The Course Mentors Podcast
Hey there, future course creator!
Ever feel like turning your know-how into an online course is like trying to solve a Rubik's cube blindfolded? Well, grab your headphones because "The Course Mentors Podcast" is here to be your secret weapon!
Meet Aimee and Odette (that's us!), your new best friends in the course creation world. We've been in the trenches for over a decade, and for the last five years, we've been rocking the online course space. Now we're here to spill all our secrets in bite-sized, 15-20 minute episodes that'll fit perfectly in your coffee breaks.
No fluff, no filler - just real, actionable advice that'll take you from "um, what's a landing page?" to "holy moly, I just hit six figures!". We're talking everything from crafting your course to marketing it like a pro and building a business that'll have you pinching yourself.
Whether you're dreaming of ditching the 9-to-5 grind, adding a sweet extra income stream, or just want to trade demanding clients for students who think you're the bee's knees - we've got your back.
Think of us as your personal cheerleading squad, but instead of pom-poms, we're armed with proven strategies and a healthy dose of "you've got this!" energy. We're here to give you the straight-up truth (with a side of fun) to help you crush your goals and create that freedom-filled life you've been daydreaming about.
So, ready to turn your expertise into course gold? Tune in to The Course Mentors Podcast. And hey, once you're done implementing our awesome advice, swing by Instagram @thecoursementors and show us what you've created. We can't wait to celebrate your wins!
Let's make some course magic together, shall we? 🎉
The Course Mentors Podcast
How To Be Switched Off While Still Supporting Your Students
Feeling overwhelmed by student questions? Worried that without 1:1 calls, your students won't succeed? In this practical episode, Odette and Aimee tackle the support dilemma that every course creator faces: how to provide exceptional student care without sacrificing your sanity!
We're breaking down innovative support strategies that both scale your impact AND improve student results. Because contrary to popular belief, more of your personal time isn't always what students need most!
In This Episode:
- Why 1:1 calls aren't always the best support method (for you OR your students)
- The Proactive Support Framework that prevents problems before they start
- Creative alternatives to traditional office hours
- How to build support systems that scale with your business
- Real examples of courses with exceptional support (and minimal burnout)
Whether you're drowning in DMs or worried about launching without unlimited availability, this episode will transform how you approach student support. Because helping your students succeed shouldn't mean sacrificing your life balance!
Ready to create support systems that actually work? Hit play and let's jump in!
#CourseCreator #StudentSupport #OnlineCourse #DigitalProduct
Hello and welcome to the Course Mentors podcast. I'm Odette, I'm Amy, and today we are talking about how to build support into your online course, and no, we are not talking about one-to-ones. First up, we're going to talk about some common success blockers and provide some solutions, and then we're going to get into the support structure how to actually include support into your course. Most of it will be automated. Okay, amy, first of all, tell me something happened in your week.
Speaker 2:Okay, I do have one for you this week, actually Course related, not life related. I like that. So over the past five weeks I have been refilming my course and this was something I want to tell. A quick story. I feel like I've lived my entire life to tell this story. Go on, okay.
Speaker 2:Do you remember when I first launched Japanese in 12? One day look, look, I'm gonna get into this on another episode we're gonna talk about this like in a long form, about what it took to really film it at the start and a lot of the things that I learned through that process. But one thing that I will say is that the filming process was really really hard, harder than I thought it was going to be. The first time around, I think I assumed I have 15 minute modules, so I assumed one video is 15 minutes. No, I assumed that, and if you ever edit a video before in your entire life, you know that it probably takes about 30 minutes of footage to edit down to 15 minutes. So my workload doubled. And then I was also not great in front of a camera and all those other things. Anyway, moving past the point, that process and then I was also not great in front of a camera and all those other things anyway moving past the point.
Speaker 1:That process was really, really hard, harder than I really thought it was going to be and at the end of it you pulled some hours, like I really did. Didn't understand when you were sleeping, it was mental.
Speaker 2:I really don't. I don't want to like make it sound like it was worse than it was, because it was pretty brutal but you were figuring it out by yourself.
Speaker 1:You had no roadmap like, and I was on a tight timeline as well. Because you've made up a tight timeline for yourself, I do that a lot for myself.
Speaker 2:If you are a type a out there and you give yourself five minutes to complete a task, you'll know what I'm talking about. But anyway, I got to the end of that and I needed a day off. At the end of it like I was so, so tired first day off um, I ended up having to come into the office anyway to talk about some quick things with debt. She walks in and she says I can't wait to refilm this course.
Speaker 1:I cannot tell you how many times Amy has brought that up to me.
