Playbook, online course
Paid on a Sunday night, and now what
There is nothing to configure here. Onboarding on a course is not a setup task, it is a planning question, and the learner asking it has just spent money on the belief that they will find the hours. What they need in the first week is an order, a realistic weekly figure and the live dates in a form their calendar understands.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for setup and onboarding holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- Nothing has to be installed, connected or imported, so the first week question is entirely about sequence and time: which module first, how much of an evening it takes, and whether anything has to be read before a live session.
- Live session times are published in one zone and read in another, and a learner who has already paid does not ask twice, they simply miss the first one and then feel foolish about it.
- A cohort has an orientation, a group and a start; the self paced version of the same course has none of those, so one product has two entirely different first weeks and the welcome page usually describes only one of them.
- Downloadable material is where self paced learners quietly stall, because nobody knows a workbook exists until a module halfway through refers to it as though it had been in front of them the whole time.
How it arrives
- where should i start if i only have a few hours a week
- what time is the live session where i am
- do i need to read anything before the first session
- is there a workbook i should print
- how long should i give myself to finish
- do i join the community before or after i start
What has to be indexed for this to work
| The module order, with a realistic length against each | How long a module takes including the exercise rather than only the video runtime. Learners plan their week against these numbers, and a figure that counts only playback is the reason somebody decides after two weeks that they are behind. |
|---|---|
| The live schedule with a named time zone beside every entry | Dates, times, the zone spelled out, and whether calendar entries are provided. Omitting the zone is the single most expensive omission in this pair, because the cost is a session somebody paid for and cannot repeat. |
| The first week described separately for each version | What a cohort learner does in week one and what a self paced learner does instead. One welcome page written for both leaves half the buyers looking for an orientation that does not apply to them. |
| Everything downloadable, listed in one place | Workbooks, templates, checklists and reading, named and gathered rather than scattered through modules. Publish it at the start, because a learner who finds the workbook in module four goes back and does the first three again. |
The reply
If you are working through it yourself, the recommended order and a realistic length for each module are on the course outline, and those lengths include the exercises rather than just the video [1]. If you are in a cohort, the live dates are published with the time zone written next to each one, so it is worth putting them in your calendar before anything else and checking them against yours [2]. There is a list of the downloadable material on the same page, which is worth having open from the start rather than meeting it halfway through. I cannot see your enrolment or tell you which version you bought, so if you are not sure which applies, leave me your name and the email you enrolled with.
It answers for both versions without asking which one the person has, because they may not know the word for it. The calendar instruction comes before anything about studying, since a missed live session is the only unrecoverable thing in the first week. And the note about exercise time is there because a runtime figure is what makes people feel slow.
Where it stops
The trigger. The visitor asks which version they bought, whether they can move to a later cohort, or wants somebody to look at their own schedule against the course.
I cannot see which version you enrolled on or move you between cohorts. Leave your name and the email you enrolled with, and say what you are trying to fit it around, and somebody will come back to you.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never say how long the course takes for a particular person, or that anybody is behind, since neither is knowable and both are discouraging.
- Never state a live session time without the zone it is published in.
- Never say a learner can be moved to a later cohort, because that is a commercial decision on somebody else's list.
- Never invent a study plan, a weekly hours figure or a completion rate that your own material does not publish.
Questions
- Is onboarding worth answering when every learner is different?
- The differences are smaller than they feel. The order of the modules, the honest length of each, the live dates and the list of downloads are the same for everybody, and they are the questions that arrive in the first week from people who have just paid and are looking for a reason to start.
- Can it work out the session time in somebody's own zone?
- It should not try. It has no reliable sense of where the visitor is or what the date is, and a confident conversion that is an hour out costs somebody a session. Quote the published time with its zone and let the learner do the arithmetic they can actually check.
- What is the cheapest thing to publish here?
- The list of downloadable material, in one place, before module one. It costs an afternoon, it stops the most common quiet stall in a self paced course, and it is the sort of thing that never gets written because everybody inside the business already knows it exists.
Keep reading
- Everything for a online courseWhat is included, how long access lasts, refund and cooling off rights, and the honest limit that it cannot see a learner's own progress.
- Handling setup and onboarding in generalMost product material is written for somebody who already understands it. A first run guide has to be ordered, not merely complete.
- Asked before buying, and a wrong answer becomes a refundA tablet at home, a locked down work laptop, a phone on a commute. What to publish before purchase rather than after the refund window.
- The sales page is fine and the course will not loadThe page that sells and the platform that serves fail separately. What may be said when a session starts in an hour.
- One person, one purchase, and a clause they have just read properlyNot what I expected, a module withdrawn, an instructor who never replies. Where a learner complaint goes, and what is never conceded.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.