Course Creators Weekly #54 🗓 July 5th, 2021 - Don't skip the ending

Gwyn Wansbrough is a master facilitator. In the 35th edition of her newsletter, The Quest, she writes about closing live sessions and how to make sure participants finish with a sense of closure and inspiration.

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  Help participants internalise their new knowledge by planning a thoughtful ending
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  Get participants to look inward, e.g. sharing key learnings or appreciating the group
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  Get participants to look outward, e.g. visualising the future or making commitments

A few ideas for closing well:

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  Invite participants to describe how they're feeling in one word
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  Invite participants to finish the sentence: "One thing I learned… therefore I will…"
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  Take a group photo (with consent)
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  Get participants to write letters to their future selves
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  Pick a random person to shower with words of appreciation and gratitude
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  Share an inspiring poem or a quote

Check out Gwyn's post for more details and more ideas, and subscribe to her newsletter for more golden tips like that!

Alyssa Dulin and Melissa Lambert talk about building an audience on Twitter. They're both relatively new to Twitter themselves, which makes their perspective more interesting if you too are just getting started.

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  Write clear, concise tweets
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  Tweet consistently high-value content that's true to your strengths
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  Use threads to to take people on a journey, telling a story or sharing a case study
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  Use the last tweet in a thread to plug your email list, newsletter or website
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  Use a pinned tweet to introduce yourself and your work to people visiting your profile
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  Know your why—if you don't have a reason to be on Twitter, you don't have to be

Sorry to disappoint, but it depends!

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  It depends on your niche, your students' prior knowledge, the transformation + more
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  Make it as short and concise as it can be while still delivering results for your students

How to decide what's in, what's out

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  Find out your students' baseline knowledge and experience
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  Nail the transformation—the single ultimate outcome your course delivers for students
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  Connect the dots—the necessary skills and knowledge needed for success

How to outline your course

I've had some additional thoughts since I published my essay last week, so there are some changes here:

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  Brain dump—write it all down, including content ideas, assignments, reflections, etc
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  Rank—put things into four buckets: Core, Bonus, Redundant, Irrelevant
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  Organise—arrange Core and Bonus content into modules, discard everything else

Remember the acronym, BRO!