iterating—operationalise what works, experiment, improve, repeat
🔗 Ish Baid + Marie Schacht + Will Mannon via tryvirtually.com

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Hey, I'm Merott 👋🏻

I'm an indie maker and freelance web developer from London.

I'm building my own business, because I'm terrible at following other people, and because I want my work to matter. I hope it will, to you and to your students.

Making progress, slowly and steadily, I'm also documenting and tweeting my journey every Monday @merott .

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Merott