How To Leverage the Power of Online Courses

As an online business coach, you should always make sure to deliver the content in an easy-to-consume way to your students. You have to do all in your power to enable your students to go through the content when they can and in a way they choose to.

Online courses are a great option because they are a perfect way of distributing learning materials and keeping students engaged. They are particularly suitable for online business coaches because they are this perfect mixture of structure and creative freedom.

Attract More Students With Certificates

Going through online courses holds many benefits for your students. But what happens when they complete the course? Is there any proof that they have gone through all your learning materials and successfully completed the course? 

People love to end up with some proof that they’ve put their time, effort, and money into something, especially when it comes to various forms of online education. If you provide a certificate, your trainees will be able to update and enrich their career information on LinkedIn and their blogs.

While this is a free form of marketing you can get rolling, there is more to it. The certificate is only guaranteed to those who successfully go through all the content and quizzes. With the ultimate reward waiting at the end for them, the trainees’ drop-out rate will significantly decrease.

Besides, certificates will help you build a more stable revenue stream. With modern learning management systems, you can enable the students to pay extra for the certificate if they want it. 

Engage Your Students With Gamification

Sometimes it’s not enough to rely on the will to grow and develop professionally as the only incentive for your trainees. The increasing drop-out rates across the educational landscape testify to this. Is there something that you can do to ensure that every single one of your trainees stays all the way to the end of the course? 

The answer is pretty simple. Use online courses gamification features to engage your students, inspire competition, and help them stay for the entire ride. What are the gamification features? 

There are many of them, but the most popular ones are: 

• The achievement badges students receive after completing a milestone.
• Collecting points across all lessons and courses.
• The experience and levels of progression students can use to access advanced courses.
• The leaderboard where students can compare their achievements with other students. 

Here are some amazing gamification examples to serve as inspiration. 

Learn What Your Students Want

Most of the popular learning management systems, including LearnDash, are based on the Tin Can software specification. This software upgrade allows online courses to capture user actions and record them. This opens many opportunities for you as the online business coach who wants to adopt, progress, and give only the best to the trainees. 

For instance, you can identify the learning material that causes the students to search for specific terms and to include clarifications of those in your learning materials. With the Tin Can power online course, you will also enable your students to learn offline. Once they get online, their progress will be automatically updated and stored in the central database. 

Delight Students With Personalized Learning Paths

Online courses can help you deliver personalized learning to each of your trainees. You can target specific learning materials to individuals who can benefit from them the most. Online business coaching is a very diverse niche. It’s important to acknowledge the level of knowledge and skill of your target audience segments. 

There is no need to deliver all the same courses to all of your students. With online courses, you can easily create a learning environment that benefits all your students, but in a different and very specific way. This is a great practice that can quickly help you delight your students. It will show them that you value their time and that you are focused on helping them work on their weaknesses. 

Directly Communicate With Your Audience

Online learning doesn’t have to be an adventure that your students have to go through alone. If you truly want to leverage the power of online courses, then you must be consistently active on all the communication channels. 

Many online course platforms support communication via boards, groups and instant messaging. Encourage your students to ask you anything regarding the learning material, and be very efficient at answering those questions. 

This type of interactivity that online courses offer will help you build a relationship with your students and appear as a trustworthy knowledgeable online business coach who wants their students to succeed. More importantly, these types of interactions also help to engage students and lower drop off rates.

Diversify Content in Your Courses

Last, but not least, leverage the online course platforms to upload and distribute all types of content. This includes images, infographics, videos, data charts, and quizzes which are particularly great when it comes to reinforcing learning. You don’t want your learning material to appear monotonous. By diversifying the content, you will engage your students and help them relate to the material without breaking a sweat.

Beside adding different types of content, it is also important to keep all your learning materials up to date. You want to provide the most accurate information to your students. Revisiting and updating materials ensures this. You should also be consistent with adding additional materials to your courses. This will improve and turn your online courses into powerful resources your students can use to learn and advance. 

Extend the Reach With Mobile-Friendly Courses

Do you know that almost half of the Earth’s population uses a smartphone? This is why you have to make an effort to optimize all your online content for mobile. It makes it easily accessible to your future trainees and helps them consume the content when they want and how they want. This will help you extend your reach and increase your student base.

The great thing about online courses is that they can be taken on smartphones and tablets. At this point, you should know that not all online course platforms support this option. So before you decide to implement online courses, make sure that the learning management system is mobile-friendly.

On a side note, mobile-friendly courses are not just there to extend your audience reach. You will be able to provide a hassle free mobile learning experience as well and all the images and videos will fit the screen size of your users perfectly. These courses are easy to maintain and you’ll allow your trainees to access fresh new content on the device of their own choosing. 

Online courses are powerful tools, not only reserved for educational organizations. You can use them as an online business coach to extend your reach, attract more students, and deliver exceptional and personalized learning experience.

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