"It's the same as writing a script for a Hollywood blockbuster": How to make training courses really interesting
Miscellaneous / / January 11, 2022
Educational designer Zhenya Ivanova shares her professional secrets. And tips like "Add games and tests" will not be here.
This article is not about how to create a course. This article is about how to create an interesting course - one that will be remembered for a long time by your students and will not let them get bored in the process. And to make the text as useful as possible, we turned to peddesign theory - a discipline that studies student experience and helps launch cool training programs.
Keep a selection of tips that will help you learn how to place wow-points within the course, come up with unusual class formats and lure students in a way that makes learning more interesting to them than watching videos on TikTok and Instagram.
Zhenya Ivanova
Founder of the production of educational programs "Teddy Bear" and the prose school "Verb". She worked in the project for the development of creative thinking most creative camp.
Decide why you are creating a course
Before you set the goal of "creating an interesting course", you need to understand why you are doing it in principle. You can honestly answer: "I want to make money." And if this is your goal, you need to create a scalable product - think about how to reduce your participation in the educational process and how to constantly increase the number of students without losing quality.
If you think, “I want to change the X sphere,” that is a different story. For example, when I was taking writing courses, I often caught myself thinking that I was missing something. Therefore, I decided to create a program that would cover these needs.
Also, I've always liked letterand I wanted to help popularize it. So I had to formulate: “What is the uniqueness of my product? What is my special mission? What exactly do I want to change? "
When I was creating a writing course, I wanted to do something that was not yet on the market. My goal sounded like this: I want the thesis "anyone can write" to become higher than the thesis "to write is for those who were kissed on the top of the head by Dostoevsky."
There are many answers to the question "Why am I creating a course?" But only honest will help you not to get lost and move in the right direction.
Research your competitors and target audience
Competitor analysis and target audience analysis are two parallel steps. With their help, you can find a winning strategy and understand how to make your course better and more interesting than others.
Questions will help to study competitors:
- What are companies X, Y, Z doing? Am I going to do something similar or something completely different?
- How much does a similar course from companies X, Y, Z cost? How much can my course cost?
- How many people are recruiting for company X, Y, Z courses? How many people could I recruit?
- What are the disadvantages and advantages of programs X, Y, Z?
A company that has been on the market for a long time probably has some kind of business model. And if the company has existed for more than two years, then it makes money with its help. What is this model?
Company X enrolls 100 people for the course and sets the payment at 2,000 rubles. They have two teachers. Most likely, they neglect feedback and make lecture formats. Company Y, on the contrary, recruits 10–20 people, there are several teachers, and the course itself is much more expensive - 20,000 rubles. So maybe there is a lot of feedback here, and people pay mostly for it.
It is also important to understand the requests, fears and the needs of the target audience - your potential customers. It will not be possible to make an interesting course if you do not know what fascinates them, and what, on the contrary, drives them into depression.
For example, people who have been writing for a long time and want to improve a certain skill can go to writing courses. Or maybe those who have not written anything at all, but want to start. The semi-professional will be bored with hearing about character creation and storytelling again. Newbies may not be interested in narrowly focused topics if they don't know the basics.
Therefore, the coolest thing is to talk to potential students. Take and write, for example, on Facebook: “Friends, I am looking for people who will answer 5 questions in the Google-form! It will take 3 minutes. " And then analyze the results.
Let's say there may be: “I'm afraid my friends will laugh for what I want to be a writer». This means that you will need to indicate that there will be a community of like-minded people on your course.
After that, you need to "make friends" these answers with the previous paragraph. See what requests, fears and needs do not close or poorly close the courses of other companies. This will help to detach from them.
Make the goal of the course the creation of the final product
The average student's route is always a path from point A to point B. He must strive to get to the final point. The motivation for this can be the end product: it greatly increases interest.
Of course, not every course can offer it. Even so, it is possible to articulate a set of skills and abilities that the student will possess at the end of the course.
If a person goes to cutting and sewing courses, then the final product can be a ready-made dress or a collection of clothes. If he studies the history of literature, then he can come to point B with the statement: "Now I can orient myself in the main poetic directions."
Think about the steps that will lead the student to the goal
In order for a student to go to the end point with interest (and in general to reach it), it is important to think over all the steps that he will have to take for this.
First, when designing a program, it is advisable to focus on the conditional "C grade": someone in the group may know the proposed information, but it is important for you that people of any level reach point B preparation.