Speaker 2:I was like like. I was like I had like battle wounds, my eyes were bloodshot, I was tired, I hadn't slept in a fucking week and I was like what do you mean in a fucking week? And I was like what do you mean?
Speaker 1:refilm it dad, I can be a little bit insensitive. No, I can. I'm not very good at like reading people's feelings sometimes you're just so action focused.
Speaker 2:Sometimes, yeah, that's so action focused and it's just me. You have a blind spot for me, because we're so like sisterly with each other.
Speaker 2:I think that, like sometimes, you don't realize that you're a human being with emotions oh, yeah, um, but anyway, moving on, it's been four and a half years since then and I finally refilmed it and I know that debt is really, really happy about that. I know that she's really excited about the fact that I've refilmed, but that is what I've been doing for the past five weeks. I got sick in the middle it, otherwise it would have taken about three and a half weeks but, I, did it.
Speaker 2:I refilmed the entire course. And for anyone out there who is thinking, why did it take three and a half weeks to refilm the entire course, for a little bit of context, I have a really, really big online course. It's also five different levels, full of lots and lots of videos. So, over the whole entire program and all of it, it was about three and a half thousand different worksheets and about 650 different videos that I refilmed over three and a half weeks. But I did it and I'm really bloody proud of myself, to be honest. But that is my update for what I've been up to. I refilmed the course. Debt is ecstatic about it she loves the videos.
Speaker 1:I'm so happy it looks. It looks so good. I'm just, I've been editing, I've been helping editing um, and it's so amazing, so I'm very proud of you.
Speaker 2:Well done thank you, I really needed to hear that I was waiting until the last day. Then she could say oh, can't wait for you to refill it again, never. No, like my cousin, you know better.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's get into it.
Speaker 2:So today we're going to be talking about support structuring, and we go through this in depth in our program, really, really in depth, because we talk a lot about our expectations for the online course industry and how we want to create really, really, really phenomenal courses, and a big part of that is including support. We don't believe that good educational resources can be a YouTube series worth of videos, and we say this often and all the time that we don't think giving someone five videos, 10 videos, 100 videos and then just bye is oftentimes a good course. Part of learning requires some back and forth not a lot, but at least a little bit and so when we say that we try to include as much support as we can in our courses, I think a lot of people think does that mean I'm going to be doing one-to-ones?
Speaker 1:because fuck no no, we avoid one-to-ones as much as possible, because it's not an effective use of your time because one-to-ones as much as possible.
Speaker 2:Because it's not an effective use of your time because one-to-ones are just you repeating yourself over and over again. So, no, there is no one-to-ones and no, we're never going to advise you or tell you or like ever, just suggest even that the support you include in your course should have you sitting in a zoom screen for 10 hours a week.
Speaker 1:absolutely, that's what you're probably trying to get away from Exactly.
Speaker 2:So what we're going to talk about today is how to include that support in your online courses without having to show up live constantly, because everything we're going to talk about today is extremely hands-on, but it's also automated.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. It feels so hands-on on the user end, but you can automate just so much of this. First of all, let's talk about some success blockers and their solutions, and their solutions very important, very important. First up is isolation issues. Are your students feeling isolated within your course? It shouldn't be a solo journey. There needs to be, if not community, there needs to at least be, some communication with you. We don't want self-paced course self-paced is you. We don't want self-paced course Self-paced is great, but we don't want self-paced without support, without you dropping in every now and then. We'll tell you how to drop in later on, but we don't want a self-paced course without any support or input from the teacher.
Speaker 2:One of the worst things that you can buy on the internet today is a series of videos.
Speaker 1:That's it. And also, people have done that. They've done the trying to figure it out themselves and watching a few videos. That's YouTube, that's their YouTube search, whilst they're trying to get an actual solution. They've passed that. Now they want somebody to actually teach them. It's a course. A course has a teacher. A teacher teaches. So to cure these isolation issues, you want to have some touch points. They can be in a community, it can be group input, but have touch points along the way, definitely from yourself, because you're the one you know that sold them this. Give them a good experience and let them know. Lights are on, doors are open, I'm available for you. You don't have to be available 24-7, you don't have to be unreasonable about it or anything like that. Set boundaries, make it clear when and how they can contact you, but make sure that you let them know you're there for support.
Speaker 2:And what we mean by that is answering small questions. If you have a community platform, an hour a day to check into a community and answer some questions or an hour a day to do emails, is not a big deal.
