Transcript

Ian:
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to this video on effective online courses. One of the things I think that's been the most obvious since we've gone into lockdown is the switch many people have had to make from doing live training and life consulting and live coaching to doing more and more online, including, of course, creating online courses. And I think obviously, that's going to continue beyond lockdown because it gives people the opportunity to earn without investing so much of their time, per client, as it were.

That said, it seems to me that what most people have been focusing on when it comes to online courses is either the basics of how do we make them? And what technology can we use? And stuff like that. Or how do we sell them? How do we market them? How do we get people to buy them? And we've had very little focus from the people who've switched to them on how do we actually make them effective. So in other words, how do we make sure people actually learn from them?

And how people can get results from them. And that those results are sustained. Now that's something that in the, in the live training world, there's been a kind of a body of knowledge built up over very many, many years. But many of us who are new to doing courses, but who are doing it effectively because of lockdown are kind of missing out on that body of knowledge. So today I have with me Antoinette:, Antoinette and I have known each other for a long, long time. And one of the things that Antoinette has always been incredibly well regarded for is the level of interaction and engagement and results she gets from her live courses. They're not just the normal kind of exercises you do, etc. But you really make sure that the attendees really engage and really get results when they come out at the end of the course. And those results are sustained over the long term. And now of course, she's turning that to online courses as well. And had already started on that path well before lock down. So what we're going to talk today about is how do you make your online courses more effective? How do you make sure people get results from them. So welcome Antoinette.

Antoinette:
Thank you, Ian, lovely to be here with you.

Ian:
Brilliant. So first, first of all - a really broad question, first of all, what is it that makes an online course or any course I guess, get results? What makes sure that people who've come on that course can actually turn it into results in the real world? What are the the big levers or key factors?

Antoinette:
So I think the big thing with the kind of online courses that we're talking about or the kind of training courses we're talking about, is it's not just about acquiring knowledge. It's not just about acquiring information. What we want is people to change their behaviour as a result of the course they're attending and to take action. So there's lots of principles of behaviour change that really need to come into things to make it very practical and for people to take the steps that they need to take. So starting with the end in mind the key thing that people need to be thinking about when they're designing their courses is what actions or what behaviours do I want people to implement as a result of this training?

Ian:
So does that mean for example, rather than I guess, if you were being simplistic about anything, I'm going to develop an online training course, I'm an expert in topic x, you might list all the things you want people to know, you take all the knowledge in your head, and dump it out, make a list, all you need to know this and this and this, and this and this. And you're suggesting, rather than focusing on what people need to know, you should start by focusing on what kind of behaviour changes you want them to make, as a result of the course that is going to lead to some better result in their working lives or their personal lives afterwards.

Antoinette:
Yes, exactly. And so then you can work back from that, that if I want them to take this action. So if I take one, let's say that I want them to be able to run the webinar. Well, how do I know that they're going to be able to run a webinar? Well, they'll identify what the learning outcomes are, they'll identify what platform they're gonna use. They're going to identify what time they're going to schedule it - there's all these visible signs that they can do what you want them to do. And that will then dictate what information you need to give them in order to pass that on. So rather than starting with all your body of knowledge, and yeah, someone like you teaching marketing, you've got your decades of experience, it must make it really hard to think, oh, my goodness, if you really focus in on the action that you want them to take, and how you know that they can take that action. It just funnels it right down to the critical elements.

Ian:
Yes, I think that's probably key, isn't it? Because those of us who are doing creating the courses, I suspect many of us are kind of in love with our topic by now. That's why we're still in that field many, many years later, why we've acquired all this knowledge. So I think there's often a tendency to assume that everyone else is in love with the topic. And therefore your job is to teach them as much as you can about that topic, because they love it too. Whereas the reality is in business or in life, most people learning something are not necessarily learning it for the love of learning it. They're learning it because they want to do something as a result.

