#68 Should Your Online Course Be Live or Prerecorded? How to Choose the Right Format

You were told you could just record a live session, chop it into pieces, and sell it as a course. It's faster. It's efficient. You get two things out of one effort. So why does the finished "course" feel flat — and why do your students quietly stop showing up?

In this episode, Shannon breaks down one of the most misunderstood decisions in online course creation: live vs. prerecorded. They're not two versions of the same thing. They're two different formats, built for two different purposes — and when you treat them as interchangeable, your students feel the difference before you do.

But there's a second layer here that most creators never consider, and it might change how you build your next course entirely: what if teaching live on purpose is the smartest way to create your best prerecorded course? Shannon shares the exact question a client brought to a recent coaching call — and the shift that turned a "good enough" membership into something far stronger.

In this episode, you'll get clarity on:

• Why a recorded live session isn't actually a course (and what your students sense that you don't)
• The real structural difference between live and prerecorded teaching
• How to decide which format your content actually needs
• The counterintuitive way to use live teaching to build a dramatically better prerecorded course

If you've ever been talked into "just repurposing" your live workshop, masterclass, or program into a course because it's easier, this is the more honest — and more effective — way to think about it.

Press play, and rethink what you thought you knew about building a course your students actually finish.

Free Resource to Get Your Course Started With Purpose: Course Clarity Blueprint

Get started on your own course creation journey or learn how to make your existing course even better at The "Your Best Course" Build Lab, my interactive and supportive online community.

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To book a call to discuss your options and see if working together makes sense.  Click here. 😊

Transcript

Shannon Boyer 0:00

Taking a two hour live session, chopping it into pieces and calling it a course does not make it a course. It makes it a recording of something your student was never actually a part of, and they can feel it. Today, let's talk about why live and prerecorded are two completely different things and how to use one to build a better version of the other Welcome to The Art of Online Course Creation, the podcast dedicated to purpose-driven entrepreneurs like you who are passionate about creating impactful online courses. I'm your host, Shannon Boyer. As an experienced educator, I understand that craft. Exceptional online courses requires more than just mastering online marketing. It demands strategic planning, dedication, and a focus on delivering real value. Each week we dive into the essentials of high quality course creation, share inspiring. Success stories and provide practical tips to help you build courses that truly make a difference. Whether you're just starting out or looking to enhance your existing courses. This is your go-to resource for creating a digital course that leaves a lasting impact. Okay, two things before we start. First, grab your notebook and second, gather your in. Because we are going to create something special together. Your journey to developing transformative online courses starts now.