Speaker 1:That will pretty much be your whole job once you've got your course set up, like there'll be some marketing, some this and that. But as far as actually supporting your students, we have methods to make it really easy, really streamlined. An hour a day would be heaps. So cure any isolation issues by communicating with your students Pretty straightforward. Next is missing momentum. So you don't want big gaps between wins. You don't want them to lose momentum. You don't want them to lose interest. You checking in on them is going to be a big, easy way to let them know hey, I'm still here.
Speaker 2:You're not just on the other side of a laptop with nobody supporting you or cheering you on yeah, this comes back down to what we always say, which is like people who complete courses are human beings and human beings find hard stuff hard, and if you're asking them to complete a monumental amount of work between each win, that alone is going to feel really hard. And if you have to do that, you have to do it sometimes and that's totally fine. That's just part of learning, right. But you need to be there for support in between those wins to keep them accountable and to keep them coming back and to let them know there's more good stuff coming to keep them on track.
Speaker 2:That's part of it. Yeah, absolutely. And then the third most common mistake success blocker problem that we see is one-to-one dumping. So what people oftentimes do is they say my course completion rates are really low, or people aren't communicating in the community, or people aren't finishing the program and I really, really want them to and I want them to have a better time. So what they do is they go back to what they know, and oftentimes people who do this come from the consulting, the one-to-one place, and that's what they know. They know seeing people in person increases accountability. So what they do is they one-to-one dump. They start adding in way more calls into the program, getting people to book one-to-one calls, getting people on a zoom. That is probably the worst thing that you could do to your course, because you're essentially just turning it back into one-to-one work. So you're like negating the entire course. And the second thing you're doing is you're asking people to stick to meeting times and come to calls and show up and miss some calls and reschedule them.
Speaker 1:yeah, anyone who's done any calls, like, if you've done a 15 minute call, that is not a 15 minute call, that's a half an hour of. Oh, sign into your computer, oh, do I look okay? Oh, am I ready for this? Oh, who am I meeting? And then 15 minutes turns into 20 or 25, if they, you know, take the piss a bit, or if you just want to help them out and you're having a good conversation, whatever. We don't just say, oh, just meet in one-to-one. That's like the lazy answer, that's the uncreative, un-innovative answer.
Speaker 2:It can be solved and it should be solved without that one-to-one work. So let's get into a support structure that you can implement today and I think, a lot of things that you'll like love. I think you'll listen to this list and be like, oh shit, I never thought of that, because when we read this list of people on the coaching calls and as part of our course, people are like, whoa, that blew me two pieces blew me into pieces.
Speaker 1:I don't think that's the expression, isn't it? Blew me away, I think is what I have, this game where I say common expressions badly and I she's been doing it for years. She says common expressions slightly wrong and then just watches my face like try to compute it.
Speaker 2:I always say oh, you just gotta wait for the penny to fall.
Speaker 1:I'm like, yeah, I didn't realize she was doing it for like four years. She'd go home and like tell nick the one, her husband, the one that um that sounds like I'm bullying you.
Speaker 2:I'm not bullying you.
Speaker 1:It's just so funny because you are so polite to me that you pretend I just and I take things literally, so I do not assume like I feel like, oh, am I, is that the expression? Oh, I thought it was different. No, I don't, actually I think that's wrong but, I don't say anything. So let's blow people to pieces. Let's blow people to pieces. Sounds very violent okay anyway.
Speaker 2:So there's three main kinds of support in an online course. The first one is proactive support. So that is you reaching out. This is you reaching out proactively. That's things like and if you don't have these in your course, go get them in right now, get to a computer.
Speaker 2:This second, okay, the first one, a welcome sequence. There should be some sort of welcome sequence welcoming people into your course that basically just kind of follows them through their first 48 hours, let's say, welcomes them into their course, lets them know the expectations, lets them know how to reach you, kind of just communicates a little bit of a welcome, just like you would kind of expect in a university course. You wouldn't expect to get into a university course day one you're learning neuroscience like you'd probably expect a bit more of a soft landing. Next is expectation setting. So within that welcome sequence and then perhaps a video on top of that, inside your course platform, there should be some sort of expectation setting. You do not wait for someone to email you something that's absolutely banana town crazy and then say, hey, I don't answer these kind of questions because that's like really negative experience. Proactively, tell them what to expect, let them know they can't email you about their great granddad, if that is your a a designing course.
Speaker 1:You need to set those expectations as well, because sometimes you're going to need to set boundaries. People will ask questions that are out of scope. You can't say.
Speaker 2:I don't answer that it's normal.