Of course, some people are going to be learning it. I mean, if I think some of the things that I bought in the past like the famous master class courses, so I bought a master class from Aaron Sorkin, on k ind of script, writing, and screenplays, and then I'm not really going to do anything with that. It's more for enjoyment and entertainment and just wanting to learn and of course, there's a couple of things I can pick from that have maybe influenced me, but the main thing was just learning for learning sake. But that's not true of most things we get courses on - most things we want to get a result from and so if you try and splurge everything you know to them, most of it's irrelevant to them, they don't need to know everything in order to be able to get a result.

And I think that's definitely the case that, you know, when I've bought courses that I've really struggled to get through, it's often because it's like hour after hour of pre recorded sessions, where they're just sharing everything they know about a certain topic, rather than what I need to know, in order to be able to do something with it.

So that's the first step then is to focus on what behaviour change you're looking for, and therefore what they need to know in order to make that behaviour change. So that will be a first step in doing a course is to is to look at the behaviour changes. What would you What would you look at next in terms of getting results from a course.

Antoinette:
So the key thing is to make it quite is to break it down into small actions and also bite sized recordings in such a way it's not hours upon hours upon hours. But actually breaking it down into a small amount of input, just the amount of input they need in order to demonstrate that they've learnt the key thing they need to learn in order to take the action and making the action as small as possible.

So I don't know if you've heard of a gentleman called BJ Fogg at Stanford University. Yes. So that whole concept of tiny habits, and the whole theory behind that is that anything that is too big to do, just takes too much effort, too much motivation and too much skill. And therefore, people are paralysed, and they're not there to take it. Whereas if you make something really, really small, it makes it you know, really, really easy, then actually, it's, it's not too hard. There's not too many barriers in the way for them to do it.

Ian:
And I suppose that's exaggerated with online courses, because in a live course, you can kind of force them to to keep going through and unless they walk out of the room, they're kind of forced to listen to the next step and to do the next exercise. But with an online course, they just clicking over and reading email or switching it off, etc. So I think that's probably one of the things to bear in mind for an online course is it's, it is really discretionary. This is even if someone has bought a course for someone else, or they're supposed to do it for their job, it's very easy to just put it off and not do it and to have lots of excuses why, either to yourself or to your boss as to why you couldn't complete it, that you wouldn't have live so it's even more so you've got to break things down into little easy, manageable chunks.

Antoinette:
I think there's a point to make there on what we mean by online courses, because I think, obviously it's a term that's being used all the time at the moment. And there are as many different kinds of online schools as there are face to face course. And I think when people are talking about online courses, one person's talking about the equivalent of a university lecture, another person's talking about the equivalent of a Udemy course. And the two are completely different.

So one thing to bear in mind one difference between online training but you don't get in face to face is you get synchronous and you get asynchronous. So synchronous online learning is like a live webinar, right and, or like a live online workshop. And certainly in terms of moving to online training. My clients want that step to be as small as possible, and as close to what they're used to in face to face as possible. One of the reasons being, what you've just said, is they feel that people have to be sat in front of an instructor in order to be led through a programme and haven't got the motivation or inclination to do it in their own time.

So depending on your audience, when you're designing these online training, you need to think about that. Is it asynchronous? Or is it synchronous?

Ian:
And especially if your audienc is an organisation that's buying a course for its employees, that could well be a strong tendency for them to want a live synchronous component to it at least, or at all to be synchronous. Because of that fear that people will just put an async course to one side and not do it. Okay, so that's, that's definitely worth bearing in mind as you're thinking of, especially for your first courses, if you're thinking what, where's the first place for me to go as a course it's going to be easier for you as well, to take what you were doing live and turn it into a live experience over the web. The only thing I guess that's more more difficult is the technology in the year, there may be a fear that the tech will let you down because the webinar platform will fail or whatever, that you maybe don't get if you get the chance to re record a video a few times, but other than that it's less of a step to doing all the recording and then having it up on a website, you know, you can just do it on a on a webinar platform. And that's the only thing you have to learn.

Antoinette:
Yeah, exactly. And once you've done it that way, you know what the energy levels are, you know how the timing works. And that makes it a lot easier to then chunk it down to move online.

