Penny Claringbull 8 years, 10 months ago-
Posts
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Platform:
Going with the use what you have,
– I think my first choice for a platform is BigMarker.com. I set up an account a few years ago with the intent of offering courses and have never used it. It’s a pretty good all in one solution.
– A second option would be Facebook for the forum, Vimeo or Amazon S3 for vidoes and find a web conferencing service. I know there are free teleconferencing offerings out there that would work nicely too.
– LifterLMS might be a possibility for down the road if I wanted to bring the setup and support “in-house”. By going with BigMarker or FB I wouldn’t have to be the tech department during start up and early tweaking. I could focus on the course and participants.
Community
Creating a safe space is critical. I’d rather have a smaller number of highly engaged participants than a large number of less engaged. Stats/research shows about 3-4% of a community are active, and that seems pretty consistent with experience. Feedback from someone who fits the ideal client profile also confirmed the desire for a smaller number of participants (eg 10-15) where everyone was active. Once the group started getting large you couldn’t keep track of what others were doing.Note: Richard Millington’s FeverBee.com is a really good resource for community building. Solid newsletter of information.
I don’t see my target audience being into gamification. Honestly, I’m not either. That said, I do have assignments, skill building exercises or reflection questions as part of each session. Each session will likely feel individual pieces because they each look at a different facet, then all get pulled together to form a bigger picture.
Hey @lorrainewatson great job.
Is BigMarker.com JUST webinars, or do they do eCourse platforms as well? Looking at their site, I thought it was just webinars. If that is the case, out of all the options, where do you feel inspired to house all your eCourse content (videos, pdfs, membership, etc)?
As for Private Facebook Groups, that is a fine place to begin your community. There are other forum softwares, but this is definitely the easiest when just starting out. If you want to know some of the WordPress forum softwares out there, strike up a conversation with @andyfreist 🙂
Teachable is also really good if worried about the tech side of things. It’s very user friendly. You could potentially use the BigMarker as your webinar/video service and then upload all lessons, etc to Teachable. But I need to learn more about BigMarker before I know if that makes sense.
As for gamification: remember what Master ZenTeach. Gamification can be as simple as creating really clear calls to actions and exercises that they’re to go off and do, then come back and report to you with. It doesn’t necessarily have to be badges or anything like that 🙂
@bradleytmorris – BigMarker.com has a whole community forum built into it and the ability to house or link to pdf files, etc. I can’t recall exactly if they have tiered membership, but I do think there are ways to set up free communities vs paid to create some basic membership scenarios. Refamiliarizing myself with the new functionality since I joined way back when is something I have to do. They do have a pretty comprehensive offering.
Tech wise I can go with most of the options. I just don’t want to at this point because I don’t want to set myself up for exciting the geek in me. For the first go rounds of the course I want to focus on teaching the course. Ideally I’d like to go with a self-hosted option (WP & Amazon S3 for example) so as not to be at the mercy of other services. If they go down the tubes, so too does your material.
Makes a lot of sense to me Lorraine. Sounds like a great strategy for round one of your course.
@lorrainewatson Feverbee looks like a great tip, thanks for that. Also, I know what you mean about gamification, maybe interactivity is a better way of looking at it?
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