 Alright, online courses with WordPress. That is me Troy Dean, I'm co-founder of WP Elevation and Rockstar Empires and my big passion is the democratization of education. A couple of case studies to get us started. Megan Teltner worked in the advertising industry and she was diagnosed with a rare condition that meant that she was kind of sick and couldn't work and the doctors told her, look you're just going to have to manage this for the rest of your life, there is no cure. And she didn't like that answer. So she turned to nutrition and cured her symptoms through cooking. She then started teaching people how to cook in her loft in Canada until she got to the point where she couldn't teach any more people. So because she physically didn't have the room to take any more people on, she was teaching six nights a week. So she took her course online, it's called Culinary Nutrition Academy and she's now graduated over a thousand students in various countries around the world and done over a million dollars in sales. Mark Dawson is a self-published author who learnt how to use Facebook ads to sell more of his books and then he turned that into a course and sold it to other self-published authors and his first launch he did $250,000 in his online course. And Nikki Elige Brown was a park ranger and figured out that she had a bit of a knack for copywriting. So she put a copywriting course up online and went from zero to three hundred thousand dollars in 12 months. One of the biggest rewards for me as a course creator online is actually getting to meet our students and our colleagues in real life and this was a mastermind we had in New York City a few months ago and in fact we've just come out of a two-day mastermind here in Philadelphia which was overwhelming and humbling and awesome on so many levels and the irony is having an online business this is probably the most rewarding thing for me is actually meeting these dudes in real life. So the online education market is worth a hundred and seven billion dollars at US that was 2015 and just to put that into some kind of context the blockbuster box office industry is worth 38.3 billion dollars so for every dollar people are spending going to the cinema they're spending almost three dollars on online courses and as someone who knows something and wants to help other people it allows you to go from the one-to-one business model of doing consulting to the one-to-many business model by teaching lots of people at once. So who can you teach? Well I think there are two audiences that you can teach that are the low-hanging fruit you can teach the DIY crowd so that is someone who wants to know how you do what you do so if you're really good at SEO but they can't afford to hire you they can take your course and learn how to do SEO make sense right or you can teach your peers which is kind of the space that I play in so if you're really good at SEO and you know how to run an SEO agency and a PPC agency like my friend Mike Rhodes then you can teach other PPC agencies how to run their business and that's kind of what we do at WP Elevation. The problem with what are known as massive online open courses is that most people don't finish them so you spend all this time you do this work you get people to enroll in your course and the vast majority don't finish it like somewhere between 2 and 10 percent of the people that enroll in your course are actually going to complete the course. There was a whole bunch of research done I think my friend Justin Ferriman from LearnDash for putting me under this research that has tracked analytics across Udemy and Harvard and MIT and all the big online course providers. At WP Elevation we're getting 65% plus completion rates here's how we do it we start of course with the reason we're all here WordPress it's free open source completely extensible and configurable and adaptable and it allows us to build beautiful course websites that look like this I'll talk a little bit more about the technology in a little while but our big approach is more carrot and less stick so I'm going to show you some examples of what other people do and what we do and how we differentiate. Most online courses talk at you so this is a particular this is a very typical screenshot sorry to pick on Sensei I think this is a Sensei screenshot anyway I just grabbed a screenshot of an online course platform and this is a screenshot of you know a typical online course so you log in you start taking this online course and there's a little voice in the back of your head that says maybe I'm the only one here maybe I'm the only who's ever bought an online course by just quick show of hands keep your hand up if you've bought an online course and not finished it I think more hands went up then actually so the problem is you log in and the online course is talking at you right now you might design a really beautiful UI and have different learning modes like visual and audio but there's still no real interaction that the content is just it's a one-way conversation we invite you into a conversation so the first thing you see when you enroll in one of our courses is an onboarding wizard and a stupid little welcome video with me being a bit of a goose and we ask you a series of questions then we get you set up in the platform one of the questions we ask you for example is what is your skill set and if you identify yourself as a copywriter then we're going to allow you to be matched up with other people in the community who need a copywriter and then we introduce you to your sorry we continue that conversation by asking you what it is you want to achieve today so we invite you to be part of the conversation rather than talking at you the next thing we do is introduce