Any experience of creating distance learning courses?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Doreen Cohanim C.Ht on August 30, 2009 at 2:56pm

Hello Juliet, I am a Certified Hypnotherapist, C.Ht & Child Birth Practitioner/ Educator, HBCE... and my advice will be helping clients for natural child birth face to face, the reason is, they need to be thought how to do certain thing that it is not related to hypnosis to help natural child birth, the other thing is, to teach their partner to hypnotize them, meaning teaching them step by step, face to face, so you can supervise them, and last but very important, when you do face to face, you can only then learn if they have any other fears that they were not aware of.

This will be my true advice...

Respectfully, Doreen Cohanim C.Ht

www.EnterYourMind.com
www.HypnoCruise.com

Permalink Reply by Juliet Eccleston on August 30, 2009 at 11:53pm

Hello Doreen,

Many thanks for your comment. This discussion was intended to identify good distance learning software to enhance my existing product set, rather than discuss whether face to face is better than remote therapy (also the distance learning is for existing hypnotherapists/NLP Pracs rather than pregnant couples). If you'd like to discuss the face to face topic more, I started a group a few weeks ago called "Hypnosis and birth" to specifically talk about best practise etc...here's a link....

Hypnosis and birth

Hope to see you over there and chat more :-)

Take care

Juliet

Permalink Reply by Roger Elliott on August 31, 2009 at 2:33am

HI Juliet

We run a suite of online courses at http://www.uncommon-knowledge.co.uk/training_workshops.html

After much research, we went for Amember as our training platform, as it's free and open source so getting programmers for it is easy. We did have to have quite a lot of work done on it to get it into the kind of shape we needed, but then we're running fairly complex programs within it. If you're keeping things simple it should be fairly straightforward.

Best of luck with it

Roger

Permalink Reply by Craig Eubanks on September 14, 2009 at 6:23pm

Hi Juliet,

It would help if you could lay out your requirements a bit more. Such as

- will you use video recorded?
- will you use video live?
- will you need to do a screencast of your computer screen?
- will you use one-way communication or two-way?
- will you have documents to deliver?

All these are important considerations in delivering content over the Internet. Each has different problems associated with it.

Also, will you do multiple time zones at the same time? And is this a group moving together training or do it at your own pace type learning?

What you ask is do-able and at the same time not trivial to set up correctly. The more you know upfront, the easier it is to design a system (or systems) to deliver your content.

Cheers,

Craig Eubanks

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Internet's #1 Marketing Resource**
exclusively for Hypnosis Professionals!

HypnosisMarketingTips.com
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Permalink Reply by Juliet Eccleston on September 15, 2009 at 11:33am

Hi Craig,

Many thanks for your reply. I was hoping that we would be able find some easily configurable software which would enable the distance learning courses to grow. Initially we will be wanting to:

- documentation, audio and video files will be packaged together in modules
- don't need live videos
- don't need screen casts
- 2 way voice conf communication, although could use other software for this if needed

The voice conf will be worldwide so yes, different time zones.

We were thinking of using open source software so we can customise it as we want to.

I know the Uncommon Knowledge courses are good (thanks Roger), so I've been taking a look at that, but any other suggestions would be gladly appreciated.

Juliet

Permalink Reply by Craig Eubanks on September 15, 2009 at 6:04pm

Probably your best bet will be to use a Content Management System (CMS) with a membership plugin that allows you to control who has access to the content.

With that in mind you have a couple options, all of these are open source:

CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

1. Wordpress - The world's #1 blogging tool is also a very robust CMS tool and is being used quite often as a membership site for distance learning. There are at least 2 plugins for doing paid membership sites which I'll list below.

Wordpress is easy to use and has a wealth of plugins available. Virtually all webhosts offer it as a 1-click install.

I actually use a special wordpress package that comes with all most all the plugins any one doing marketing online would ever need. It's also fully tested to work with the plugins before it gets released. It's called Semiologic.

It's not cheap, but I like the support, all the marketing & SEO toos, and the fact that it is tested with all plugins before it's released.

2. Joomla - A popular CMS than can be configured in a variety of ways. Tends to be more complex than wordpress and has a larger learning curve. If you go this route I suggest getting a Joomla person to do the tech stuff. Also has plugins for paid membership sites.

3. Drupal - One of the oldest and robust of the open source CMS systems. Has a very large user and installation base. I don't know if it has plugins for membership sites but I assume if Joomla does, then Drupal does.

MEMBERSHIP PLUGINS

1. Amember - This is the one most people I know use. It works with Wordpress and Joomla (and likely many other CMS systems). It hooks into the CMS and your payment system so as long as the person is paid up-to-date, their membership works. It also has a built in affiliate program if you wish to get others to help you promote your courses.

It is a bit of a pain in the butt for users to register, and it has a few other quirks, but it does what it says it does.

2. Wishlist - This is a newer one, but what I like about it is it serves up content based on when a user subscribed. So as an example, if you had a 12 week program. No matter when someone signed up, they would only get access to Week 1 content and lesson.


My preference is to use wordpress. The more I use Wordpress the less I want to use anything else. In fact, in the future all my websites will use Wordpress instead of doing basic html.

As for the membership plugin, you'll need to do a little research to find out which would be better for you.


FILE STORAGE

If you host videos, audios and other downloadable content on your website you'll end up paying a fortune for storage and bandwidth.

The best thing to do is to create an Amazon S3 account and store them there. You can link to them from inside your member site. The storage and bandwidth charges for S3 are ridiculously low. The only tricky part is getting the account setup and first learning how to transfer files.

S3 is a cloud storage system so it's not like a standard file system on a linux machine like most servers. But, more and more FTP clients now know how to 'talk' to S3 so it's not such a big deal. If you have a Mac, get CyberDuck. It's makes S3 uploads seem like any regular FTP file transfer.

If you are on a PC, there is a plugin for the Firefox browser that works with S3.

COMMUNICATIONS

As for doing 2-2way communications, there are a variety of systems that do this out there. If you plan to do voice only and you have a small number of people, you might find one for free. It kind of depends on your needs.

If you would like one that operates like a classroom environment, a friend of mine here in San Francisco came up with a slick system that has gotten a lot of excitement from people who do distance learning and trainings. The system allows you to create break out groups, have assistants work with those groups, have people raise hand to ask questions and some other cool stuff. It's called Maestro Conference. They offer a free trial so you can learn what the system does.


A final option if you are doing one-on-one calls is to use Skype. More and more I'm impressed with what Skype can do, and it's free for skype-to-skype calls. Plus you can call anywhere in the world for less than 10 cents/min. Skype is free software and works on Mac, PC, and Linux.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Craig Eubanks

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Internet's #1 Marketing Resource**
exclusively for Hypnosis Professionals!

HypnosisMarketingTips.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~