I've been working my way through rebooting my online courses. I thought I might be ready by March, and then April, but there has been (as always) much more to do than I expected.
I now plan to start two new courses in May and one in June. I should have a link to my new website to show you in another week or two.
Here's what I've been doing since I finished the books in mid-January.
First I spent a month choosing a learning management system (LMS) and learning how to use it. After watching many videos and reading much documentation, I decided to use TrainerCentral. After about a week of working with it, I decided I couldn't stand its limitations. Then I switched to LearnDash, which seemed better. But after about a week of working with it, I decided I couldn't stand its limitations. So I went back to TrainerCentral, and I plan to stay there. It's a pretty solid platform, and though it doesn't have everything I want, it will work fine.
Parenthetically, in case you're interested, the crux of the issue (and the reason I spent a month choosing a platform) is that even though every LMS says it supports cohort-based learning, it really doesn't. All of these systems were built to support individual video-based courses, so their support for learning cohorts is bolted onto an individual-learner frame.
For example, in pretty much every system I looked at, you have to make a copy of each course for each cohort. You can't just point to the course; you have to clone it. So if you decide you need to change something in your course materials, like how you explain an instruction, you have to make the change in every copy of the course. It took me weeks to figure out that I could host most of my course materials on my own web site and just link to them from my cohort-courses. In this way, if I need to change how an instruction is explained, I can update my back-end files, and the change will affect every course cohort.
Anyway, I'm past that hurdle now. The next hurdle is rethinking the course structures. That's what I'm working on now. After all, it has been three years since I last ran these courses, and I couldn't just pull them out and run them again without rethinking them. Luckily my trusty embarrassment rule is working as it should, and I can remember every little thing that didn't work as well as I wanted it to the last time.
So I am changing many little things about the way the courses run: what they are called, what happens in their meetings, what people do outside the meetings, and so on. The differences will be apparent both in the paid courses and in the open-source course materials (which I am updating at the same time). If you took one of my courses before, thank you so much, because I am remembering everything you said and did, and it's helping me to make the courses better.
I haven't changed the course calendar (which I showed you in a previous blog post) or the time of day when course meetings will happen (they will all happen at 2pm New York time).
One more thing: in a previous blog post I said that I plan to use a Purchasing Power Parity system to offer discounts to people in countries with low exchange rates with US dollars. On further reflection, I decided to just create some discount codes and ask people to use them on an honor system (that is, if they need them). PPP indexes can be useful, but there are richer and poorer people in every country. I don't plan to offer non-profit or educational discounts (because there are richer and poorer non-profits and educational institutions). I'm just going to let people decide whether they need a discount and hope people don't abuse the system.
I'm not quite ready to announce the reopening of the courses yet, but I hope to be ready within another two (or at most three) weeks.
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