you to your community a couple of ways that we do that here is we just show you who's logged in recently who the other members are in your community and there's a Facebook style wall here that shows you what's happening what is the activity so straight away you realize that you belong to a tribe and that you've got classmates you're not insane you're not the only person who has bought this course most courses overwhelm you with content this is an actual screenshot of a course platform there are I think five pages there I have no idea where to start we hold your hand every step of the way so when you actually enrolling one of our courses the first thing you see after the onboarding wizard and the community is this just the one course that you enrolled in and then during that course we unlock bonuses to encourage you to complete the modules so by the time you've completed all of the modules you've got this beautiful dashboard full of bonus courses but we're not going to show you that until you've completed the course that you've actually enrolled in because we want to keep you focused we want you to complete the course and little sidebar why I think course completion rates matter two reasons first of all I actually want our students to complete the course because I want them to get the benefit of the learning but from a marketing and a business standpoint it dramatically lowers your cost per acquisition because if they are a successful student they are more likely to refer their friends to you most online courses teach abstract concepts I'm really sorry if this is actually someone's course but this is a flow chart that I got from an online course and I have no idea where to start and I'm overwhelmed and frankly I don't really care because it's way too difficult we teach using very simple frameworks very simple step-by-step follow the bouncing ball tick things off as they're done most courses use long lessons boring slides and bullet points is anyone read Seth Godin's death by PowerPoint presentation yeah so this is an actual course and I've blurred out some details to protect someone's I was going to say privacy but I'll say reputation this the course actually is really good the content in this course is really good but most of it is this most of it is like slides with lots of bullet points and a video where nothing changes for 17 minutes and 25 seconds now I don't know about you but I can't sit still for 17 minutes and 25 seconds and look at one slide with lots of bullet points it's not a great student experience we use slides and direct to camera for dynamic videos so here are the screenshots from one of our videos this is an introduction title cards very straightforward here's one camera angle here's a second camera angle and here's a nice graphic visualization to illustrate what it is we're talking about so they're all one video we're constantly changing the content and making it dynamic so that you don't fall asleep and most of our videos are somewhere between five and eight minutes anything over 10 minutes you got to break that into us into into two lessons most courses are just video so let's go back to case in point this is just a series of videos that get kicked open in a light box again I've taken this course the content's really good but every time I log in I don't really know where I'm up to and I've got to watch a whole video again just to see if I've already done this I can't read a transcript I can't listen to the audio so there are four different types of learning modes we've learned this over the last few years there's visual oral reading and writing and kinesthetic so we use video audio kinesthetic by the way is doing things we use video audio text quizzes and homework to make sure that our students actually learn what it is we're teaching for example here's video here's some text underneath the video there's video on audio downloads there's a quiz we use dynamic quizzes to keep students awake so they're not all multiple choice it's a combination of multiple choice there's a drag and drop to drag things into the right order most courses deliver static content so I go back to another course here that I've taken again great content but every time I log in I don't know where I'm up to it's static it's not listening to me as a student we use gamification to keep students motivated and some of our gamification looks like this just really simple progress bars underneath the course so you know we are up to and a little tick underneath the the course on the actual dashboard so you know hey I've done that course I'm going to move on to one of my bonuses most courses email you when new content is released which makes perfect sense right we send you emails based on your actions so if you haven't completed module one there's no point sending you an email that says hey Paul congratulations on completing module one module two's just been released we instead we'll send you an email that says hey Paul get off your ass and complete module one because module two is about to be released tomorrow and we also this is what our emails look like and we also deliver in-app messages based on your actions and some of you may be familiar with some of these in-app messages you've seen in certain software apps anyone seen kind of messages that look like this that pop up in websites and software apps we intercom by the way to to trigger these in-app messages again based on your actions and your behavior and we reward you for taking action so when you complete modules we unlock badges that we put on your dashboard and then we show you you know what's coming up next week there's a coaching call coming up that you now have access to because you've completed the course you get access to this bonus