Speaker 1:It's normal, but you can't say I don't answer that, or you shouldn't if you haven't already set that expectation. It's way better to reinforce a boundary than create it when it comes up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think the other thing as well here is that, like for a lot of people, they won't be prepared for what the kind of out of scope questions are going to come in until they see it. Yeah, I teach japanese and sometimes people email me translative work. I'm here to teach people how to speak japanese, how to read and write and speak japanese. For the first year of teaching the course, people would send me an email and say, hey, um, I have just contacted my pen pal who lives in Okinawa, can you please translate this document that they've sent to me? And I'd be like, no, that's like two hours worth of paid work. Like I can't, just do. That will be five hundred dollars, please. So I would have to, you know, be like no, I can't.
Speaker 2:And so within a year, within six months or a year, I learned, oh yeah, I gotta say that up front, I gotta set that expectation that that's not within the scope of the course. You can email me about questions related to Japanese, but I can't translate things. Yeah, 100% yeah, and so that comes. It's like learning about what it is that your boundaries are through. The course creation process is totally fine too, but at some stage, if you've been running a course for a little while, you've got to have those expectations in there, absolutely.
Speaker 1:It's not a negative thing about people respect you when they, when you reinforce boundaries, it's fine. They just might toe the line a little bit, so you need to.
Speaker 2:Just no honey, I can't translate your japanese homework next up in your proactive support are two other really important things. First one, clear Just let them know a timeline of what they're going to be learning and when, so that they can manage their own expectations about how hard things are going to get. Let them know the hardest part of this course is around week four. Or let them know you're going to be finished in weeks 10 and then you're going to be doing this in weeks 11 and 12, because people can then adjust their expectations. They can adjust their timelines. But if you're not giving people a clear roadmap, that's where you're going to hit questions and non-complaints and those is when you're going to start to feel like, oh God, I'm not communicating enough. Why don't people understand Like these are communication guidelines that we expect Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Next one is FAQ resources, so you'll eventually see common questions asked. Let's combat those without having to send a personalised email every time by having some FAQ resources. That way, if somebody asks that common question, you can direct them to your spreadsheet. Like a working spreadsheet is best, so you can add to it and then say hey, great question, here's a link. And then they can read through the other ones. You've just 10 times lowered your workload.
Speaker 2:So, proactively, you're giving people a welcome sequence, your expectation setting, you're giving them a clear roadmap and you're giving them FAQ resources from the very beginning as they're landing into the course, and that alone is going to clear up so much communication and confusion that those people who feel like they need to add those one-to-ones in or those group calls in, that alone is going to bring that right down Absolutely.
Speaker 1:So the next one is active support. Let's look at that.
Speaker 2:So active support is things that you are actively doing as a student is in the program. These are the things that you're probably doing live. These are the things that are a little bit less automated but still can be. The first one is check-in emails. So around the hardest part of your course, the course that creates the most amount of friction for us that's running the pilot round, but for Japanese and 12 that's around the middle point, when people are starting to really start to nut out some really difficult grammar for sewing it's for sewing.
Speaker 1:It's like the hardest project I know. When people are going to ask questions, so I check in with them and say, hey, this one's a bit tricky. Here's I've actually made an extra tutorial of the hardest part of the sewing project and said, hey, this has really helped some people.
Speaker 2:But if you're still stuck, reach out to me yeah, and so you can automate those emails 100 000. You can have an automated email that heads out at the hardest part of your course to check in with them to say how are you going? Because a simple how are you going? Email a simple how are you going. Here's a little bit of an extra resource, or a little bit of an extra nudge that alone is going to get people to respond to you and to keep going through the hard work. The next thing that you can do is progress monitoring.
Speaker 2:Now, if you're looking to do this completely manually, that looks like going into each person's course manually, backend and looking at where they're stuck or stalled on progress. So if they've not logged in for 30 days, they're stalling. What can you do to help them get back on the horse? This again, though, could obviously be entirely automated. So most platforms out there that we've dealt with have nudges or alerts or tags or some sort of way of alerting you that someone hasn't been active for 10 days, 30 days, 60 days, whatever. It's different platform to platform, but what we tend to look at is inside the platform. They should have some sort of feature set up where, if someone hasn't logged in in 30 days, an automatic email goes out that says hey, I'm giving you a little nudge. I know you haven't logged in for 30 days. Things can be tough Check in with me, beautiful.
Speaker 1:Give them a really clear instruction. So next one is engagement prompts. That's reinforcing how to use your content back into their life. Make it super contextual for them, make sure that they're really reaping the rewards of your course and remind them that I'm not just teaching you this for fun. Like this is what you can do. These are some cool ideas where you can implement it into your life. It really shows that you care, that you really know your stuff. You can share like success stories of how other people have used your content to create this cool outcome, and maybe you can do the same thing and then finally, in the active support category, is celebration triggers, and this is kind of the opposite of the progress monitoring.