1:33

Hey there, and welcome back to The Art of Online Course Creation. I'm your host, Shannon Boyer, and I help coaches, educators, and expert entrepreneurs build courses their students actually finish, love, and get great results from. Today's episode came straight out of a coaching call I had this week, and it's on something I have not given a full episode to before. We talk a lot on this show about pre-recorded lessons and asynchronous courses, but here's the thing I wanna sit with today. Teaching live and teaching through pre-recorded lessons are not the same thing, and one is not better than the other. They are two different formats built for two different purposes, and they need to be designed differently. There's also a second layer to this that I think is even more useful. You can actually teach something live on purpose with the end goal of turning it into the best pre-recorded course possible. So here's the question I want to answer for you by the end of this episode: how do you decide whether you should be teaching live or pre-recorded? And if you're going to build a pre-recorded course, how can teaching it live first make that course dramatically better? If you've ever been told you can just record a live session and repurpose it into a course because it will be easier, this episode is going to give you a more honest and, honestly, more effective way to think about it. So let's get into it. Let me start with the call that sparked this, because it lays the whole thing out perfectly. I was on a coaching call this week with a client I've worked with before. A while back, she'd come to me for a quick power audit. She had a membership with courses inside it, and it was doing really well, but she wanted me to take a look and tell her where she could improve. And one of the biggest things I saw right away was that she had these very, very long live sessions that had been repurposed into, well, quote, unquote, "courses." So I gave her some feedback on it, and one of the things I told her was that you can't just take these long live sessions, leave them exactly as they are, and call that a course. It... They're built for two different purposes. And this is why I love working with her. She took the feedback on. She didn't get defensive. She got curious. So when she decided to rebuild her membership and move it onto a new platform, she took all of that into consideration. But she made one more additional s- decision that I think is really smart, and it's the reason I wanted to bring this to all of you today. She decided that she wanted to teach it live one more time on purpose so she could really learn where her clients were struggling, and then turn that into the best pre-recorded lessons she probably could. So the question she brought to our call was, "Shannon, what should I be paying attention to when I teach this live so that the prerecorded version comes out as strong as possible?" And that's what we spent the session on. Actually, I was really impressed with this question because it's one that I don't think I've ever been asked before. And when I got off that call, I thought, "This is exactly what I wanna talk about on the show." Because like I said, most people never even consider this. They think it's one or the other. But the truth is that you can teach live. It doesn't have to be recor- prerecorded, and you then can also teach live with the goal of building the prerecorded lessons after. So let's back up a minute and talk about why this matters, starting with the mistake that I see most often. The problem is that a lot of people host a live session, a workshop, a master class, a live round of a program. They hit record, and then they take that recording exactly as it is and just put another name on it and call it a course. Maybe they break it up into smaller sections. Um, and I understand the appeal of that because it feels efficient. It feels like you're getting two things out of one effort. But live and prerecorded are structured differently at the bones. When you teach live, you can go long. You've got interaction. You have questions and conversation and back and forth with your participants. That interaction is doing a huge amount of the work. It's what creates the engagement. It's what keeps people leaning in. The energy of the room, the real-time responses, the fact that someone can raise their hand and say, "Wait, I don't get it," all of that is holding the experience together. Now, take that exact recording and hand it to someone who's watching it alone on their own time with no ability to interact. All of that connective tissue is gone. The thing that made it work live, the interaction, it isn't there anymore. So what's left is often too long, a little meandering, and missing the mechanisms that keep a solo learner engaged. And to be clear, there absolutely are ways to make an asynchronous course deeply engaging. So asynchronous means that the person is watching it at a different time from when you're teaching it, and they're watching it from a different, at a different time from other people. There are specific methods for building that in, and it's a lot of what I teach inside my program. But those are different methods than let people talk in real time. You have to design engagement into a prerecorded course intentionally because you don't get it for free the way you do live. Now, here's the part that I feel most strongly about, and it's not just a structural thing, it's relational. When you take a live recording and sell it as a course, you put your new student in a really strange position. They're watching other people ask questions. They're watching other people interact with you. They're hearing you respond to someone who isn't them about a situation that isn't theirs. And from the very first lesson, they feel like an outsider. Like they showed up late to a party that was already happening. Like this thing wasn't really made for them, and that's the exact opposite of what a course is supposed to do. One of the biggest benefits of a course, one of the things that makes real learning actually happen, is connection. Your student needs to feel like you built this for them, like they're first, like you anticipated where they'd be, what they'd struggle with, what they'd need. When someone feels seen like that, they trust you, they lean in, and they learn. But a chopped up live quietly does the opposite. Instead of building a connection, it builds a barrier. Right at the moment you're trying to create a relationship, you've made your student feel like they're on the outside looking in. So this isn't only about format being a little off. It's about the relationship you're building or failing to build with a person who trusted you enough to buy. And I'll be honest, I've been on the receiving end of this myself. I've bought a course and been disappointed to open it up and find a recording of something that was clearly live at some other time with other people asking their own questions. It's a bit like buying fish at the store and only realizing at home that it was previously frozen. I think I've used this example before. It's not that it's worthless, it's that it's not what I thought I was getting, and no one told me. Which brings me to the fair question: Is there ever a time it's okay to sell or share a live recording? And the answer is, yeah, absolutely, with some conditions. If you teach something live, you should record it and make that replay available to the people who couldn't attend live. That's completely legitimate. That's not what I'm talking about here. You can even offer the recording as a bonus. That's fine too. But the non-negotiable is you have to tell people it's previously re- recorded because that changes the value, and it changes what they expect walking in. Whether you're including it as a replay or as a bonus or anything else, being upfront that it was recorded live at another time is what keeps it honest What is not okay is taking a one-hour, two-hour, three-hour live session, chopping it into little bits, and telling yourself that makes it digestible. It doesn't. Length is not the same thing as design. Cutting something into smaller pieces doesn't do the instructional work of turning it into a course. It just relocates that work. And this is the part I really want you to hear because it's not just about ethics, it's about your business. If you push the work of making sense of your material onto your student, two things happen. Number one, you lower the value of what you're selling, and number two, you open the door for someone else who is willing to do that work to step in and provide that value to your people instead. So doing the