Teaching and Studying Online

A step by step guide to promoting your online course for free.

Five ways to make sure your online course serves the needs of your students.

There are thousands of online course sites out there.  It is very difficult to rise above the crowd.  You are not only competing for attention with other instructors, but with software as well.  It can be as difficult as beating a computer at chess.

There is, however, a distinct advantage that you have over any machine.  That is creativity.

Over the years, I've done many things to promote my online learning sites and courses.  Now I'm going to share what I've learned with you.

Step 1:  Learn to write effectively by posting at least some of your work for free.

This is the most difficult if you don't have a natural writing talent.  It is necessary even if you intend to have someone else edit your work.  You need to be able to make sure that your message is coming across to the audience, your students.

One way to learn effective language skills is to join an authors' community.  There is a very good one at AuthorsDen.com.  You'll get alot of positive feedback, and supportive criticism from other writers.  The most crucial difference between AuthorsDen and some other writers' sites is its relationship with search engines.  It is so good that the only thing holding you back would be your own writing ability.  Through your statistics there, you can more accurately gauge your work's popularity.  If it's there and it's interesting, it will get attention.  This is a good site for articles and courses that don't require student feedback or images.

If you want to test run an online course with discussions, tests, and images, you can always do that here.  I don't know of any other site that offers this kind of opportunity, but I'm hoping that there will be more in the future.

Step 2: Host at least one of your courses someplace popular.

UniversalClass and Suite101 are the most popular online course sites with built in pay structures that allow instructors to create courses.  I personally prefer UniversalClass because they take the least amount (40%) of your profits and do a great job of promoting the courses.  They also have a very good review board, and host courses in a very wide range of topics.

Hosting someplace popular, even though it will take a bite out of your potential earnings, will gain you a reputation as an online instructor.

Step 3:  Get out there and add your URL everywhere that will take it.

Since you're teaching online courses, you've already solved the content part.  Now all you need is for search engines to see that.

Don't depend on the host to promote your courses.  They're promoting their own service and have no particular interest in promoting your course unless you are paying them specifically for advertisement.  So you must do your own extra promotion if you want to make money beyond the first few days your course is listed as new.

Do not go for pay per click search engines.  Aside of being a rip off most of the time, it will not bring you the kind of quality advertisement that a fairly rough and raw search engine like Google will.  They give priority to their paid advertisers, but everyone knows that after their paid ads, there's going to be the most relevant quality links.  So focus on getting high rankings in the search engines people use the most, which are going to be the ones that aren't the search engine equivalent of spam.

To make the submission process quicker, use AddMe.

Then submit your site manually to AltaVista.

Then start submitting your site to individual learning sites.  Go to Google, and then type "(your subject) add url" without the quotes, and work your way down the line.  This is how Cornrows.co.uk got top rankings even before it had its own domain.

Do this last step at least once a month, and add your url to sites that may not have been highly ranked the last time you checked.  Eventually, every relevant site on your subject with a links page will have your links. Make sure to honor link trades religiously.

Step 4:  Join TrafficSwarm.

TrafficSwarm has a very popular and unique way of getting your link on sites you might not have otherwise found or thought to trade links with.  It is a major traffic pull.  Other webmasters surf sites listed there to get points to display their sites.  Along the way, many of us find great sites to trade links with permanently.  In addition, your site is displayed on other TrafficSwarm webmasters' sites according to how many points you have.  You can also buy extra points or upgrade to their premium program and basically pay them $30 a month to do their magic.  Aside of affiliate programs, TrafficSwarm is one of the most effective ways of getting targetted traffic to your site.

Instructors on StudyITonline who join TrafficSwarm may add their referral link to the banner rotation free.  Just send me a message with your banner and referral link URL.  If you make points, I make points too, and we all get more traffic.

Step5: Network!!!

I cannot stress the importance of this enough.  I would even go as far as to say to put links in your online calendar to remind you when to visit certain forums.  Join every forum or mailing list you can find on your topic, and make sure that a link to your course is either in the signature line of every message you send, or in your profile.

Offer information about your subject to readers who ask questions.  Don't give away a courseful of information for free if you don't have the time, but try to be a consistent source of information.

If you follow these simple steps, you'll rise above the crowd.  You might even find yourself a sort of educational activist like me.

Good luck!

StudyITonline.com

Teaching online is of course very different from teaching in a physical classroom.  What many course developers forget is that it is also very different from writing a textbook.

A textbook is meant to be an assistant to classroom teaching and lectures, but an online course has to serve as both an information bank and distributor.

1.  Cut to the chase.

Reading on a screen is much more difficult than reading on paper, so you've got to be as concise as possible.  Students will not have time to mull over your words because every second counts towards eyestrain.  Also, one of the main
reasons many take online courses is for the speed.

2.  Have forums and chat.

Even if they don't get much use, forums and chat are important.  Students need to be able to interact with you and other students.  It increases your course's credibility exponentially, and reduces the need to repeat the same answers to the same questions.

3.  Get development help.

There are both free and paid resources to help you out there.  Look up educational resources or webmaster resources in any search engine.  Find a community you're comfortable and stick with it.  You'd be surprised what people will give away for free in exchange for a simple note and link of credit.

4.  Trade links with other teachers in similar topics.

This may seem like giving your traffic away, but it isn't.  One of the best things about the internet is having options. By showing that you are part of the community, you raise your own credibility, not to mention your website's relevence.

5.  Remember that your students are human beings.

On the internet it is very easy to forget sometimes that there are people behind the text.  A word of caring or encouragement goes along way in the cold virtual halls of cyberspace.  Send a note to students that they've done a good job.  Send them holiday and birthday greetings (if you know their birthday).  If it's a paid course then take some of the money you make from teaching and turn it into small prizes or contests for them.

I hope that this advice is helpful to you.  If you have any questions feel free to contact me through the site.

StudyITonline.com