How to use online courses in Customer Education: formats, setup and costs
It's increasingly clear how the way people look for knowledge is changing. The pandemic brought a boom in online courses, and those who bet on this new way of sharing knowledge saw the impact of their courses skyrocket.
Given the impact of online courses, there's no reason not to use them to explain your company's services. Using online courses to teach people about platforms, products and services is a great idea. We'll explain how to do it and what it costs, so you can plan well.
That way you'll have every tool you need to decide how to use the power of online courses in your customer education strategy, and go even deeper into a great customer experience.
The different formats of online courses
First of all, it's important to understand what counts as an online course. An online course is a course delivered virtually that can cover all kinds of subjects. The goal is to educate your audience, and one nice thing about online courses is that the language doesn't need to be strictly formal, which gives instructors more freedom.
Contrary to the most common practice, courses can go beyond videos and text. Each educational element inside a course is called a learning object, to put it briefly.
There are different ways to present your online course. So it's important to understand these formats well, to avoid showing up with a fully prepared online course that doesn't make sense for your product.
Synchronous (live) courses
These are online courses delivered live to students. Each lesson has a specific time, and the instructor is connected at the same time as the students. These lessons can be recorded, but synchronous teaching favors the people present during the class.
The advantage of this format is that students can ask questions as they come up, and the teacher can adapt the lesson to each group, making teaching more personalized. The downsides are the fixed schedules and, usually, smaller groups.
Asynchronous (pre-recorded) courses
Asynchronous teaching refers to lessons that are pre-recorded and made available to students in a "closed" package. There's no specific time, and each person watches at their own pace. You can run "closed" cohorts, where videos are released gradually with a start and end date, or open enrollment, where people can start at any time. It depends on what best fits the goals of the course.
There are also different ways to deliver your online course to your target audience. The first is Learning Management Systems. You've probably heard the acronym LMS. It stands for Learning Management System.
An LMS is a platform designed specifically for delivering online courses. It's built to help you create lessons, deliver them to your target audience and track students. It's widely used for corporate training, changing the idea that training must always be in person, with employees listening to a speaker, and making everything much more interactive.
Although it's widely used for training, an LMS fits Customer Education very well. It's a way to present your product and build quick modules so customers learn to use your tools. I'll cover that in more detail in the next section.
Another way to deliver online courses is through platforms like YouTube, where you only need to upload the video and share the link or make it public. With this approach it's harder to know where students are in the course, but it can be a way to reach different people because of the greater reach.
How online courses connect to your Customer Education strategy
Online courses and Customer Education are closely linked. An easy way to see this is to think of examples of onboarding for new customers that include video tutorials.
Explaining by video is much more direct and interactive. Customers can see where to click, for example in a screen recording, or, for a physical product, exactly where the button or feature being described is.
By combining these small video tutorials, you can create an online course fully focused on Customer Education. Unlike tutorials, a course can have a deeper narrative and present the advantages and benefits in more detail.
You can split your course into several modules, each covering an aspect you want your customer to dive into, or create several courses about features. The format varies and should be tied to the course goal. The possibilities are endless!
If different groups can use your product, it's worth creating several courses. An expert has no reason to take the same course as a beginner. This saves time and gives people who want to use your products a well-defined path.
This system of advancing and achieving small goals gives learners an extra incentive to complete the lessons, which makes it a very interesting feature to build into the course.
Besides presenting a complete tutorial for the product, online courses are also a great way to bring together a community that learns together. Creating Discord channels, or channels on another platform, for each online course cohort is a great way for people to ask questions and help each other.
What you need to create your online course
The first thing is to define the main goal of the course. Do you want it to introduce your product, or to explain a new update better to existing customers? Do you want a very introductory course, or a trigger course that leads customers to buy other upgrades?
Thinking about goals is the first step to having a basis for defining your target audience. It's also important to think about the lesson format and the platform where you'll publish the content.
Make a list of pros and cons if you're unsure. It's easier to visualize and to check whether it really connects to your goals.
With the foundation of your course defined, organize the subjects you want to cover. Group similar subjects and always think about a path through the knowledge, from the most basic to the most advanced. It's better to explain in detail than to make something too complex, always keeping your target audience in mind.
Another important step is choosing how you'll make the material available to your students. Lesson slides? Text and PDFs? Will your course have no supplementary material, or will it include recommended reading? It's a good idea to give tips for going deeper, showing students they should go further on their own to complement what you're teaching.
If you record videos, scripts can help you avoid getting lost or forgetting an important point on a topic. The same applies to live classes, but it's more noticeable in recorded lessons whether there's a script or not.
The script doesn't need to be a word-for-word description of what will be said. It can be bullet points or short trigger phrases to remind you to mention important details. The idea of scripting your lessons is to prepare in advance what will be said, so your course doesn't skip over a highly relevant topic.
Since it's an online course, having the right equipment is essential. If your course is based on a recording of you in a set, that's another thing to plan and organize before you start. A camera and a microphone are the basics. You can also invest in other equipment such as studio lights or a chroma key, but that depends a lot on your budget.
Once all your videos are recorded and ready, you need people to watch your online course. So think about how you'll promote it, or whether your chosen platform already helps with that. Will it be through a link, a newsletter or organic promotion? Think about these aspects so the time invested in the online course is well spent and brings a return.
Finally, follow your students so you can keep improving the process. Maybe in your first course you got feedback asking for more hands-on activities, or for a more detailed explanation of a feature. So keep learning and gather student feedback constantly, to always offer a quality course.
What are the costs of creating an online course?
Creating an online course involves a few costs. The first is the equipment needed for recording. Whether you record your screen or a presenter, you'll need the right equipment.
This equipment usually includes a camera that films in good quality and a microphone. Don't record with equipment that makes the image pixelated, because it looks like you didn't care enough about the people watching. You also need a good microphone so the audio comes out clear and without background noise. A computer to edit these recordings is essential too, along with video or audio editing software.
Lighting equipment will also substantially improve the quality of your videos.
Another cost to consider is the platform you choose to host your videos. Is it completely free, or do you pay an annual fee? Will you get a premium account to reach more people? Will it be a platform directly on your company's website? Do you already have someone to build that platform? All of this should be taken into account.
Finally, if you're not the one handling the videos, you also need to account for the cost of the people who handle image and sound editing, video design, and the whole team behind the final result.
Using courses in your customer education strategy is essential
Many people believe creating an online course is cheap and "easy". But as we've seen, there are many details that need close attention. Creating a course can be easy, but creating a quality course takes time and dedication.
We tried to give a general guide, but we could go much deeper. There's a lot of content inside each area. The good news about using courses in Customer Education is that people are already very used to consuming this type of content, so they'll feel comfortable when learning about your platform, product or service.
If your company is thinking about creating an online course to improve its customer education services, count on Poly Studio to implement your strategy.