Ian:
So you can see when people are are beginning to fade? And we've got to have a break or an exercise there, for example, okay.

Antoinette:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I haven't, I have never designed an asynchronous online course, from a blank sheet paper. I've always had a live programme that I could then chunk down and know where, well, we'd have an activity there. Right. So, you know, we break it there. And so,

Ian:
And even if you were doing one from scratch, you'd probably still do it live first online, in a synchronous manner, to learn from that to know how to chunk it up and to know where you need some extra work and to know what, you know what's working really well?

Antoinette:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Ian:
And so if we if we look at, and feel free to answer from both those perspectives of a synchronous course or an asynchronous course, so if you've split your course up, and you've got it into little chunks, what does the chunk look like - an individual chunk? Is it kind of a bit of a bit of learning a bit of kind of, you know, spouting knowledge and then they do something, how do you construct the actual individual little section?

Antoinette:
So if I was, if I was live, we try and get the learning from the participants and then summarise with the facts rather than starting with the facts and then getting them to do something. So if I give you an example, so my my company specialises in career conversations and mentoring, and so we train managers to have career conversations. So when we're teaching the characteristics for effective career conversations, we could just give a list of five things and say, well, it's this, it's this, it's this this. We don't. We get them to do an activity where they describe their best conversation that impacted their career. Now, the various ways we do that are, if we were live in person or live online, we put them into breakouts, ask each of them to share their story in turn, and then as a group, they identify the themes. If we're on an asynchronous platform, we get each of them to describe their story, they type it in, and then we ask them to read at least two other people's stories and identify the themes that they see coming through. Or we also get them to share their stories. And then when we come together in a live online session as part of that whole blended package, we would have that discussion.

Ian:
So no matter what type of platform you're using, and what type of thing you're trying to construct away there of both them reflecting on their own experiences, which is going to kind of, I guess, activate them and make them more ready to learn new stuff, because they're able to connect it to their own experiences, but also you're trying to get sharing even in an asynchronous environment, you'd be trying to use a platform where people could share not, you know, not live, but one person would pull something up, another person would notice it, etc. And I guess if you've got different people going through the courses over time, you know, they can see what someone six months ago posted about their their experiences and learn from that as well.

Antoinette:
Yeah, I mean, again, it depends how you structure that I mean, when we do our asynchronous, we still do them in cohorts. So we we copy the course every time and so it's the July 2020 course has eight people on it. And next time we run it, they would see those eight people, they'll start again, and there'll be a new cohort go through it. And one of the reasons for that is because you're the power of learning from each other, and sharing of experiences. And so one of the things we're trying to do, even though they only meet once a week is build a community. And so on the asynchronous platform, we had to really think about that. Because normally, you'd all be in a room, you'd go, Oh, Ian, hi, where do you live and you'd have all that chitchat. On a platform, you've got to do that and other ways.

And I hate icebreakers, by the way in live workshops. But suddenly I'm back into, okay, how do we break the ice in this platform.

Ian:
And so you're constructing an icebreaker. So you're deliberately building exercises or something into the into the agenda of the course. Just to get people to begin to build a relationship with the other people on the course, so that they can learn from them better because the more they know them, the more they feel comfortable with them, the more they're gonna be able to share and learn from others as opposed to kind of ignoring what everyone else is doing. So can you give us some examples of some of the ways you might do that in terms of building the relationships between people on the course.

Antoinette:
So on the on the platform, the whole of the kind of intro bit, we really bulked that up. And we asked people to make sure that they added photos to their profiles. And when we've used it in house, we've not worried about that - they know what each other looks like. But we get them to add profiles, we got them share their LinkedIn profiles and encourage them to connect. And we we ask them to introduce themselves and say a bit about who they are and what they do. We asked them to share a quote that was meaningful to them for career conversations. L&D people love a good quote!

