#idea-validation Online live courses
#idea-validation Online live courses
Hey there, what do you think about live streamed online courses?
Instead of watching pre-recorded videos, interested parties listen and interact with a live trainer in relatively small groups.
Will this be a good idea for technical courses? Do you think people's attention can be retained for a few hours? Or maybe the curriculum could be divided over a few days?
The advantage of pre-recorded is that it's more scalable, people can watch it whenever they want, etc. Async vs. sync, essentially.
If you want to bring back the synchronicity, you have to bring something more than just basic interaction, because that's something that's already done quite a bit with things like webinars (play recorded video + have live Q&A at the end).
Otherwise it seems like an inferior solution.
Have to agree with David. One of the biggest selling points of courses is that you can go through them on your own time no matter their format. When you are doing something live, it ties people to that activity only and in the age of distraction it might be a tough sell.
I came here to say the same thing so I agree with David, but perhaps it also depends on the subject being taught. For example I take online group lessons for the ukulele and having the teacher listen to my progress and then give advice is super helpful.
We include Live Training as part of our new platform that we're building. https://mavenseed.com We borrow this from the years of Live Streaming that we've done on CG Cookie (https://cgcookie.com).
Live Streaming builds an audience and engages them in a way not seen when someone just watches a video on their own time.
It's the future of online learning.
I like this. Obviously live streaming is less scaleable than pre-recorded, but there are huge benefits to being part of a live course.
The student gets to ask questions and interact, and the teacher gets immediate feedback on when the lesson goes off course, causes confusion, etc.
I can imagine tiered levels so people pay for the live course if it's valuable, and it being recorded so others pay a lower fee for access to the past lectures. And if a teacher wants to use a live course as a way to structure before bringing to a wider audience, it could even be cheaper temporarily for the guinea pig students :)
I teach sales & marketing through a live course and it works pretty well. For any technical curriculum, I've found it best to hand out a worksheet/materials ahead of time that people can follow along with, otherwise you will be spending wayyy too much time explaining every detail.
I find pre-recorded courses to be better organized and more effective. I would not like to spend time on "someone else's question" if I understood that part of the topic. An online session would be useful to me if the audience was at the same level. But, the pre-recorded course is well prepared, I rarely have further questions. And then, there are plenty of online resources to use. I'm a software engineer, so I may be lucky here, YMMV.
I don't see how this is different than any other standard live online seminar/webinar/course/conference?
This is what Jeff Walker (creator of the Product Launch Formula) has been doing before the age of Amazon. Get people together on a call and do his teaching.
People use webinar tools for that.
Yes, it's not for technical courses if that's what you mean but I don't see why it wouldn't work for technical courses, too.
It's not a new idea and I saw somebody implemented it (unfortunately I can't recall their name) what means there is a niche, a demand, and users. All you need to do is to create some courses and see.
As for a time, yes it will be time-consuming but:
Good luck.