Secondly, most often the courses are structured according to the principle: the order of actions to achieve something = the sequence of steps that the student must take in the learning process.
Course "How to write a story." Point A - no idea, no experience, no knowledge and skills. Point B - have experience in story writing, knowledge and skills for story writing. End product: finished story.
The student steps will be as follows:
- How do you find an idea?
- How to build a plot?
- How to work with vocabulary?
- How do I edit the text?
Knowing what point B should be, when creating a course, you can always check whether all the steps exactly lead to it.
Keep track of the balance of lightness-complexity
You need to understand what will be the amount of information that a person should receive during the course, and how long it will take. If the material does not fit into a week and you have to do three-hour lessons every day, you do not need to set such a period. Students will get tired. In this case, it is better to spread the course over two months.
If, on the contrary, in order for it to last two months, you need to pour water into each lesson or do them for 10 minutes, increase the intensity and fit the program into several days.
If the course is supposed to homework, you should immediately ask yourself the question: how long will it take to complete it? And this also needs to be taken into account when calculating the training time frame.
When you decide on the duration of the course and the number of classes, it will be important to keep the balance of ease-complexity already within the program. For example, if one lesson turns out to be difficult, it would be more correct to make the next simpler to give an opportunity to unload. And vice versa, if a couple of lessons were easy, you can bang out some difficult problem.
Sometimes a stream of complex information can be overwhelmed by small fan facts - also useful, but perhaps not quite hitting the mark.
Try to break a large course into several mini-courses
Often they try to cram everything into the course - this is one of the biggest problems I have encountered in corporate education. It turns out to be so oversaturated that people have their heads bursting. And in this case, you can try to break it down into several small ones.
First, this decision is more likely to help attract and retain people. For example, when a student takes one of the short courses, he may be interested in another, related to the first on the topic.
Secondly, now many people have a request for microeducation. Modern people plan their life six months in advance. stressful.
And, thirdly, making several courses instead of one is much more profitable from a business point of view.
But again, it all depends on point B. If your goal is to make sure that the student defends his dissertation as a result, then it is clear that the microformat is hardly suitable for this.
Make the student an active participant in the process
We live in a world of constant notifications and other distractions. When TikTok, memes and a favorite TV series are at hand, it becomes difficult for people to sit and listen to the lecturer for 3 hours.
Therefore, to make the course interesting, you need to create conditions under which the student is involved in learning. Ask questions during the lecture, give an opportunity to practice, ask to complete assignments. When a person is an active participant in the course, the productivity of the training will be higher.
In this case, it is better to give tasks with feedbackto motivate a person, to awaken responsibility: "If I do not fulfill, someone will know about it!"
When I prepare a lecture, I throw in a plan, each block in which is calculated in minutes:
- theory - 20 minutes;
- questions - 10 minutes;
- theory - 30 minutes.
Then we change the conversation to action:
- practical task + feedback - 40 minutes;
- questions - 10-15 minutes.
If we are talking about a purely theoretical course, in which practice cannot be included, there is always a change of focus from the teacher to the students.
On the theoretical course, you can arrange a discussion. If the group does not go through it at the same time, you can organize a virtual discussion. For example, in Telegram there is a bot with which you can communicate and prove to him some theory of your own. Or, for example, you can give an assignment that sounds like this: “There is a great article on the next question on the Internet. Find it yourself. "
And sometimes you can leave everything as it is and not touch anything - if the lecturer is charismatic, he can keep the audience for hours and he has a clearly structured program. No need for originality for the sake of originality!
Place wow-points within the course
Creating a course is the same as write a script to the Hollywood blockbuster. To be sure to intrigue the participant, the first lesson (or the first two) must be awesome!
They are like the opening frames of a movie. Something happened, exploded, and you're like, “How? What happened? Wait, I want to figure it out! " And then you already have the credit of trust: for the next few lessons, students will look intrigued and wait for what's next.
At the equator of the course, it is also great to give additional emotional boost - some kind of special effect. What could it be? A charismatic lecturer who will delight the audience. A gift the students didn't expect. Additional lesson or teacher that was not announced in the program. An unexpected lecture format. Students should be surprised.
The last activity should be a bold wow-point. A person will experience catharsis and realize that everything has changed in his life.
For the last lesson of "Verb" we invited three writers who were not announced anywhere. Students could talk to them, ask questions. For everyone, it was "wow!" - at such a point and wanted to finish.