And again, you know, they had to explain why that resonated with them. So it's a bit more a bit more personal. And, and then our programme is a blended programme. So we did actually then come together live. But what we did there was we kept it very content free. So we didn't have slides, it's like, okay, we're just screens, and we're just getting to know each other. And as we made that part of the course, as well, so the intro took quite a long time, actually. And I would allow more time for it.

Ian:
More so than you would live - you kind of over invested in the intro because it's going to be the stuff that would happen without you even knowing it in the breaks and before they met when they're having coffee. That's not gonna happen online. So you've got to plan it into the course itself.

Antoinette:
Yeah, yeah.

Ian:
Okay, super, so we've got we've got the getting the intros, getting people able to learn from each other. You've got it split up. And that all came from you seeing instead of talk - activity you've got, get them to talk first, get them to share first, then you summarise and feedback, your experience, etc. And then presumably, there's some kind of action in each module that you're expecting them to do that will take them further and embed the learning or get them to do something back in their business as well get them to take action.

Antoinette:
Yeah, so we have, you know, each video is less than 10 minutes. And then there is... Yeah, we ask them at the end of the video, we ask them to reflect and comment. So we want them to comment on what they've heard, and so that they can start a discussion about it, and then there will be an activity to put that into practice. And but one of the things that was really important to us was to have interaction on the portal and that's why we set that tone really early on - comment and react to each other's comments. Make your own observations. And and just like in a classroom if we're with people, we get people's voices heard really on early on,

Ian:
And you push that a bit?

Antoinette:
Yeah. Because otherwise they get into the habit of "Oh great. I'm just gonna sit here and listen". And once they're in that mindset if you then you know, an hour later say like, okay, now I can have a group discussion they go "what?"

Ian:
Yeah, they would not expect it - not just they weren't expecting it they're just not in the right mode or the right mood for it. Yeah, you know, it's interesting - obviously as you know, I've written quite a lot about email marketing. And there's a very similar thing there if you educate people in your first half a dozen emails to never respond to just passively read. Then if you eventually want them to take action like to click and buy something, or they just don't do it. But if you get them even just to reply and say hello or tell you what their problem is, or to even just click a button and you know, pick ian option, then they're just used to taking action. It's a bit like the difference in mindset - if you get in an email from your, from your better half the mindset you're reading that email is I'm probably gonna have to do something as a result of this. Whereas if typically you get an email, many of the newsletter type emails, your mindset is either I don't have to read this now. And I can just read it and I don't have to do anything. You just know, it's almost a shock by the time you get to the end, and you're expected to do something. And it sounds like it's the same with it with a course, if you've not been expected to do anything so far, you've never interacted. It's too much of a jolt later on. So you've got to get them interacting early.

Antoinette:
Yeah, yeah.

Ian:
Okay. And so you will deliberately do that with the intros and the exercises that you do that makes sure that later on when you give them an action to do they're kind of more used to it. And I'm guessing that the very first actions you ask them to do or kind of maybe simpler and less of a stretch for them so that they they get into the habit. So by the time you ask them to do something big, they're used to taking action.

Antoinette:
Yeah, absolutely. So whether it's, you know, on the a synchronous platform or in a webinar, you'll get them to type something into the chat box or answer a poll, in a live online session, you'll get them to introduce themselves. I mean, it is as simple as just introducing themselves. Everyone knows that their name of what they do. That's for them. Yeah, it's, yeah, whatever, whatever way you want them to interact, getting them to do that early on. When we're doing live online. We do actually say please unmute yourself and introduce yourself, tell us why you're here. And well, that kind of stuff.

Ian:
So when it comes to the kind of actions and tasks you asked them to do after they've learned something, can you tell us about what what they look like? What kind of things do you ask people to do that are the best to help embed the learning and to get them to to change behaviour at the end of the day?

