5 easy ways to elevate your online school -
The process of getting your students in the door doesn't mean the final stage of your journey as a course creator. To continue to grow your online education business you must continue to improve your student's experience with your online academy and keep delivering value with the courses you offer.
Continuously updating and improving the quality of your material and the experiences that you offer your students at an online learning academy are essential to keep your customers interested in your company and excited to keep coming back for more learning.
Moving your online school up a notch doesn't require a long-term initiative that requires weeks or months to be launched. Actually, there are several simple strategies to implement right away that are quick and easy to implement in order to enhance your students' experience, and show enormous value to your customers base!
By consistently iterating your site and courses, you not only demonstrate to your learners that you're an active course creator but you also show them that you're consistently adding value to your course options, which could improve your retention rates and conversion rates.
5 steps you can take to enhance your online academy
1. Make use of the App Store
Apps can bring cutting-edge functionality and features into your course, sales marketing, and business operations they are simple to integrate into your existing website for your course. Integrating applications into the online courses you offer is a great option to provide your students with a stimulating and engaging online learning experience that is specially designed to fulfill their needs for learning. Below are a few apps that are doing well with the top creators. You can search these apps through the App Store and download on your existing account with just a few clicks.
PowerUp Pass: Built to improve your student experience and increase sales, this pass includes a variety of applications that can be purchased individually or in a bundle based the needs of your customers. The included apps are:
- Expiring Courses Save: Increase your numbers of sales and retention with student dashboard widgets to remind your students about deadlines for courses.
- Promos Kit: High converting promotional and sales widgets that display your promotions: countdown timers and sticky bars, games-based popups, sliders for deals bundle stacks, and much more!
- plaYEAH! : Make personalized pop-ups, and personalize the course player in order to improve completion and engagement.
- Sidenav • PowerUp your student dashboard or all course pages by using Sidenav -- a richer navigation experience with categories and subcategories
- Flix : Transform your dashboard for students into a stream-worthy binge.
- Ding Send intelligent, customized notifications that keep students informed about the latest changes to your curriculum.
- Omnisearch: This application allows students to search for specific information within your course materials.
- Wobo app: It allows you to design and create online, interactive and brand-name workbooks that engage and retain students.
It is very easy to integrate apps and will dramatically enhance and customize the student experience in your online school. According to your needs there are a variety of applications in the App Store that can assist you with areas of your business such as:
- Selling and Conversion
- Email & Marketing
- Learn Experience
- Web Design
- Engagement & Assessment
- Connections & Social
- Operation Operations
A tip to remember: visit the App Store often to stay updated with latest applications. You never know which new apps will be most helpful to you and your business, so get creative and don't be afraid of trying new things!
2. Bring your students together to your community Communities
Leveraging its Community feature is among the fastest and most effective ways to elevate your online academy through connecting students to each other.
Numerous research studies have revealed that the most beneficial learning experiences tend to be the one where students can discuss ideas with colleagues, peers, and instructors.
In the Community, it can be created for all students within your website. Communities may also be Course or Group specific, allowing users to customize content and update as needed.
Providing your students with the opportunity to have a place where they are able to interact with other students is not just a way to give them a sense of community, it also gives you an insight in what courses to create or improve upon in the future. Be attentive to comments made and questions made within communities to gather details and ideas to design new course offerings, quickly determine knowledge gaps, and lastly, connect with your students on a deeper level.
3. Expand your reach by making changes to your language preferences
With online learning increasing globally, there is a good chance that you have students visiting your site who speak another language that the default language of your website. An easy win that greatly enhances the learning experience for your students is to give those students the ability to override your default language in case they prefer a particular language.
When you make this change to your course site, you will be ready to welcome students from all across the world!
To enable this function:
- Navigate to the left menu of your Admin Dashboard, and select Settings
- Choose the tab for Learning Content tab
- Hit for the Language Settings on the left
- Make sure you have you have your default site language set to is chosen.
- Select the checkbox next to the students' ability to override the site language
- Simply click Save
4. Your students to the right direction with documents for the onboarding process
Sometimes, course designers get distracted by creating incredible materials for students, they forget to add an onboarding guideline to their course. By including onboarding documents on your website can help you set goals for your course, provide answers to specific questions, and provide instructions and information about how students can gain the most value out of your courses. If you're primarily B2B, this documentation onboarding might include things like:
- Instructions for providing course access to a large student body
- Guidelines for setting the permissions for Group Analyst permissions
- The calendar should include any important events the business needs to be aware of. This includes, training in person and live classes with Zoom, or any other important points.
In contrast, if your business is predominantly B2C Your onboarding document could include elements such as:
- Subscriptions, materials or any other resource that may be needed during your course
- Instructions to your students on how they can ask questions or engage with the instructor.
- Calendar of the most important events the students need to know about. Ie, In person training, Live Lessons with Zoom, quizzes/exams/assignments, or any other key milestones.
When you welcome your students when they enroll in your course they are being guided in the right direction and increasing the chance that they'll complete the course with the success they were expecting. Set your students up to be successful will make sure that they continue to gain knowledge from you and will help you grow your business long term.
5. Increase student success with an FAQ section.
A FAQ section for your course site is not only a great way to create a valuable source for students but it could also be a long term benefit for you as a course creator. A well-written FAQs on your site will help you reduce the number of support queries you receive from students giving you more time to focus on providing valuable content to your students.
Pro tip: If you want to quickly create an FAQ section for your website, you could use Site Builder's Custom Page. Once you have created a custom page using Site Builder, you can use the following knowledge base article as a jumping off for addressing commonly frequent questions that students ask during an online class: Troubleshooting Guide for Student Problems
By implementing these quick and simple strategies for your online academy, you'll be able to make significant improvements in the student's experience. This will guide them towards success with the courses you offer, in turn motivating students to return to find out more about you.