Speaker 2:So if someone hasn't logged in for 30 days, you're going to nudge them right. But what about if they've logged in every day for 30 days? Or what about if they've completed the hardest part of your course or gotten past the halfway mark? Then you can send an email or a message or something, or maybe a community shout out to really highlight and celebrate their success. So this is an idea where to incentivize more people getting to those points. You can really shout out someone for achieving something.
Speaker 1:Amy just mentioned a couple of ideas. What I love about this stuff is you can get really creative. What do you do Like? Personalize it and get really innovative and make this experience really fun for you as well. Doing these things it really enriches your life. Like we love celebrating people's wins. It's so positive. It increases engagement. There is no negative effects of being like hey, lisa, you just got past the halfway mark and you should be really proud of yourself. Next up, reactive support.
Speaker 2:So this is reacting to people's support, so let's say that they have reached out to you. Your reactive support is making sure that you're getting back to them appropriately. The first one, obviously, is just making sure you have a quick response time.
Speaker 1:To do this, you need to set your own goals we have within the community. We're in there every day 10 minutes, half an hour, depending on what we're doing. We need to be in that community every day and that's the goal Amy and I have set for ourselves. So the community has a quick response time and they don't feel like they need to follow it up with an email that really undermines your community. Email response time 24 hours, besides weekends, because we have lives and we set that boundary. We used not, we used to work seven days a week. Why would we? A weekend's a weekend. We can have fun, you can, people understand it, but point is create those boundaries and set goals for yourself so that you can really stick to those um response times and reinforce that.
Speaker 2:Hey, I've said I'll get back to you within 24 hours and you do it yeah, and then the last thing for reactive support is clear help channels, a solution library and troubleshooting guides, and these three are all things that are kind of like one of the same.
Speaker 2:So when people do reach out to you, you need to be directing them back to a place they can get help. So if you have, you know again, when we do this podcast, we're talking to all kinds of people in all kinds of different industries, so give us a little bit of leeway. But whatever it is that you teach, if there are a lot of questions that are coming up, you should have some sort of document, like that said, that has common faqs in it or common support questions or troubleshooting guides or a solution library, something like that. That is a channel of support resources. And when people ask questions in your emails or in the community to make sure that you aren't repeating yourself over and over and over again you should be giving them a very quick and clear answer. If it's personalized, but if it's general, you should be linking them back to some sort of support resource so that they can get help over and over again.
Speaker 1:Also, I don't want it to sound like there's always questions being asked, there's always problems or you know things to react to. That's not the case at all. We're just making things as automated and as easy as possible for you by at the start of your course, when you're having these common things. Don't just continue for months and months and months and months answering the same questions. Put them into a document.
Speaker 2:Problem solved yeah, to be completely and utterly transparent for Japanese, I put in about 45 minutes to an hour a day. I do that five days a week for the course mentors and my half of it anyway, I'm not sure if I mean I'm sure we have these similar times because we do it together, but we again probably 45 minutes to an hour a day, and then on Fridays Dan and I do feedback Fridays Sewing as far as like admin and stuff and like getting back to people, same as Amy, like 45 minutes.
Speaker 1:we use the same strategies, so that should be pretty much the same. I put a bit more work in, though, more work than you. I put a bit.
Speaker 2:I probably put a few more hours in just like sewing and like making content. Yeah, you do a lot of like community focused, like engagement stuff. You do a lot of like content for the community to keep people really engaged and that's like fun for you though that's fun for me, like it's my hobby as well, so like I just turned that into my hobby, job, hobby, job hobby job, hobby job.
Speaker 2:That is about it. From us, though, guys. Today we talked a lot about support and why you don't need to create a course that is packed full of one-to-one calls to be a supportive course. That support can come from a lot of automated stuff that's done really well, and then you touching it on the back end with a little bit of community interaction and a little bit of email support. No, you don't have to be on a call for millions of hours a day or even more than five hours a week. This is you doing a couple of calls, a group calls a week and maybe a couple of emails a week. It's not that big of a deal, but what we want to break down in the industry is people packing their courses full of one-to-ones because they think that it's going to be the superior option, when oftentimes it's just not needed.
Speaker 1:No, that's right. If you've designed a course well, you really don't need that one-to-one and it's not what people are really there for. One-to-one and it's not what people were really there for. A course is a supported journey. It's not the I'm going to go to a psychologist once a week or I'm going to get my dog trained once a week. You know, if people wanted an hour's appointment every week, that they would go somewhere else. There's a different solution for that. A course should be easy, supported and a lot of fun that is about it from us.
Speaker 2:So, guys, thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next week. Bye.