Antoinette:
Yeah, I mean, it's a challenge for us because that our skills are about conversations. So we want them to go and practice having conversations. And when everyone's locked down at home with their family, if their choice of person to practice having a career conversation with is a four year old, then that's not really, that's not really ideal. And so what I would like to do, I'll be honest, haven't been brave enough yet is to pair them up and get them to work together outside in terms of having those practices. But actually our clients have been so "oh my god we're so busy", I just though oh, that's not gonna go down very well if I asked them to do that, and but we asked them to go and, and practice having the concept of practice asking this question, you know, in terms of keeping it small practice asking this question, your husband, your friend, your, you know, teenage son, whoever it might be an employee, if you want to, and think and then comment in the portal as to how it went, yeah. What did you try?

Ian:
Okay, so it's important that in a way, it's interesting as you've been, we've been going through, you've always called these actions rather than exercises, sometimes in courses, we call them exercises. But an exercise sounds like academic and writing something down, and action. In this case, you're going out in the real world and doing something. So, and again, it's it's conditioning them to expect to do something, rather than just to sit quietly by themselves and make notes etc.

Antoinette:
Hmm, yeah. And sometimes there'll be reflection. So because we're asking them to have career conversations with others, we asked them to reflect on their own career. So that might be a little bit more of an exercise in that think back over the last six months of your career, or think back to three months locked down you know. What have you enjoyed, what have you hated, what has surprised you? And then we get them to plot a timeline and develop some insights and some self awareness from that. So that's a bit more of a reflective exercise.

So, there is a concept called, called multiple intelligences, where basically people learn through multiple intelligences. Some are intrapersonal, ie reflecting on your own, some are interpersonal, through engaging in a discussion with others. Some might be mathematical, so you might ask somebody to come up with a list of seven characteristics of an effective conversation. And some of them might be physical. So we actually do encourage people to get up and go and phone somebody and have a conversation so that they're moving around to change in their physicality. And so, using those multiple intelligences can be a great way to design these kinds of actions and activities, so that you gain variety.

Because one of the challenges with online courses is the fact that I'm going to watch a video. I'm going to have to do a question right and watch a video. I'm gonna answer a question and watch video. Yeah, that gets a bit repetitive gonna put you to sleep.

Ian:
Yeah. And I guess it sounds like when you've done this a few times, it comes naturally. So you'll, you'll naturally put variety into your actions at the end of every module. But I guess when you're just starting to do this, it's worth going back and looking at it and seeing Okay, these are all my actions. Is there enough variety in them? Am I actually getting people to get up and move or do something different to speak to people to reflect versus to, to analyse, etc. Okay.

Antoinette:
Yeah.

Ian:
And so if you so that if we look at those, those actions, actually one thing is worth seeing that has come out naturally is those actions have always been very related to their own lives or their own business. You're not setting them kind of for a career conversation. You're not setting them an exercise that might be "imagine Tom is a manager in a in a in a business and Tom has to have a difficult conversation with whatever" that's not the type of exercise you do.

Antoinette:
Now, we don't believe in roleplay. We believe in in people having real career conversations. So we say to them, you're not pretending at any point here. If you're talking about your career, you're talking about your career as much as you want to. And if you're asking somebody else about their career, you're asking them about their career. And so it is very real and grounded. We do get them to just give us case studies. That's about the closest we get where, and sadly, you know, Phileas Fogg is an employee who's been with, you know, whatever company for 10 years and yes, we'll get a description, but we know it's based on Yeah, a real person.

Ian:
They've just anonymized a bit. Yeah.

Antoinette:
Yeah. And then we will

Discuss as a group, well, how might Claire handle this? If she's the manager and she has to have a quick conversation with this person? That's the closest we'll get to any kind of simulation.

Ian:
Yeah, because my experience in training when you've done roleplay, etc, is because it's not real, you miss out the the shades of grey and the difficulties. So often you get, often it ends up either being extreme. So you know, someone who's really so difficult, it doesn't reflect real situation and you can't make any progress. Or it's too easy and someone will just be, you know, you'll ask the obvious questions, and they'll kind of roll over and play along and it doesn't kind of work. It's only when you get a real situation that you know, that you're able to go "but..." and, and you get a proper level of challenge. It's not either too difficult or too easy. It's the right level of complexity that reflects the real world.

