I had a request from @laurakoller to share an example of my Thinkific school.

You can see it here:

https://members.learnandgetsmarter.com/

As you can see, the URL is a subdomain (“members”) of my website (learnandgetsmarter.com), but it’s actually my Thinkific school. You are on Thinkific on that page but without realizing you’ve left my WordPress site. I really like being able to set it up that way in Thinkific using a custom URL.

Right now I only have 2 mini courses live, but I am working on a ton more stuff on the back end. You can see some of my green screen work in the digital flipbook course by the way. I look like I’m popping out of the background of the flipbook, while giving instruction on how to create it.

I’m working on setting up my coaching and consulting bundle  in Thinkific. Here are some screenshots of how the bundle landing page will look on mobile. This only took a few hours to set up (like, 2 hours) and I am very happy with it. (See screenshots).

I haven’t forgotten the Green Screen Adventure, just haven’t had a chance to dive back into it. I’m working on getting my book ready to load up to Amazon, and getting more courses live on Thinkific.  My new website and blog are live at https://askmotherrebecca.com/

I need all this infrastructure to support what will later become Course Crafters Camp ™…. I’m excited about incorporating green screen into all of this, but I need the instructional design backbone to be set up and solid first. It’s all coming together (left brain/ right brain).

I’ll include some screenshots of how the landing pages for my Course Design Formula ™ and Course Crafters Camp(tm) course bundles will look, on Thinkific, once I get them launched. The reason I love Thinkific is that it’s user friendly for both course creators and course participants. It makes CREATING the course easy once you have the instructional design worked out, and it works WITH good instructional design best practices, which are my main area of focus and emphasis.

In terms of creating a community to go with the course, it’s possible to do that in Thinkific using Disqus comments, however, I don’t love that because Disqus comments are public. I think a course community should be private. One can integrate one’s Facebook group or Slack group into a Thinkific course, or create a private social network in some other way.

If creating a GREAT student forum experience directly within an online course interface is your MAIN priority, in my experience the best way to do that is with Moodle. Moodle is an outstanding elearning platform, but setting it up as an independent online course creator may require more of  a learning curve than a lot of folks want to climb.

Another solution is to use Zoom within Thinkific, for live group interactions. Zoom also offers breakout rooms for small groups to collaborate and then come back into a larger group discussion. You can integrate that into Thinkific using a multimedia lesson.

Thanks for your kind words, @laurakoller! It’s so interesting to see which posts people enjoy. I think that the colonoscopy post will always have a very “special” and specific audience, but hopefully it will be helpful to those who, like you, are interested. I’m thinking of putting together a virtual “colonoscopy gift basket” made up of the items I listed in the blog post, that would be helpful to someone getting ready to go through that. The virtual gift baskets idea is one that I had years ago in an ecommerce class… I find that in terms of having a lot of balls in the air, that’s how my mind works… what I’m pleased to see now is that the Mother Rebecca blog is providing a landing place and structure for some of those balls to land.

I haven’t forgotten my green screen studies…Mother Rebecca will be your hostess at Course Crafters Camp and we will be making videos to bring that to life (we= me, myself and I because there’s nobody here but us chickens, lol).