052: Create Your Online Course with Janelle Allen of Zen Courses
Have you ever thought of turning your expertise into an online course? It can be a great source of income that comes with the satisfaction of inspiring others with content you feel passionate about.
Shannon welcomes Janelle Allen, the founder of Zen Courses to help you get started. Janelle shares her knowledge with us covering how to pick a topic, organize and market a course, the different styles of courses, and much more.
Armed with her Masters of Science degree in Instructional Technology, Janelle has spent nearly ten years creating courses for a variety of clients, including colleges, universities, corporations and small businesses. Realizing that she wanted to work in a more personal way with others she founded Zen Courses. Through her business, Janelle offers services that include one-on-one consultations and courses.
Janelle has a free online email list course just for our Connected Yoga Teacher listeners.
6:20 How Janelle got interested in online learning and went from working for a six-figure company to working for herself
10:10 Janelle’s experience with yoga
11:20 How to get started creating an online course: 1) target learner 2) what problems do they have 3) what solutions do you have
15:35 How do yoga teachers pick from possible course topics? How to determine if people will pay for your course.
17:35 How to organize the course? “The one thing” what should people be able to do after completing the course, using “backwards design”
21:45 “Simpler is better” - resisting temptation to put too much content in your course
20:35 Tools Janelle uses to create her courses- outline, content cues, mind maps
23:40 The difference between a live course, self-paced course or blended course (part live and part self-paced)
26:30 Open cart or close cart launches- whether a course is available for a limited time
27:15 How choose between creating live course, self-paced or blended course- often depends on complexity of your courses
28:40 Thinking about your learners- there will be times when parts of the course will be harder, students may stumble and it will be important to be available to your students during these times through video chat, Facebook groups, provide an extra week to do their work, etc.
32:10 Making your course actionable: activities and assignments in your course, develop a community in your course (on social media like a FB group)
34:05 How to get students for your courses 1) market to existing audience through email including survey questions, building a case for the course and how to sign up for your course 2) partner with people that have an audience through a joint webinars
39:30 When you are worried about being “salesy” and how Janelle worked through that and the fear of rejection
41:30 How to reach Janelle if you want to work with her
43:40 What advice would Janelle give to those starting out
46:40 Shannon’s closing thoughts
Links
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Yoga for Pelvic Health Teacher Training
Mama Nurture Teacher Training (RPYT)
Free TCYT 5-Day Content Creation Challenge
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