Antoinette:
Yeah, and it's, it's what you do as well. So you know, you get people to pull up their personas. It's not kind of well imagine that you run an ecommerce business selling jewellery, you know, what would the persona be? It's like well, you have a business. Think of your clients Who's your ideal client? And you know, draw that.

Ian:
It is incredibly easy to draw up a persona for someone else's business that you don't know. Because you just draw gross stereotypes that all sound as if it would work brilliantly. It's only when you look at your own business. You go, Oh, this is hard work. And I'm not quite sure. And I have three different types. Which one do I pick? You know, the subtleties only really come up when you're looking at the real world.

Okay. So you're going through kind of module by module and and doing the actions at the end that are going to lead to the behaviour change you were looking for when you when you drew that out? How do you how'd you get that all add up? You see, you're looking at the individuals do you do something to make sure that when when you add up all those actions and behaviour changes it, it comes to the end result as some kind of sanity check on that?

Antoinette:
Well, again, it comes down to kind of what they need to know to make this happen. So if I give you as an example ours, and so our competent career conversations training: they need to know what questions to ask. So we go through that. They need to know how to answer those tricky, you know, statements that employees may call or tricky challenges, they need to know how to set it up. So actually sat in an office with a one hour Outlook calendar request is not the best way. So they need to think about how do I make this a great environment? How do I make this a trusted environment? How do I build rapport so the person is happy and believes I've got their true interests at heart and then need to know some philosophy around what do we mean careers and career development because there are some myths around that, that need to spell it.

And, and that's essentially how we break down our different modules. So we have one which is on let's talk careers that's around the philosophy and the mindset and busting those myths. And we've got one around characteristics of effective career conversations. So how do you set it up how to create create the right environment? We've got one around, you know, what we call a career conversation toolkit, that's essentially the questions to ask and how to structure the career conversation. So you'd cover the right things. And then we have career conversations in practice, which is around those challenges. All those, you know, questions that managers will ask, which is things like, Yeah, but what if they say they want to be promoted and I can't promote them or what if they say that they don't want to be developed, or whatever, you know, all of those "what ifs tips" and simply we chunk it down like that.

Ian:
So when they've done each of those things, they've done all the things needed to prepare them. How do you then kind of throw them out into the real world? How do you kind of close the course that gets them to take the next step of translating their new learning into into a real world change?

Antoinette:
Thinking about how they can make it as simple as possible to have that conversation. So, you know, rather than, oh, my goodness, have to go and have a massive one hour or longer conversation about somebody's whole life, which is terrifying. And what if they asked me things I can't answer. It's actually breaking it down into one question. You could ask somebody tomorrow, that would just be a bit safer. Okay, what have you enjoyed about workday? And so we we set up almost a seven day or 30 day career conversation challenge, which is just one small thing you can do today that is around that subject just to make it a bit more comfortable.

We also say, Don't pick your most challenging employee. So a manager, yeah, a manager will always have but the what if, what if - don't start with them. Start with the person that is going to be the easiest and most reset.

Ian:
Give yourself some practice and build up your confidence. Yeah. So they've done this whole course and they've learned a whole load of stuff, but rather see right now go and do it all. You see, right, okay, day one, day two, day three, etc, or the first week of the first month and do a little bit at a time. So you're building up to that. So there's a, there's always a section on how to put this into practice. That makes it easy and chunked for them so they can, they can manage it practically. Brilliant.

Antoinette:
Yeah. And if you have the beauty of an asynchronous online course you can, of course built that in. If if it's a live on my programme, then we don't often have access to them after they've finished the work.

Ian:
Okay, so async, you can have a section at the end, where they're still going through it after 30 days, for example. Yeah, can come back and report on how it's how it's been and stuff like that.

Antoinette:
Yeah. Or you could have a separate kind of email automation set up through Active Campaign that they signed up for voluntarily. And kind of the right, you know, well, if you're ready to go, why not sign up for seven day challenge, five day challenge, which as similar to what you would do from a marketing perspective, but doing that from implementation perspective.

