In reaction to Covid19, many teachers and schools have had to move their English courses online. But where to start? Dr. Marek Kiczkowiak tells us about his experiences creating online language courses for students and what he’s learned about online platforms, marketing and social media along the way.
If you would like to learn how to tackle native speakerism and teach English for global communication, try Marek's TEFL Equity Academy.
Also check out Marek’s book Teaching English as a Lingua Franca, which is available on Amazon, and publishers’ websites: Delta publishing and Klett publishing
Setting Up Online English Courses (with Marek Kiczkowiak)
Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." I'm Ross Thorburn. This week, my guest is Marek Kiczkowiak. Marek is founder of TEFL Equity Advocates and TEFL Equity Academy. He's a materials writer at the moment in Belgium.
In this episode, I ask Marek about putting English language courses online. For obvious reasons, recently a lot of people are having to create online language courses for the first time. Marek's got experience of doing this, both as a material's designer and also as a teacher trainer.
In this episode, you'll hear Marek talking about some of the challenges of putting courses online, the different platforms to use, and of course very, [laughs] very importantly, how to get students to actually take your courses. Enjoy the episode.
Ross: Hi, Marek. We're obviously talking about this because of COVID‑19. Before we go on, how has the pandemic changed where you're teaching?
Marek Kiczkowiak: Yes. I think the classes shut down late March, early April. I don't know if they're going to resume from the new academic year. I doubt it. I think maybe some classes will, the absolute essential ones like work in the laboratory that you can't do online. This might resume. I think a lot of it will be done online, still.
I haven't been teaching. I've been just developing academic writing courses on academicenglishnow.com. The reason I set them up was...For three years I was teaching academic writing basically to university students in Belgium. When I started my new job in Brussels, I wasn't teaching anymore. I was developing materials.
I've been thinking at the back of my mind that I could do all of what I was doing in the classroom with students, I could just offer that online. Then I'm not limited. I can be anywhere in the world and deliver the same quality program. When the lockdown happened, I was like, "That's it. If I don't do it now, then I've missed the boat."
Ross: The online courses that we're talking about today Marek, can you tell us about them? I feel that online learning covers so much. You could have synchronous online classes in real‑time with groups of students in a virtual classroom. You can have asynchronous where people interact with each other, but maybe they are in different time zones, and they comment in a forum throughout the day.
You can even have completely self‑accessed courses where learners are working their way through things at their own pace. They don't interact with each other very much. Tell us about the courses that you've created and why did you design them that way.
Marek: Most of it is completely asynchronous, and there are two reasons for that. The first reason is that at the moment, I have most of my PhD students in Bolivia. The time difference is big. Therefore, finding a suitable time for a live class ‑‑ even now when these 15 students come from exactly the same university ‑‑ proved completely impossible.
Also, because people can work through it at their own pace, they can jump through the different lectures and focus first on the ones that they feel are the most important to them. I might start at a certain point, and I, as a teacher, feel that this is the best point to start with, but maybe for other students, they have a different problem they want to tackle first.
These are some of the reasons and why it's better for students. For you, as an online teacher, it's also much better because I don't have to constantly give the same material online. Time is money as a freelancer. That's why in the online courses that I offer, the basic package just includes the online work.
There is no input from me apart from answering students' comments. There is a forum. They can ask each other questions, and I come in and answer their questions. The second higher tier that you can add is feedback on assignments. If you pay more money, you can do the assignments that are on the course, and then I'll check them and give you personalized feedback on them.
I'm now including my time, so that's got to be more expensive. Then even above that, we've got group live sessions where we meet live and discuss any problems students have. They can send in the questions before when we have a live session. Even higher than that has to be a one‑on‑one class.
It doesn't cost €20. It doesn't cost €50. It costs much more than that. Ultimately, there'll be few people who will buy it, but that's good. You want to limit yourself to people who actually really, really want to work with you. A lot of people might not need that. They'll just need the online course.
Ross: You mentioned lectures there. In my experience, online courses tend to involve a lot of reading. They also sometimes have quite a high dropout rate. I think it's quite difficult sometimes to stay motivated for a long period of time when studying at a distance.
What input do you use on your courses, and how do you make sure that those courses will be able to stay interesting?
Marek: Sure. I guess I refer to them as lectures because my market is in universities. Otherwise, I would refer to them as lessons or maybe videos or whatever you want to call them. You definitely can't have lessons, lectures, or videos that are much longer than five minutes. People's attention span nowadays, we can hardly even finish a five‑minute video on Facebook.
Maybe if it's educational and we paid for it, we'll give it more effort. I really like to think of them as little how‑to steps. To give you an example, one module is, "How to Write an Introduction." Within that bigger task, you have a smaller task, which will be, "How to Identify the Research Gap." This smaller task will consist of even smaller tasks, and those smallest tasks are individual lectures.
You might have four how‑to lectures in, "How to Identify the Research Gap." Each of them takes about five minutes ‑‑ each video ‑‑ and then there is a task below it. A task could be for students to write something. Sometimes it can be as simple as writing one sentence. Sometimes it will be a longer 100‑, 200‑word assignment. It could also be a quiz.
Sometimes, for example, because things vary from discipline to discipline in academic writing, I often like to give students a task to now go off and read an academic paper from their discipline. Then tell me whether what I said applies to their discipline. For example, some disciplines like to have introduction and literature review together as one section. Others will separate it.
I tell them that in the lecture about organizing this. Now they need to read the text and comments and let us know how it's organized in the field.
