📈 Viral Writing 101

@ShaanVP, @dickiebush, and @Nicolascole77 talk about viral writing.

They dissect Twitter threads, and share actionable frameworks you can start using today to make sure your writing captures the eyeballs it deserves.

Some key lessons + video 👇🏻 😮 Tap into emotions—think about how you want your audience to feel

🔮 The Future of Online Education

@gaganbiyani talks with @APompliano about the future of online education, cohort-based courses, Maven, and more.

Biggest takeaways + video/episode 👇🏻 On the education industry:

🔟 People have become a lot more optimistic about online learning in the last decade
⚖️ Traditional education is losing its appeal as costs continue to rise
📈 Online education is becoming more viable as online courses improve in quality

Here are my top 3 essays from Ship 30 for 30—in terms of impressions and likes, in the order that I wrote them!

😩 Cohort-Based Courses Are Too Much
💩 Course Completion Rates are bullshit
🌍 Introducing Open World Courses (OWCs)

The tweets… 👇🏻

https://twitter.com/merott/status/1412102066626048006

💡 Introducing Open World Courses (OWCs)

What if online courses were like open-world games?

The course creator's job becomes not to design a curriculum, but to create a world of ideas, missions, and learning quests!

Imagine that! 👇🏻 Do you know someone, whose life is identical—and I mean identical in every conceivable way—to your life?

Unless you've been recently cloned, your answer must be a 'no.'

💡 MVC: Minimum Viable Course

How do you know your online course idea has legs?

You don't, so you experiment with it! 🧪

We frequently talk about the 'Minimum Viable Product' in startups.

How come we don't talk about the 'Minimum Viable Course'?

Here are 16 MVC ideas! 🧶👇🏼 🐦 Post on social media

This is the easiest way to start!

Write on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, wherever your audience hangs out.

Get people to engage. Pay attention to their reactions, confusions, questions, etc. 🙋🏾

Learn from @heyblake!

https://twitter.com/heyblake/status/1394436821564669960

👩🏻‍💻 @wes_kao on making online courses more accessible

@rohitmal talks with @wes_kao about online courses. They actually talk about a lot more than making them accessible.

Biggest takeaways + video 👇🏼 📣 Learn sales, marketing, and copywriting—as a creator, it's your job to convince buyers

🧶 How Andrew Barry created the curriculum for #ODCC1

@Bazzaruto takes us behind the scenes of creating the curriculum for On Deck Course Creators.

Biggest takeaways + video 👇🏼 🧱 Think in first principles: reflect, deconstruct, reconstruct
🚩 Start by defining pillars and high-level buckets of knowledge—these are milestones
🧠 Brain dump a list of topics under each pillar—this is ever-changing, so keep iterating

🚀 A framework for Course-Market fit

Courses are complex systems with interdependent parts (levers) influencing one another.

@wes_kao presents the Course Mechanics Canvas, and 12 levers you can pull on to design and deliver a top-notch CBC unique to you!

Summary + article 👇🏼 Here are the 12 levers:

🕐 Length
🕑 Number of students
🕒 Price
🕓 Intensity
🕔 Project-driven
🕕 Group interaction
🕖 Coach involvement
🕗 Instructor involvement
🕘 Production value
🕙 Pre-recorded content
🕚 Application process
🕛 Cohort frequency

💡 5 Insights From Taking A Live Cohort-Based Course

@benlcollins shares what he's learnt about cohort-based courses through his participation in Keystone Accelerator (by @BillyBroas), and five key takeaways that he plans to apply to his own course:

Summary + episode 👇🏼 🤘🏾 World-class content, community, feedback, accountability → transformative experience
🤝 New human connections and the diversity of the group are as valuable as the content

(cont.)

The Future of Education is Community: The Rise of Cohort-Based Courses

@fortelabs presents the 4 Waves of Online Education, from MOOCs to cohort-based courses:

A summary… 👇🏼 1️⃣ MOOCs: bringing traditional educational content online
2️⃣ Marketplaces: giving ordinary people the platform to earn money through teaching
3️⃣ Toolkits: giving instructors control over distribution + pricing + the student experience

Yesterday, I didn't share a weekly update for #buildingxebel

No one noticed. As common wisdom says, very few people will notice these things, and the ones who do, don't care! 😅 I barely managed to write up my newsletter—sending it out only 15 minutes late! 🎉

What started out as a short, curated newsletter, now takes up a tremendous amount of time and energy. Summarising is hard!

I have so much respect for people who write book summaries! 🤯

How to run a cohort-based course

@julia_saxena has plenty of practical tips on this—possibly the most actionable piece of content I've shared in my newsletter so far! 💯

First, a summary… 👇🏼 🔦 Make sure students always know what to expect, when, how, and where
🗓 Set up a separate calendar, schedule Zoom calls on it, then share it with your students
✍🏻 Design an elaborate onboarding process to better understand and help your students