Ian:
Very good, very good. And that can be really simple. It's kind of no extra work once you've programmed it, but it just triggers the interaction and you can begin to get feedback as well and stuff like that. Okay, that's excellent. Okay, so it sounds like we've kind of covered the core elements is there anything else that you'd say is key to getting results from a course you've got how you design it by taking the behaviour change, not just the knowledge of behaviour change and you chunk it up, you've got getting people behaving early on to, to interact into, and then taking actions that are real world ones, and build up to the whole picture. And then you get them going in the end, anything, anything else you would build into your courses to, to make sure people are getting results from them?

Antoinette:
Yeah, I mean, I think the more that you can build a community that can learn from each other, the better. And as I say in our online portal, we do that in the cohorts. In your stuff, you probably do it through private Facebook groups. And again, you can then have people that have been on the same programme all at different times, but they're coming together and helping each other. And now, I know community is always good for marketing, but actually from a learning perspective, and then implementation perspective, it's really powerful people, you know, one of the things about training courses, they will always say that people will learn more from each other in the breaks than they will from the person at the front of the room. Which is not nice to hear, but it might be a little bit of reality. So the more that you can create that network and community in other ways. And then the better. And then it's more likely to stick and people are there supporting each other for the implementation piece.

Ian:
I've always been really impressed by how much people are willing to help other people in these communities. And I remember when I first started running, online courses that had a live component, I began to get a little bit worried because people were progressing at different rates through the programme and I remember thinking oh, we're halfway through and some people are like, almost finished, and some people are just beginning - will the people who are almost finished get bored with the online calls if we're if they're talking to people who are just starting. But no, they were really helpful enjoyed helping the others with the things they'd already been through themselves. So it worked. It worked really well. I think that's just more I'm guessing most people certainly my experience has been most people are very generous in terms of sharing what they've been through and helping others kind of catch up.

Antoinette:
Yeah, and I think that's the important point is that if you do have a live element to it, then you have to be really careful that people that have not managed to get as far through the online portal don't not come because they haven't done that component.

Ian:
Yeah, you know, that kind of embarrassed or feeling they're behind?

Antoinette:
Yeah. And we always say, you know, that doesn't matter. We don't care how you learn it. You can learn it by going through it yourself. Or you can learn it by hearing from somebody else that's gone through it. You know, it's as long as you get what you need from it. We don't mind how that happen. So, yeah, you know, don't don't not come to us because you haven't, you know, got as far through the module.

Ian:
Brilliant. And it has been absolutely fantastic there has been a ton in there for people to learn from as they create their first or just as likely as they're creating their third, fourth or fifth online course because there's a lot to learn, I think you, I think we should also be generous with ourselves as well in terms of not expecting our first course to have all these elements in. So similar to using for the 30 day plan that you produce at the end of the course where you introduce these things gradually, we ought to do that ourselves when we're creating our online courses and, and the nice thing is, we can always go back to it and update it and add more to it and rejig a bit it you know, we don't have to get it all right the first time, especially if we're doing it live, because we can learn from that experience and then go back and update it before we release it. But thank you so much for all of that it's going to be incredibly useful for people watching and and if you are watching and you are doing your first online course, come back to this video you don't as I say you don't have to learn it all at once. Keep coming back learning a bit more at a time. And you'll get a lot out of it. And you're, more importantly, the people taking your courses will get better results. So it's good for them, which means they'll come back to you. And they'll recommend you, which is better for you.

Antoinette:
And I think to your point, which you would always say, and just ask for feedback, just keep asking them for feedback. Ask them what works. And you know, as you say, once it's there, you can just keep refining it and improving it.

Ian:
Yeah, don't feel as if you have to be perfect on all of this. Nobody's expecting - especially now I think now is a great time to be doing this stuff. Because people know that the world is in a weird place at the minute people are not expecting perfection out of the door. So it's a great chance to get something out and learn from it and keep improving it. Antoinette once again, thank you very, very much and see everyone again soon.

Antoinette:
Thanks. Take care.