5 simple ways to improve your online academy
The process of getting your students in the door doesn't mean the only step in your experience as a creator of courses. To continue to grow your online education business, it's important to constantly enhance the experience of your students through your online academy, and to continue to provide value through the courses you offer.
Constantly updating and improving your content as well as the learning experience which you provide the students of an online learning academy are key to keeping your audience engaged with your business and eager to come back for more learning.
Taking your online academy up a notch doesn't need to be a lengthy project that takes some time to get implemented. There are several simple strategies that you can start leveraging from the beginning that are simple and straightforward to use in order to enhance your students' experience. They also provide huge value to your customer base!
In a constant cycle of updating your site and course offerings, you not only demonstrate to your students that you're an engaged course creator, however, you show them that you're constantly adding value to your course offerings, which can aid in increasing your retention as well as the rate of conversion.
Five steps to improve the online school you run
1. Use the App Store
Apps provide advanced functionalities and capabilities to your course, sales, marketing and business operations, and are easy to integrate with your existing course site. Integrating applications into the online courses you offer can be a fantastic option to provide your students with a stimulating 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 in the ranks of the most popular creators. They can be found in the App Store, and then install the apps onto your account in just a few clicks.
PowerUp Pass: Built to improve your student experience and increase sales, this pass contains a multitude of apps that can be purchased individually or as a bundle depending on your needs. These apps include:
- Expiring Courses Saver: Increase your sales and retention rate by using students dashboard widgets designed to alert your students about courses that are due to expire.
- Promos Kit: High-converting sales and promotion widgets to display your promotions: countdown timers and sticky bars, games-based popups, sliders for deals, bundle stacks and other!
- plaYEAH! : Create personalized pop-ups and customize the course player in order to improve the amount of time spent and increase engagement.
- Sidenav The best way to power up your student's dashboard, or any pages for your courses with Sidenav -- a richer navigation experience using categories and subcategories
- Flix : Transform your student's dashboard into a stream-worthy binge.
- Ding Ding: Send intelligent, customized notifications that keep your students excited about the most recent updates to your learning content.
- Omnisearch: This app makes it effortless for students to search for precise information inside your course material.
- Wobo app: It allows you to design and build customized, interactive, and interactive books that keep and engage students.
Integrating apps with is simple and will significantly improve and customize the student experience in your online school. According to your needs there are a variety of applications in the App Store to help you in areas of your company, such as:
- Selling and Conversion
- Email & Marketing
- Education Experience
- Website Design
- Engagement and Assessment
- Connections & Social
- Operation Operation
Pro tip: Remember to visit the App Store regularly to stay up to date with new applications. There's no way to predict which applications will prove most beneficial to you and your business So, be creative and don't be scared of experimenting!
2. Bring your students together to your community Communities
Leveraging 's Community feature is one of the easiest and most efficient ways to boost your online school by connecting your students to each other.
In fact, multiple research studies have revealed that the best educational experiences are often the ones where students get to exchange ideas and interact with peers, coworkers and teachers.
A Community within a Community could be made for any student on your site. Communities can also be Course or Group-specific, which allows users to customize contents and change as needed.
Giving your students an environment where they can interact with other students is not just a way to give them an atmosphere of belonging, it also gives you insights as a course creator into what to develop or improve upon in the future. Be attentive to comments made and questions that are made in the communities. This will help you gather information and insights to develop courses that are new, swiftly determine knowledge gaps, and lastly, connect with students on a deeper level.
3. Increase your reach by changing the language settings
With online learning increasing globally, you are likely to will have visitors to your site that speak a language other that your default language. A quick win for you that greatly enhances your students' experiences is to give those students the ability to override your default language in case they prefer a particular language.
With this easy change to your course site You will be prepared to accept students from all around the globe!
To enable this feature:
- Navigate to the left menu of your Dashboard for Admin Select Settings
- Choose the tab for Learning Content tab
- Hit to change the language settings to the left
- Be sure to ensure that you have your default site language has been selected as you would like it to be
- Click the checkbox beside Students can override the site language
- Click Save
4. Help your students navigate in the right direction using the documentation for onboarding
Sometimes, course designers get distracted by creating stunning material for their students that they forget to add an onboarding guideline in their courses. By including onboarding documents on your course site can help you set goals for your course, answer course specific inquiries, and give directions and details regarding how students will get the most benefit from your course offerings. If your company is predominantly B2B, your onboarding documents may include such elements as:
- Instructions to grant course access to a large student body
- Guidelines to set the permissions for Group Analyst authorizations
- An agenda of all important events the business needs to be aware of. For example, in-person training or live lessons via Zoom, or other important milestones.
In contrast, if your business is predominantly B2C Your onboarding document may include items such as:
- Subscriptions, material or other resources that are likely to be needed during your course
- Instructions for your students on how they can ask questions or engage with the instructor
- Calendar of the most important events the students need to know about. Ie, In person training, Live Lessons with Zoom, quizzes/exams/assignments, or any other key milestones.
By onboarding your students right following their enrollment in your course they are being guided in the right direction and increasing the chance that they'll complete the class and get the outcomes they were expecting. Making sure your students are set for success will ensure that they will continue to get to know you better, and can help increase your profits over time.
5. Increase student success with an FAQ section
The creation of a FAQ page on your site for courses isn't only a great way to create a valuable source for students but it can ultimately be an ongoing gain for you as the creator of your course. An informative FAQs on your site will help you reduce the number of questions about support you get from students giving you more time to concentrate on providing valuable content to your students.
Pro tip: To swiftly build an FAQ section on your website, you could use the Site Builder's Custom Page. After you've created your own custom pages using the builder on your site then you may use the following knowledge base article as a jumping off source to answer frequently frequent questions that students ask during an online course: Troubleshooting Guide for Student issues
By implementing these quick and simple strategies for your online academy, you'll have made significant improvements to the student's experience. This will help them succeed with your classes, and encourage them to come back to learn more from your teaching methods.