Caitlin Bacher:
My name is Caitlin Bacher, Founder, and CEO of Scale with Success®. And I’m on a mission to help course creators all over the world, grow their business in a way that is profitable and scalable. We are sharing reviewing conversations about what it really takes to scale an online course business to millions of dollars per year. Join us here to discover the tough decisions we’ve had to make, the biggest failures we’ve had to bounce back from and the learnings that emerged every step of the way. We are so grateful that we have the chance to share it all with you right here on Scale with Success®: The Podcast Built for Course Creators™. Let’s get started.
How do I help students make progress in a self-directed program? I think this is a great question and it’s great because, yes, we are in this business to reach people and to have people complete our program, but we’re also in the business to help them get the desired result. And I think that piece is really, really important. So I want to start off by the very first piece of being able to figure out how you can really help your students make progress. The first thing that you need to do is define progress. Because progress means different things to different people. For some people, they define progress as completing module number one, lesson three or whatever. So as long as they’re completing the course and producing the assignments, that’s progress. That’s what I care about. Other people say, “Well, I want them to implement the program, but most importantly, I want them to achieve a specific result.”
Maybe the result is getting your first client, or maybe your result is with love and intention resolving a conflict with one of your children. Or whatever that specific result is. You want to make sure that you’re really, really clear on what you mean by progress. So I want to ask you guys what results does your program help students achieve? And getting clear on what the specific results is that you want people to have from your program is really important for you to understand and it’s also important for your team to understand, because that’s something that everyone can get behind. That’s something that everyone can be like, “Oh, okay. So our goal is for each person to who apply to five programs and to get into at least one program.” Super, super, very measurable. So after you define progress, the second thing that you want to do is create goals.
And these are goals not for you, it’s goals for your student. So there’s two different kinds of goals that need to be set. So number one is completing specific assignments from your course. So your goals might be complete module one within seven days. Because if it’s evergreen, it’s going to be a revolving seven days. So complete module one by day seven, complete module two by day 14, whatever the case is. But clearly listing out those specific goals. The next type of goal is something to achieve. So you might want to complete five grad school applications within 90 days and be accepted within the first year or whatever it is. And what those two types of goals do is it helps give you leading and lagging indicators for whether your students are on track or off track. For example, if you’re solely focused on achieve X goal by Y date, you’re not going to know if they were able to apply to five programs and get into one program until the very end.
So it’s going to be hard for you to get the student back on track unless you know a leading indicator that they’re about to fall off track. So for a lot of people, the leading indicators are completing assignments, because probably one of the assignments is identify the programs that you want to apply to within the first seven days or whatever it is. So when you have those time based goals and you share those with the student, it also helps them pace themselves, and it helps you better understand which students are starting to fall off track and need to be pulled back on track.
The next piece that you have to think about is building a feedback mechanism. So it’s great that you have these goals. It’s great that you say, “Oh, I want people to complete module one by day seven, module two by day 14. And I want them to apply to five grad programs by day 90.” So that’s great, but how do you know what they’re doing? Right? Especially if you’re running a course and you have hundreds or even thousands of students inside of that program. What is the feedback mechanism? How are you going to be able to receive data and track their results in a way that’s scalable? Because you can’t. At least for the price point of most online courses, you can’t have a one-on-one coach for every single person that’s going to call them on the phone every day and say, “Okay, what are you doing today? You need to complete this assignment.”
And that’s not really realistic. So what is the mechanism? The other thing to think about is it is a feedback mechanism. So it’s an exchange of information. You’re collecting information and then you’re responding to it. So what is that going to look like? If you receive data that, yes, this person has completed module one by day seven, do you do nothing? If you do nothing, that’s not really a feedback loop. You want to be able to congratulate them. And ideally, this is something that you can automate over time. But you want to congratulate and say, “Hey, you successfully completed module one,” or whatever. And if they’re not on track, if they’ve been in module one for 30 days and they’re still in module one and you’ve received that data, what is the check-in process?
Because you don’t want to just leave that person struggling. And again, ideally this is something that would be automated where you can initiate some kind of a check-in. The tricky thing about these feedback mechanisms is that a lot of times people tend to overcomplicate them. So we start to test out all of these different things. And before you know it, the program becomes very crowded with all of these updates that may or may not be effective when it comes to helping your students implement the program and get a specific result because that’s the end point that we’re all looking for. But if you think about what you’re really doing with that feedback mechanism is you want to make sure that you are testing updates to the program and that you are measuring the result of that update because that’s the only way that you’re going to know whether you should keep it or not.
If we are not doing that, what happens is that we get into this emotional state where then we’re like, “Well, should I keep it? Should I not keep it?” But for sales and marketing, we’re running our business by the numbers. We’re looking at the metrics and we’re determining like, “Was this effective? Did it produce the desired result? Or was it ineffective? Did it not produce the desire result?”
If it didn’t, then we let go of that and try something new. It’s really, really important that when you are rolling out an update that you have a specific metric that you are tracking over time. So you can test that out. You don’t have to roll it out to everyone. You can select a random set of students and see if their success metric actually improves. So it’s not just the top performing students because the top performing students are going to do well no matter what. It has to be like a random thing to test and see.
So if you’re like, “Okay, this randomly selected group of students actually had a 60% success rate, versus, the overall population, which has a 40% success rate.” Then that tells you, okay, that might be something that we can start testing out and rolling out to more people and see if it holds. As opposed to, making a big change all over the place. The end piece of that after you test the updates to the program and you’re keeping updates to make a measurable difference in results, then eventually you get to transfer ownership of that onto someone else. Over time, you’ll be able to assign a team member to really own student progress. Now owning student progress does not mean that you’re going in and doing the work for the student, because that’s impossible. But it does mean that that team member is responsible for improving the overall percentage of people in your program that have attained their desired result.
Whether the baseline success result is we want for people to apply to five programs and get into one program. We used to have 40% and now we have 50%. So what you want to do is after you have transferred ownership from yourself over to a team member, then you’re going to have to track that team member’s improvement over time.
So if X% of students successfully achieved their desired result, if that percentage used to be 20%, then your team member is going to have a goal to improve that success percentage from 20%, maybe to 30%. Maybe that’s their goal for year one. And then year two, maybe it’s to improve it from 30% to 40%. Now that team member is going to create results by fine tuning the program. And by continuing to simplify, to eliminate what’s not helping and to test and implement what is working.
And what we don’t want to do is have something in place where you have to read over their shoulder. Like someone would say they feel like they have to go in and read the emails that their team member is writing to their students or to their audience. They have to constantly be going in and checking up on that. That’s not scalable and it’s not really helpful. But what is helpful is if you are tracking that particular success metric, that that team member has ownership of and if they’re hitting their success metric, great. And if they’re not, then you can go in and say, “Hey, actually, why don’t you show me some of the emails that you’ve been sending and we can go over these?”
“Oh, okay. I see.”
So the problem is that you’re saying it this way and we want to say it this way. Is that something that you can do from now on?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Okay, great. So let’s make that change and then let’s start to track the progress of that and see if that actually improves or does not improve.”
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