How I Switched to ONLINE EDUCATION (vs Traditional Education)

Switching to online education

Hey everyone, today I want to talk with you about how I switched to online education, and what you can learn from it to be more productive and flexible in your own workshops and meetings.

The quality of online education has improved dramatically in the last couple of years. MasterClass, SkillShare, and YouTube even have made on-demand online education accessible for the masses.

But there is one big problem with online education, and I actually ran into that problem myself in 2019.

In this video I will share some of my successes and failures along the way, and this can help you in a number of ways:

• If you’re a trainer, you will learn my approach for creating engaging online learning experiences when starting from scratch
• If you’re thinking about starting a new business or have a new idea for your company I will walk through a specific online learning experience which helps you to validate your business idea in only 2 weeks.
• We just did another run of this course and the feedback doesn’t lie.
• [Amadeus social proof]

And make sure you stick to the end because you will also learn a trick or two how to make your boring and repetitive meetings fun and effective.

Breaking down an online learning experience

And today we’re doing a breakdown of an online training program I created together with the amazing team of BuildupCamp.

The program is called Validation Sprint, and it’s a 2-week online learning experience that helps startups to validate their business idea, by building a prototype and talking to customers.

It’s a cohort based course, which means that you’re starting with a number of people at the same team. 20 in our case.

The basic setup is like this:

• Participants watch a video
• They do an assignment
• We do a live workshop where we created a program where participants can bring their questions and we also help them do develop their ideas even further.

On top of that there is also a community where people can ask their questions any time they want. And we do 1-on-1 sessions as well.

What’s so great about this way of online education for participants is that it is a combination:

• You are flexible and go at your own pace
• But also their is a healthy peer pressure from the group and the live program

And for us trainers running the program this way is also way more fun.

• With the recorded videos we can create the best possible version of explaining the theory.

Asynchronous training approach

This is an asynchronous approach which is not only great for training programs, but for every single meeting you have in your calendar.

Let me explain why:

I have given a lot of in-person training and I love to approach training in general in a learning by doing kind of way. The theory is something that is necessary for training programs, but the most valuable part is in the doing and getting feedback.

But when you work with a group of people not every participant of a training is at the same level.

So you always end up with planning more time for the theory than you like.

[balk met 50% talking about the work vs doing the work]

The same goes for meetings. Most of the times meetings are used to explain ideas and talk about those ideas.

But what you actually want is to transform your meetings into workshops, so that you can use the moments you spend real-time with your team mates to actually do the work instead of talking about.

For example instead of doing a 1 hour team update, record a 10 minute video where you give the update, make sure people watch it, and then do a 30 minute Q&A session.

This not only saves you a huge amount of time, but also improves the quality of the discussion in the 30 minutes big time.

Now if I bring that back to why the feedback on the Validation Sprint was so great, than this is 50% of it. If you think about that’s huge.  50% by simply structuring your online course or your online meeting better.

And if you have applied this approach a couple of times, then it becomes easier to apply every time.

So I invite you to start applying this principle yourself as well. The simplest step to take is to choose one meeting in your calendar this week. Instead of talking about a topic in that meeting, record a 5-minute video of yourself with a tool like Loom. Share it with your colleagues before the meeting so that they have time to watch it.

Then see what happens in the meeting itself. My prediction is that you can end the meeting early, but let me know in the comments.

And if you’re interested in following the Validation Sprint I’m cohosting with BuildupCamp, then you can learn more about that at BuildupCamp.com. There is a new cohort starting in May, and we have a few spots open. Would love to see you over there :)

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