content and we also allow you to download your course badge to display on your website and print your certificate like Caronda Adair from Portland Oregon Renee Sedgling from the Netherlands Melanie Adcock from the US Christina Hawkins who is here with us today Ryan Lavander from the US Julie Walpers from the US and Dave Narra from Mumbai in India is this little snapshot of all of our members all over the world and this is this is big because people know that they're part of a community they know that there are other people all over the world doing the same thing going through the same journey so we built this for WP elevation we've recently duplicated it to another business we've started called Rockstar Empires which is where we're essentially teaching creative entrepreneurs how to take their business online and how to leverage part of that is teaching them how to create and sell their own course so just to show you that you can do this outside the niche that we plan you can duplicate this entire system for whatever it is that you want to teach and we also built it for a buddy of mine Nathan Chan who runs a digital magazine called Founder and this is what his looks like here all right according to this I have five minutes and three seconds left so I'm going to talk a little bit about the technology that we use which of course is WordPress the core then that we put on top of WordPress to drive most of this is of course LearnDash which if you haven't already seen you should definitely check out and the man behind LearnDash is Justin Ferriman who is sitting in the audience here you should definitely go and chat to him but don't shake his hand because he's got the man flu by the way the man flu is an Australian term for when a man gets a head cold and he believes that he's the only person that's ever been so sick and he's about to die this is what LearnDash looks like WordPress LMS made easy and then to build in the social interaction we install BuddyPress thank you very much to JJJ if he's anywhere around for all the work that you've done on that over the years BuddyPress is basically a social network in a box for WordPress and then to to build in some of the gamification we use BadgeOS which is a great open source badging system built by the guys at WebDev Studios this is what BadgeOS looks like we then use this amazing platform that comes from the guys at BuddyBoss in Chicago it's called social learner for LearnDash and what this does this actually ties in the social integration of BuddyPress with the learning of LearnDash so when someone when one of your classmates completes a module and unlocks a badge it will display on that Facebook style wall hey Brett's unlocked the positioning module and now has the badge you go damn you Brett I'm going to complete the quizzes so I can get my certificate as well social learner for LearnDash looks like this and it is amazing it's incredible I can't speak highly enough about it we use Infusionsoft for all of our email marketing because we like paying lots of money for very confusing software that's what Infusionsoft looks like we use Stripe to handle all of our payments because it's easy and it works and they charge less than PayPal that's what Stripe looks like and then there is a plugin that integrates Infusionsoft and LearnDash and WordPress and ties it all together really well but unfortunately I can't mention it because it's not GPL so instead I'll talk about this one which is called WP Fusion which is open source and WP Fusion is a relatively new player on the market but it basically tags people in whatever email system you're using so ActiveCampaign, Ontroport, Infusionsoft based on the activity and the actions that they've taken in the course website and that's how we trigger emails when you complete module two and reminder emails when you don't complete module two because you're too busy binging on Netflix and that's what WP Fusion looks like we use Intercom for our in-app messages which is just amazing it's an absolute game changer we use Twilio to send text messages to remind people to get off Netflix and get on a coaching call and that's what Twilio looks like and we use Vimeo Business to host all of our videos because their price point makes perfect sense and they have great analytics and everything is built on Amazon S3 and AWS for speed and scalability by our wonderful developer Ben May from the code company who's based in Queensland I don't understand any of that but I'm glad he does all I know is it costs me a lot of money every month and that's what Amazon AWS looks like and of course we use Slack for internal communications who love Slack we love Slack we use Gridix which is a fantastic this is an interesting case point in itself Gridix is this great little analytics tool to measure the engagement of your Facebook groups and it is built on top of WordPress so when you log into Gridix to have a look at the analytics in your Facebook groups I thought this is really familiar so of course I went view source code the whole thing's built on top of WordPress it's a good little case study so that measures the engagement of our students in our Facebook communities and we use Asana to try and manage our projects internally and to avoid distraction so that ladies and gentlemen is our case study with online courses with WordPress I strongly encourage any of you if you think you've got a course in you now are the glory days for online learning and online courses there is a huge wave coming and we are all sitting ready to ride that wave so if you've been thinking about this now is the time to go home and start taking action and this technology is making it easier and easier every day and I think I've got 52 seconds left to just stand here