5 easy ways to elevate your online academy
Making sure that your students get in the door doesn't mean the only step in your journey as a course creator. To keep growing your business with online learning you must continue to enhance the experience of your students through your online academy. You must ensure that you are providing value in the courses you offer.
Constantly updating and improving your content as well as the learning experience that you offer your students in the online school is key to keeping your audience engaged with your business and motivated to keep coming back and learn more from you.
Taking your online academy up a notch doesn't require a long-term initiative that requires several months or even years to be launched. Actually, there are a number of simple methods to implement immediately that are fast and simple to put into place to help improve your student experience. They also provide the immense value of your client base!
In a constant cycle of updating your site and courses, you not just show students that you are an enthusiastic course creator they also see that you are consistently improving your course options, which could help increase your retention and convert rates.
Five ways to boost your academy online
1. Use the App Store
Apps bring advanced functionality and features into your courses, sales marketing, business operations and other courses They are also easy to integrate with your existing website for your course. Incorporating apps into your course website is an excellent option to provide your students with a dynamic and enjoyable online learning environment that's specially designed to fulfill their needs for learning. Below are a few apps that have been making headway with the top creators. You can search these apps on the App Store and install the apps onto your account in just a few clicks.
PowerUp Pass: Built to enhance the student experience as well as boost sales, this pass contains a multitude of apps available for purchase individually or as a bundle depending the needs of your customers. The included apps are:
- Expiring Courses Save: Increase your sales and retention rates with students dashboard widgets designed to alert your students of upcoming deadlines for courses.
- Promos Kit: High converting sales and promotion widgets to present your special offers such as countdown timers, sticky bars, games-based popups, sliders for deals, bundle stacks and many more!
- PlaYEAH! : Make personalized pop-ups, and personalize your course's player to boost completion and engagement.
- Sidenav : PowerUp your student's dashboard, or any pages for your courses by using Sidenav to provide a more immersive navigation experience with categories and subcategories
- Flix is a way to transform your student dashboard into an experience that is worthy of binge watching.
- Ding : Deliver smart, personalized notifications to keep your students excited about the most recent updates to your learning content.
- Omnisearch: This program helps your students to locate precise information inside your course documents.
- Wobo: This application allows users to create and design on-brand, interactive workbooks that keep and engage learners.
It is very easy to integrate apps and is a guaranteed way to greatly enhance and customize the student experience through your online academy. Depending on your goals You can find a range of applications in the App Store that can assist you in areas of your company, such as:
- Selling & Conversion
- Email & Marketing
- Learn Experience
- Website Design
- Assessment and Engagement
- Connections & Social
- Operations for Business Operations
A tip to remember: visit the App Store regularly to stay updated with latest apps. There's no way to predict which applications will prove most beneficial to your company and you So, be creative and don't be afraid to 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 by connecting your students to one another.
In fact, multiple studies have proven that the most rewarding education experiences tend to be one where students can share ideas and connect with peers, coworkers, and instructors.
A Community within a Community could be made for any student on your site. Communities may also be Course or Group specific, allowing users to customize content and update as needed.
Offering your students a space in which they are able to interact with each other will not only give them an atmosphere of belonging, however, it can provide you with insights as a course creator in what courses to create or refine the next time around. Take note of the comments and questions posted in communities, to collect details and ideas to design new course offerings, quickly discover knowledge gaps and most importantly, interact with your students on a personal scale.
3. Increase your reach by making changes to the language settings
As online learning is growing in popularity around the world it is likely that you are attracting students to your website who speak another language than your site's default language. An easy win that will enhance the experience of your students is giving them the option of changing the default language of your site if 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 feature:
- Head to the left menu of your Admin Dashboard then select Settings.
- Select the tab for Learning Content tab
- Hit to change the language settings to the left
- Check that your Default Site Language set to is selected as you would like it to be
- Check the box next to Allow students to take over the language of the website.
- Click Save
4. Guide your students in the right direction by providing the documentation for onboarding
Sometimes, course designers get too caught up in making amazing course content for their students they do not include the essential onboarding information to their course. Including onboarding documentation on your website can help you set expectations for the course, address specific inquiries, and give directions and details on how students can get the most benefit from your courses. If you're primarily B2B, your onboarding documents may include such elements as:
- Instructions for providing students access to courses to a vast student body
- Guidelines for setting the permissions for Group Analyst authorizations
- The calendar should include any important events the business needs to know about. This includes, training in person or live lessons with Zoom, or any other significant events.
However, if your business is mostly B2C-based Your onboarding document could include elements such as:
- Subscriptions, material, or resources that will be required during your class
- Instructions for your students on how they can have questions answered or interact with the instructor.
- An agenda of all important occasions that students should be aware of. Ie, In person training, Live Lessons with Zoom, quizzes/exams/assignments, or any other key milestones.
If you can help your students onboard right after they enrol in your course, you are guiding them to the right path and increasing the chance that they will complete your class and get the outcomes they were expecting. Making sure your students are set for success will ensure that they keep coming back to get to know you better, as well as help to expand your business over the long run.
5. Increase student success with an FAQ section.
Creating a FAQ section on your course site is not only a great method of creating a useful guide for your students, it could also be an overall benefit for you as the creator of your course. A well-written FAQ sections on your website could help cut down on the volume of questions about support you get from students giving you more time to concentrate on creating content that is valuable to your students.
Pro tip: To swiftly build an FAQ section on your website, use Site Builder's Custom Page. Once you have created a custom page using Site Builder and you are ready to make use of the knowledge base article as a jumping off source to answer frequently frequent questions that students ask during online courses Troubleshooting Guide to Student Problems
When you implement these fast and straightforward strategies into your online school, you'll see significant improvement in the experience of your students that guide them towards success with your courses, motivating your students to continue to find out more about you.