When things aren’t working, entrepreneurs tend to pivot.
We don’t reinvent the wheel, we just find another, more effective way to achieve our goals.
For us, the goal has always been to craft the ultimate student learning experience, and to have a lot of fun doing it.
When creating the Great eCourse Adventure, we asked ourselves, “How do we craft an online learning experience that is a work of art and that our students actually love showing up to?”
Music, movies and video games are all looked as art-forms, but eCourses tend to be looked at as merely business opportunities.
Our biggest breakthrough came when we decided to go away from the traditional powerpoint and PDF way of doing courses and we decided to create an immersive learning experience that merges many different art-forms into one online course.
The result and feedback has been powerful.
“Without question this is the best example of gamification we have seen on a LearnDash learning program.” – Justin Ferriman, co-founder of LearnDash
The internet is a vast sea of distractions, which means your course and lessons need to be a more compelling yes than all of those other options that exist for your student.
Below are seven examples of how we have used entertainment as a way to share a message and teach, and how you can too. As you watch each example, ask yourself: “How could I translate this to MY work?”
I used to love staying up late and watching Saturday Night Live. That show had such a huge impact on the direction I am now going with our work here at eCourse Adventures.
I love the art of coming up with an idea and crafting a clever skit to get my message across.
The Great eCourse Adventure is the story about a journey up a mountain to Launch Summit. Along the way, our students go through a lot of differnet landscapes and meet a bunch of wild characters who teach the lessons.
There are 92 video lessons and each of them is like a mini-Skit that teaches the lesson. We’re definitely not claiming to be as awesome as SNL, but you now understand one of the sources that inspired us.
Here’s a sample lesson from the adventure:
Before being an eCourse Adventure guide, I actually taught more than 500 meditation workshops and created a couple meditation courses that spread to 50+ countries.
As a way to share the benefits I received from a regular practice, I wrote and co-produced a meditation hip-hop video (with my SoulFam Productions partner, Blair). Understand, HipHop was the last genre of music I thought I’d ever sing…
But a’las, here it is and it worked great!
After the meditation video, we were hired by a hemp company called, Planet Hemp to make a music video on the many benefits that come from eating hemp.
We easily could have made a boring article with a boring talking head video, telling people about the benefits, but instead, we produced a musical comedy.
Watch this music video and see what fun facts you learn about hemp.
Here’s a link to our “Epic eCourse Rap Battle Video” too.
For one of my meditation programs, I wanted to create a trailer that gave people a feel for the power that comes from a daily practice and what my vibe/philosophy is like in my meditation trainings.
I spent about 2-hours writing the script and another 3-hours out on a mountain hiking around getting the shots for the video below.
If you can’t record all your own footage like we did, then you could always find stock video and images to tell your story and share your message.
Watch this short trailer for my online meditations.
Theme’ification was one of our greatest discoveries when building the Great eCourse Adventure.
We produced a Star Wars-themed outer space Masterclass on how to create immersive eCourses by giving them a unique theme.
When you give your course a theme, you take it from a boring 2-Dimensional video, to a world that pulls your students in.
A lot of people come to us skeptical about the power of themes, but eventually, after spending enough time immersing themselves in our work they come to understand just how effective it is.
Here’s our trailer to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.
Here is the link to watch the full Masterclass.
After making the hemp music video, we were then hired to create a short animated video showcasing the incredible history of hemp and its’ many uses.
I wrote the script, recorded it in my home studio and then we hired a team on Fiverr.com to do the animations. I think we spent about $400 CAD making this video.
See how effective animations can be as a teaching tool.
Make your own animations with Moovly.
We were hired to make a few commercials showcasing the many health benefits of a nutraceutical product called “Phytomune.”
One of the commercials we made was a suspense thriller, filmed in the dingy basement of my old house.
How many health benefits did you learn about Phytomune here?
See more stuff we’ve produced at www.SoulFamPro.com
When we came up with the idea for the Great eCourse Adventure, we had NO CLUE how to film on green screen.
But we knew we had to learn in order to fulfill our vision.
As a student of the Great eCourse Adventure, you get to witness our evolution because the higher up the mountain you get in the journey, the better the production, value and delivery gets… because we learned so much as we went.
If you don’t have one yet, get a green screen and lighting kit and start practicing today!
Here’s a video lesson on lighting your green screen.
As an added bonus to this already lengthy exploration, here are a couple ways to increase engagement and make your course even more compelling to stick around for.
With the Great eCourse Adventure, we put in the time and energy to make an adventure map that our students literally hang up on their walls in their office and check off their progress as they go. We even have forum thread in the community where people take a selfie pic of them in their “creative work space” showcasing their map on the wall.
That adventure map acts as a reminder of the goal they have to build an awesome online course.
AND – it’s super cool to look at. See the screenshot below:
Course creators underestimate the power of using guided audio meditations or visualizations as a tool to open people’s minds, help them have a breakthrough or to integrate a teaching on a cellular, mental, emotional level.
I’ve been creating audios for over 5-years and have had more than a million people listen to my tracks through the various mediums they’re published.
Audio is one of the most potent ways to capture people’s minds, attention and imagination.
Here’s a simple 5-minute gratitude meditation I created.
1. There are more ways and more effective ways to teach than powerpoints and PDFs.
2. Find a way to make your lessons more exciting, enjoyable and yup, entertaining.
3. The average human has a 3-12 second attention span, which means you need to be changing something on the screen every 3-12 seconds. This could be cutting to a close up/long shot OR a slide change OR something far more exciting and creative.
4. Experiment with different ways of teaching and see what’s the most fun for YOU to create and most effective for your student.
5. Watch at least 20-seconds from all the videos above to get your creative wheels turning.
We invite you to dig deeper by watching our free outer space Art of eCourse Creation Masterclass or go through our choose your own adventure Courses Worth Sharing mini-course. {No opt-in required}