work to build a real course isn't just the right thing to do for your students, it's how you actually protect what you've built. Okay, so let's flip this into something you can actually use because there is a version of teach it live that I'm 100% for, and it's the one my client chose. Let me just as an aside say you can teach live with the sole purpose of teaching live, and I, I love that as an option. I love teaching live. So if you wanna just teach live and then make the recording available for people who paid but weren't able to attend the actual live, that is 100% okay. That's not what I'm talking about here. I wanna talk, though, about teaching something live before you build the prerecorded version because that can be a genuinely great strategy, especially if it's something you've never taught before. Because what the live gives you is information. It shows you where your students actually struggle before you commit all those hours to filming it. You've heard me say this before, and it's true every single time. When you become the expert, you can't remember what it was like to be a beginner. It happens to all of us. The things that are now intuitive y- to you, the things you take for granted, those are exactly the things your students are gonna get stuck on, and when you teach live, that becomes obvious. People get confused, they ask questions, they ask you to repeat yourself, and you get to see the gaps in real time before they're baked into a recording. So if you're going to teach live as a way to build a better course, here's what to pay attention to. First, a quick logistics tip that'll save you, tell your students up front that you're going to take questions at the end of the presentation so you don't get pulled off track mid-teach. But ask them to drop their questions into the chat as they come up. That way, you stay on your through line of the presentation, and you capture everything as it happens. Then afterward, you can scroll back through the chat and see exactly where the flurry of question happened. That's your confusion map. Wherever a cluster of questions piled up is a spot that needs more scaffolding in your recorded version. And when you do open up for questions at the end, you can start by going through the chat. "So okay, let's start with the questions that came up as we went." You might also be even more bold and direct your students so that if they see a question in the chat and they also have the same question, that they like it. Because what you don't want is for one person to ask a question in the chat, and then everyone else who had that question doesn't say anything because they see that it's already been asked. What you wanna try to figure out here is where are the majority of the people having questions and getting stuck? So by asking them to just like questions that they also have, that is a really great indicator for you. Second, watch their s- faces and their body language. Now, I'll say something that sounds a little bit harsh, but it's actually really practical. You're not designing for the outliers. You're watching where the majority of your people are. That's who your course is gonna be for. So pay special attention when people get quiet, because quiet can mean one of two very different things. It can mean that they're deeply engaged, they're processing, they're taking this new informatio- information and attaching it onto what they already know, assimilating it. That's a good quiet. But watch because there's a risk there, too. If someone's really chewing on the thing you just said, there's a chance that they're actually gonna miss the next thing you teach because their brain is still hung up on that last one. That tells you that that concept might need its own moment, its own pause, its own space in the recorded version. Or quiet could mean that you've totally lost them. And you can usually tell the difference by their body. Are they leaning in or sitting back? Are their arms crossed or are they open? If they're leaning in but pensive, that's usually the good kind of quiet. They're thinking about something new. If they're sitting back with their arms crossed, you've either lost them to confusion or they're doubting what you're saying. And that's a signal to dig in, either right there in the moment or in how you structure and address it when you record. All of this, the chat clusters, the faces, the quiet, the body language, this becomes your edit list. You walk away from teaching it live knowing where people got confused, where they checked out, and where they needed more. And now you can build your prerecorded lessons to get ahead of it instead of accidentally recording the same blind spots into a video you're stuck with. That's the difference between I recorded my live and I'm reselling it, and I taught it live so I could design something better. Same lesson, same live session, completely different intention, completely different result. One important caveat, because I never wanna give you advice that doesn't fit your situation, this live first strategy only makes sense where teaching live online actually works for your content. I know some of you teach demonstration style courses, so if you're teaching a knitting course, you might teach that live in person, but live streaming it digitally may not make sense at all. So take this as if your material can be taught live online, it can be a powerful learning tool for building your course, not as a universal rule. And please, if you do teach it live first, do it for the right reason. Do it because it's going to make your recorded course better for your students, not because someone sold you the line that you can just repurpose your material and it'll be easier for you. Those are two very different motivations, and they produce two very different courses. And once again, let me just say that teaching live because you want to teach live to people who are live is also okay Okay, it's time for this week's one bold idea. The one thing I want you to keep thinking about after this episode ends, and here it is. A recording of live teaching and a prerecorded course are not the same product, and pretending they are costs you the exact thing that makes a course valuable: connection. So before you decide how you're going to build, get clear on which format you're actually creating, and design it on purpose for that format. If you're teaching live, lead- lean into the interaction, the energy, the real-time back and forth. If you're building prerecorded, design the engagement and the connection in deliberately because you won't get it for free. And if you're smart about it, use one to build the other. Teach it live, watch closely, learn where your people struggle, and then go build the prerecorded course that makes every one of them feel like it was made just for them, because it was. So let's bring it home. Live and prerecorded are two different formats for two different purposes. A live session creates engagement through interaction. A prerecorded course has to create that engagement and that connection by design. So don't chop up your long live and call it a course. And if you ever do share a recording, tell people it was recorded live so it's honest. And if it's feasible for your content, consider teaching live first on purpose as a way to learn exactly where your students struggle, so your recorded lessons can be the best they can possibly be. The whole thing comes down to a single decision made before you build. What format am I actually creating, and how do I design it so my student feels like I made it just for them? And that's exactly the kind of decision I want to help you make before you sink hours into building. If you're at the stage where you're trying to figure out what your course should be and how to set it up for real results, I made something just for you. It's my free course clarity blueprint, and it walks you through the key decisions every course creator needs to make before they start designing and recording, so you're not building from the middle and hope it works out. You can grab it at the link in the show notes. And if today's episode gave you a new way to think about your course, would you do me a quick favor and share it with one course creator friend who's been about to hit record on a live and call it a day? And if you're not already, please subscribe and leave a review. It genuinely helps more thoughtful creators like you find the show. If you've got a topic you'd like me to cover in a future episode, please send it my way. You can reach me at hello@shannonlboyer.com or over on Instagram @shannonlboyer. Until next time, keep learning, keep growing, and keep asking questions