If your online course isn’t getting all of your students, the results they are looking for, or not getting you the business results that you are looking for, then consider making some improvements to it.
Before we go any further, I want to be very clear that none of this means the work you have done so far in putting together your online course is not good or not good enough. Like anything else in our businesses, finding out what works for us and our customers can require a bit of trial and error.
I’ve written this post to give you some suggestions to try out based on my knowledge as a digital education specialist. There is no one size fits all answer to teaching or learning anything.
But please don’t let results that aren’t yet as good as you had hoped they would be mean that you give up on all the hard work you have already put into this. Your knowledge has value.
1. Ask yourself if your sales language matches with what your course delivers
Often we write sales pages separately to course content. Sometimes different people and departments write these. This makes sense because they each have different purposes and writing them requires unique skills. But, if your sales page doesn’t completely and clearly reflect what is inside your course, then it’s also unlikely that your course will meet your customers’ expectations.
Most of us humans disengage with things that aren’t what we expect them to be. If people are disengaging with your course, then they are unlikely to finish it, recommend it, or buy from you again.
To improve this, take a step back and look at how you are selling your course. Consider rewording your sales page to reflect the course content and the results students can expect if necessary.
Each course created by each of you is different, so any improvements here will be individual but they might include things like using testimonials that reflect not only the top 5% of results achieved from the course, or adding in a more accurate guide to the time required for a student to commit to complete the course, or removing some adverbs and adjectives that you used to describe the course (e.g. amazing, amazingly, success, successfully, fabulous, fabulously–you get the idea.)
2. Think about the entire customer experience of joining your course
If you look at your course from the perspective of a student, does everything fit together and make sense? Is it easy to follow?
Ask these questions about every aspect of your online course, from the sign-up process to the delivery method and the content.
If something feels disjointed or is hard to navigate, it will put people off of learning.
In the best online courses, knowledge is delivered with none of the tech or processes impeding the learning. Getting this right is tricky, and big course providers have complete teams of people to make this work.
To improve this, you can get someone else to test your course for you and give you an external perspective. Get them to follow the path through the course that a genuine customer would and ask them to look for places where the next step is not clear or there seems to be something missing. Then use that feedback to change your course.
3. Is your course digitally accessible?
There are over 14 million people in the UK who have a disability and over 2 million who are living with serious sight loss. Digital accessibility is about including (often small) adaptations to online courses, websites etc. to allow more people to use them. This can include things like having alt text descriptions on images so that people who use screen readers can still access the information those images contain.
If you have never considered how digitally accessible your online course is, then this is a great place to start when making improvements.
Did you know, for example, that PDFs are not usually accessible unless you make them accessible? Here are the Microsoft and Adobe guides to creating accessible PDFs.
Most accessibility improvements help and support all students, as they often mean that information is provided in more ways. texthelp is an organisation that aims to help everyone understand and be understood and their website is a great resource to begin learning about digital accessibility.
To improve this, use tools like the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool and the texthelp website to audit your course for areas you can make accessibility improvements in.
4. Does your course cater to different learning styles?
Following on from the last point, people learn in different ways. We often need to be given the same information in different ways to take it in.
This means that online courses that are only videos, for example, just won’t work for everyone.
And the kicker here is that not all students will know how they learn best when they join your course. This means that they might find it hard to learn from your course and not even understand why.
To improve this, take some time to understand your own learning style preferences and then consider how you can include more learning style variety in your course. Adding course transcripts and captions to accompany videos and diagrams and images to accompany texts can be good places to begin.
5. Does your course get people involved?
Is the content of your course active or passive? Do people have to do things during the course, or are you just talking to them?
People learn best when they have to take new knowledge and act on it or personalise it.
Courses which are designed around engaging activities often receive the best feedback. This is especially true for longer courses. I mean think about it, do you like sitting there and just listening to someone talk about something? How long can you do that before your brain switches off?
To improve this, assess how often the students on your course have to do something. Try to ensure that there is never much new content between activities. Also, make sure that any activities that you ask people to do are explained and that they are useful for your students. This doesn’t need to be complicated. Asking students to journal about something is an activity. Asking students to share their thoughts on how something relates to their circumstances in a group chat is an activity.
6. Does your course deliver too much information?
This is one of the most common problems I see when I am working with my clients, and it is completely understandable. The people I work with are experts in the things they teach on. They have a wealth of knowledge in their subject areas. But none of that means that their students need all of that information in a single online course.
To improve this look the aim for your course; what is it you want your students to do or understand by the end of the course? Then look at the starting point of your students; what information are they like to have before they join your course? Then look at the content of your course; the only things that should be included in the course are things that bring your students to the aim of your course. Anything else is extra information and does not need to be included.
You can use that extra information to create a bonus mini course (this is especially useful if it is basic knowledge that some people might have before they join), or to create another course (this is especially useful if it is extra, more advanced knowledge and will build on the first course).
7. Does your course deliver enough information?
This is a less common problem, but it happens sometimes when a course creator misjudges the level that students will be at before they join a course. Sometimes people need some more information to achieve the aims of a course. The best way to discover if this is the case with your course is to ask students who have taken the course if they had everything they needed from the course. If the feedback sounds like “I was confused about…” or “I had trouble applying X to my business”, then you might be missing a key piece of the learning puzzle.
To improve this look the aim for your course; what is it you want your students to do or understand by the end of the course? Then look at the starting point of your students; what information are they like to have before they join your course? Make sure that your content covers every step of the journey from where they are before they join the course to where they need to be by the end of the course.
8. Is it clear how your students can get help if/when they need it?
Even in the most expensive, well designed courses, with the most engaged and enthusiastic students, there will be questions and people will need help. Help can include customer support, tech support, a community of others on the course, access to you and your brain, amongst other things.
To improve this on your course, make sure that it is clear what help people can get and where they can get it. For example, if tech support and customer support have separate email addresses, make this obvious and easy to find. Or if they get access to you, make sure that you define how, when and where that happens, e.g., in the Voxer group chat only, or on the fortnightly Zoom calls.
People’s expectations on course support vary, so it is worth including details of any support that will be provided with your course on your sales page or in your FAQs before they buy; this is a part of making sure that student expectations match up with what you are delivering.
9. Is your course a safe place for everyone who enrols on it?
Feeling safe, secure and able to make mistakes without penalty is fundamental for most people’s learning. If you have not worked on uncovering your own unconscious bias, then it is improbable that you will create a safe space for everyone who joins the course.
To improve this, learn more about your own unconscious bias and then review and reflect on how these might be showing up in your work and your online course. Make any adjustments necessary. This is a tricky area to improve on without help; by default, we all find it hard to see ourselves objectively. Paying for expert support and consultation is worth it in this area; I recommend Watch This Space, Brighton. They have great resources to learn from if your budget is tight and also offer inclusion consultancy.
What’s Next?
That’s up to you.
Don’t let this list overwhelm you.
Simple start with the question; what do you think you and your business, and your customers would benefit from next? Then ask yourself, how can you make that thing a reality?