Ross: I wish I'd known about your academic writing course before I started my heavy dissertation.
Marek: Well, take it, Ross, if you want to.
Ross: Sadly, it's too late now. [laughs] For these courses, you need to put them online on a platform. Can you tell us about how you made that decision, which platform to use?
Marek: That's a very good question because I think that's one thing obviously that's got to be pedagogically sound. There's lots of different platforms, and it really depends what you want to do and what you want to have.
To give you one example, my initial TEFL Equity Academy courses were on a platform called Teachable. Teachable is free to access at the beginning with some limitations, and then it has certain plans. The advantage of platforms like Teachable or Kajabi, for example ‑‑ that's another one K‑A‑J‑A‑B‑I, Kajabi ‑‑ is that they are all in platforms.
They give you free video hosting ‑‑ free as long as you pay the platform. It's video hosting. It's a payment gateway. The websites are predesigned for you, basically. Kajabi has email funnels. When somebody buys your product, they get a sequence of emails. Kajabi has webinars, for example, built‑in. It's an all‑in solution.
It's a good solution if you don't have time and you don't feel very techie, and you just want something quick. However, if you want to put in a little bit of effort ‑‑ and it's not that difficult because I was able to do it and have zero website building skills, literally zero, I just watched YouTube tutorials and did it ‑‑ is to host it on WordPress.
That gives you incredible flexibility. Obviously, Teachable has its website layout, and you can't really change it that much. You cannot make it look as you want it to look. To really access all the features you want to have, you'd be looking at $100 a month with Teachable and $150 with Kajabi. This is only for people who have high volumes of sales. You might not have that.
Now all my courses are on WordPress, and I don't personally think it's too difficult to set up. Just to break down the numbers, instead of paying $100 a month, you're probably looking at maybe $30 a month or less. It's just you need different pieces.
You need your WordPress hosting, you need video hosting, and then you need your online course plug‑in like LearnDash or something like that.
Ross: Let's talk about finding students. How do you go about marketing your courses and making sure that students actually want to buy them?
Marek: Sure, yeah. Never create an online course just because you think it's a good idea. Don't create a whole course before getting the proof of concept and trying to see if it actually sells. You'll spend months creating this amazing online course, but nobody wants to buy it.
The simplest idea is the sales funnel. You start with something free that's downloadable, so people give you their email address. It always has to be something valuable for your audience, so maybe even before that, you need to really define who your audience is. I help university students and researches write better academic papers and thesis.
I'm not interested in people who want to learn Business English. When people download it, they need to give you their email address to be able to download it. Then usually there is a very cheap offer of something. This could be a 60‑minute training session on something. This could be a mini‑course.
A hundred people opt‑in to download something, maybe 10 percent of them ‑‑ if you've got a very, very good funnel ‑‑ will decide to get the opt‑in offer. You already have some initial clients. Then a smaller percentage of those might get the upsell as well. Once people opt‑in and buy something from you, you can offer them a higher package or another product.
Think about it as building a relationship with someone. First, they get to know you and then maybe then read a blog post that you've written. They kind of think, "Wow, that was really, really helpful." Then they see this PDF guide that further helps them, and they're like, "Oh, I might download that."
Once they really like you and feel that you're knowledgeable, they will buy something from you. Never offer a course to people that don't know you. Don't go to a Facebook group and something and post, "Hey, I've got this amazing course. Do you want to buy it?" It's not appropriate. People need to get to know you. In marketing, it's kind of the same.
Ross: Really, it sounds there that a lot of it is about making sure that your potential students trust you before you try and sell them something.
Marek: Yeah, I think so. I think you need to establish trust and also show people that you genuinely want to help them. If you start with the idea that I'm in this to make money, people will easily see that. The reason why you're offering a certain product is because you can't just help people for free. You can do that in a blog post but in a very limited way.
It probably means you need to know your target audience pretty well. That's why I started with the academic writing courses. That's something I've been doing for a long time now. I feel I really know what problems my target audience is suffering from, what questions students have asked me over the last 10 years.
Ross: Obviously, the sales funnel though is after people get to your website. Another really important part of this is getting people on to your website in the first place. Tell us about that, Marek. How do you just attract people to come on to your website?
Marek: Absolutely. There are two ways of getting to your target audience. You can buy your way in which is through Facebook ads. This has got the advantage that if you run them correctly, and if you've got this funnel that I described to you, you can basically break even.
You're not really spending any money because, for every hundred dollars that you put in, people buy a hundred dollars of your courses. Much quicker, you are building an audience.
The second way is not buying it but through hosting content, doing content marketing that is valuable to my audience, and that Google is going to start ranking highly on the search pages. This is really, really important because if Facebook changes their advertising policies, your whole business could go bankrupt if you just rely on Facebook ads.
Another really important way is to do what we are doing here, for example. Do collaborations where you, for example, do a podcast, a video, or a blog post for somebody else who already has your target audience or has people who are very similar to your target audience. Both of us reach more people, but also, if other websites add hyperlinks to your website, that increases your ranking in SEO.
If you do collaborations like this, you add a hyperlink to my website, I add one to yours, and hopefully, we're going higher in the search rankings as well.
Ross: One more time, everyone, that was Marek Kiczkowiak. For more from Marek, please check out his website www.teflequityadvocates.com. You can also find the TEFL Equity Academy on there with some of the online courses that Marek has created before for teachers.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please visit our website, www.tefltraininginstitute.com, for more. If you really enjoyed it, please give us a good rating on iTunes or wherever you listen. We'll see you again next time. Goodbye.