Well, the rest of the activities, in theory, may no longer be so "wow" in terms of emotions. Everything is like in the movies.
Do not limit yourself to a place: an interesting course can be done both online and offline
For three years I have been doing only offline courses, and now I do them exclusively online. It's hard to say which one is better.
Here are the reasons why you can take the course offline:
- An expert whose personal acquaintance is incredibly valuable.
- Deeper emotional connection. But if you want to do an offline course just because of it, then remember - this greatly increases the cost. Firstly, you will need to pay for the venue, secondly, lecturers may request a large amount, and thirdly, you will need to make a coffee break.
- Courses handmade-Themes. Online, you cannot give personal involvement - conventionally, put your hands in your hands and show how to sculpt from clay.
- You just subjectively dislike looking at the monitor.
There are many opportunities offline for working with space: hide gifts, go somewhere, work with materials. There is more room for emotional "special effects" here.
But online it is possible to involve people and teachers from different cities, countries, time zones. In the new reality, it makes no sense to do a face-to-face course if you cannot answer your questions: “Why meet in person? What cannot be given online? "
Initially, "Verb" worked offline. But when the pandemic began, it had to be reformatted. At first, we thought there were very few online tools. There is Zoom, there are rooms in Zoom - and then what?
But then it turned out that you can do a lot of things! For example, joint brainstorms can be done with Miro. And send handouts by e-mail. Everything can be adapted if desired.
Come up with unexpected class formats
There are not many options for how to conduct a lesson. There are text, video, audio, tactile, interactive types of tasks. There are different places where you can organize a lesson: in the classroom, in the park, at Zoom, and so on. But the final result depends on how cleverly you combine it all.
Here are some interesting examples from my offline practice.
- Headphones lectures. These have always been in the programs of the most creative camp. One day, students were given telephones with a lecture, and they scattered around the camp. In the course of the lesson, it was proposed to complete several tasks: to write something down, to think of something, to look somewhere. When students gathered for discussion, many were overwhelmed emotionsThey spent an hour alone with themselves, freely coming up with ideas, knowing that no one would judge them, and found in many assignments what resonated with them.
- Lesson in an unexpected place. When our writing course was offline, we handed out lecture sticks and sent people to different parts of the city. The lecture ended with an assignment: they had to write a story about the place in which they found themselves.
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Publication from most creative camp (@ mostcreative.camp)
Here's what we did online.
- An answering machine lesson. The man expected that he would simply receive a text by mail, but received a telephone mini-lecture. You had to call the number, and the teacher "spoke" to him on the phone.
- Four Zhenya, five Natasha. One of the lessons on creating a hero for a story was with my colleague Natasha. To make it more interesting, we recorded a video in which nine people “met” in Zoom: four “different” Zhenya and five “different” Natasha. That is, my colleague and I had several roles: Zhenya the traveler, Zhenyablogger, Natasha is a stay-at-home, Natasha is a soul of a company and so on. We wanted to show how different characters can be in the stories of our students.
Thinking about formats can get very carried away. But it is important to remember that the course should not turn into a fair, a circus and a celebration. Therefore, it is important to check the route and the goal: is it really necessary for some unusual format in this particular case.
It is always important to understand what function it has. For example, in the creative thinking training camp, it was important for a person to break away from the routine every second, and we tried to make all classes unusual. And in the writing course there was no such task. No need to come up with special effects for the sake of special effects.
Invite teachers and, if necessary, help make their classes more interesting
It's good if you can find energetic lecturers and lively seminar hosts. But if you suspect that some of your instructors are not different charisma, and the presentation of the material in their lectures, most likely, will not be very exciting, it is important to include all your abilities as a negotiator and caring parent.
You need to go out with them in a comfortable and soft dialogue, be able to hear them and understand what they want to convey. It is unlikely that, rejecting any of your suggestions, they only hold on to the fact that they want to give a monotonous lecture for 3 hours without interruption.
They have their own task. And the goal of the course creator and moderator is to see if the teacher's need is out of sync with the student's potential need. This desynchronization, if any, should be pointed out to lecturers and seminarians.
You can say to the lecturer: “It seems that if there is no practice in this moment, the students will understand the material worse. It will be great if she appears! Let's think together what it might be. "
Offer to help teachers, explain what objectively lacks in their classes, and do not give ultimatums. After all, if the dialogue is not building, find new lecturers and seminar facilitators.
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