🗣️ Transcript
Hello it’s Glen again and welcome to another lesson designed to help you get your bearings, which is called: Decoding the Different Course Types.
Because the sheer variety of courses can be confusing – it’s a broad spectrum.
So here’s what you’ll learn in this lesson:
- The three “dimensions” that define any online course
- The four most common course types you need to know
- The course types this programme will help you create
Let’s start by drawing some clear lines between different types of courses.
Because it turns out that thinking in “three dimensions” can help us distinguish one course type from another.
The first dimension is size. How big is your course?
Are we talking about a large course that takes months to complete and delivers a big win?
Or is it a small course, with just a few lessons and a modest end result?
Or something in between – like a video course with an hour or two of recorded content?
This dimension is really a combination of the scale of the course – how much content is there – and the scope – how ambitious is the result it delivers?
The next dimension is spend. How expensive is your course?
Are we talking about a high-ticket course that costs several thousand pounds (or dollars or Euros)?
Or a budget course that’s less than a hundred pounds or may even be totally free?
Or somewhere in between, like a mid-priced course costing a few hundred pounds?
So that’s the second dimension – spend. Yes, it’s true that bigger courses tend to cost more, but that’s not always the case.
The third dimension is support.
How much additional help do students get from you to complete the course?
Do you offer coaching sessions, or Q&A calls or provide an online support forum, for instance? Or are students left to work things out for themselves?
And do you provide any kind of community where students can support each other and keep themselves accountable?
Support is really about how much hand-holding and accountability you provide to help your students reach their goals.
So those are the three course dimensions: size, spend and support.
How do these help us to think more clearly about courses?
I’ve identified four common course types that capture most of the variety you’ll find out there “in the wild”.
The first type is the mini-course.
A mini-course is a small, low-cost course with little or no additional support.
Mini-courses work well as lead magnets, i.e., freebies to generate leads for your business, and also as “tripwires”, which are low-cost products designed to get prospects to make their first purchase in the hope it will lead to bigger things.
The second type is what I call a “do it yourself” course and it’s what you get if you bump up the size and the spend dimensions a bit without adding much in the way of support.
A do it yourself (or DIY) course is a self-contained, self-guided course that has everything the student needs to get a particular outcome. That’s why I sometimes also refer to it as a “result-in-a-box” course.
There isn’t really a standard industry term, but a do it yourself course is what most people have in their heads when they think about online courses.
The third type is a hybrid course. This is where your course works in tandem with some kind of live interaction with your students, often on a one-to-one basis.
Size-wise it’s in the middle, but you push the spend and the support right up the scale to reflect the amount of time and personal attention students get from you.
A good example of this type of course is where you already have a service that you offer but it’s very dependent on you for delivery, so you delegate some of that work to a course you give your clients access to.
The fourth course type is a flagship course, sometimes called a signature course.
A flagship course usually has lots of content and delivers a big win for a high price tag.
It’s a little lower on the support side than a hybrid course just because students aren’t getting as much individual attention from you, but maybe some group coaching instead.
The aim is getting lots of students into the programme and moving as many as possible to the end point.
And while a do it yourself or a hybrid course might be just part of your business, a flagship course could easily be the main focus of your business or even be the basis for a brand new business.
Build Your Best Course is best suited to people who are building a do it yourself course or a hybrid course.
It’s probably overkill to go through this program if you only need to build a mini-course, although it will certainly help you create a really good one.
Likewise, you won’t find everything you need to create and run a flagship programme supporting all of those students at once.
If the options seem confusing, don’t worry. All you really need to know is this:
- Online courses come in different shapes and sizes
- The four common types I’ve described cover most scenarios
- This programme is best suited for do it yourself and hybrid courses
And if you’re not clear just yet on what type of course you should build, that’s okay. The next module will help clarify that for you.
Okay, that’s a breakdown of the various course types. I’ll see you in the next lesson!