The delightful bus stop cartoon that is this week’s featured image, is the original creation of community member Matt Champlin.Matt is an engineer and cartoonist, and led us in a fascinating group exercise last Saturday called the Lightning Decision Jam.The purpose of the Lightning Decision Jam is to help a group quickly discover the main thing
Teaching, at its highest and best, is a soul-focused activity.To teach effectively is to use your mind to help someone else move their mind from a less conscious point to a more conscious point along a particular path.To teach effectively online we need to fashion forms, learning objects, and materials, that are capable of transmitting
A characteristic that is shared by many members of the Learn and Get Smarter community is that we are ahead-of-the-times, outside-the-box thinkers… what is referred to in the book Play Bigger as “category kings” (or what I also refer to as “category queens”). In other words, we are creative experts and entrepreneurs who have come up
In last week’s blog post, I wrote about the point that occurs about module 3 and 4 of many online courses, where the learner needs to start to actually apply the new material being taught. At that point in the course, far too often, learners find actually applying the teaching too difficult, and just drop
How can you ensure learner success in your online course? Just as in a physical classroom, there is no 100% guaranteed way to be SURE that EVERYONE who signs up for an online course, will complete everything in it and get optimal results. Some of that depends on the learner: their motivation, persistence, level of engagement,
There are two types of alignment that are important to consider in setting up your online course and the business that supports it. It’s critical to be aligned “vertically”, with our higher purpose…our mission, vision, values, and purpose for teaching online.And it’s also critical to be aligned “horizontally”, with our ideal customers… the people we are
The internet has made it possible for anyone to become a producer or publisher..without any gatekeepers. Instead of having to please a gatekeeper, now we have to speak directly to the needs of our target audience. How can we best do that? The role of the teacher is not to pour knowledge into empty vessels, but
The members of the Learn and Get Smarter community who have been coming together on Saturdays since the pandemic began, have been exploring ways to survive and thrive during these challenging times, especially with respect to how our businesses can adapt. Since we are a group of educators and entrepreneurs, our focus is on how
Whether or not you are able to attend the weekly Learn and Get Smarter community meetings in person, I invite you to follow along with our ongoing group process of collaborative discovery as we explore ways to survive and thrive during these challenging times. As a community focused on creating effective and engaging online courses, we
In response to the pandemic, we started having weekly meetings for the Learn and Get Smarter community, to brainstorm and support each other in helping our businesses — and especially our online courses — survive and thrive during these challenging times.Over the past several months during these weekly meetings, we’ve been using the structure of
At the Learn and Get Smarter community meeting on Saturday, July 4th, 2020 we learned from community member Rob Ruder about information systems as they relate to systems thinking in general, and online course creation in particular. Rob is the owner of IDIC Designs and an Adjunct Faculty Member in Gonzaga University’s School of Business
As educators, we are here to help people learn and grow. As entrepreneurs, we are here to provide products and services that solve problems and meet needs. In a recent blog post, I shared a parable about long forks, in which people feeding each other across the table provided a metaphor for creating a heavenly experience. It
In honor of Father’s Day, which just passed, I’d like to send a note of appreciation to all members of the Learn and Get Smarter community who are Dads. Fathers are powerful teachers, not only in their own children’s lives but for the community as a whole, and I’d like to share some wisdom that I
In this new reality we’re living, with the Covid19 pandemic still very much present, more and more aspects of our lives are taking place online. This is especially true of learning and business. What used to be called “online learning” is now, quite frankly, just “learning”. In this day and age and for the foreseeable future, if
How does the mission of your business address racism? What can each of us do as online educators, to address this systemic problem? At the Learn and Get Smarter community meeting on Saturday, June 6th, in the midst of one of the most tumultuous weeks in American history, we took a hard look at our businesses
Extraordinary times call for extraordinary learning and extraordinary thought. We are all on an accelerated learning curve just trying to cope with what’s going on around us every day.At the Learn and Get Smarter community meeting on Saturday, June 6th, 2020 we will explore societal and global solutions to the problems we are all facing.
How do you deal with an unprecedented situation for which you have no pre-existing mental frameworks… no appropriate prior knowledge?That’s the challenge our entire planet has been facing for the past several months.How are YOU facing it? How are you holding up?If you’re like most of us, you may have been finding this time incredibly
If you think back to New Year’s Eve, 2020 (that sweet and innocent time Before the Dawn of Covid), you may remember that the general mood was one of happy expectation. Individually and collectively, we were hoping for great things from 2020, not least because the number makes us think of having perfect vision and
Most of us, I think, would agree that the current situation can best be defined as a “hot mess”. But what KIND of a hot mess? Are we living in complete chaos? It certainly feels that way at times…yet as our discussions at the weekly Learn and Get Smarter community meetings show, many of us are starting
At our Learn and Get Smarter community meeting on Saturday, May 2nd, we started filling in the content for the course we’re creating about how to survive and thrive under changing conditions imposed by the Coronavirus pandemic.We started by sharing solutions we’ve each found, that are working for us, to take good care of ourselves. Each
What do you do in a totally unprecedented situation, when there are no answers?One thing you can do when you don’t yet have answers is focus on asking more effective questions. Another thing to do is to reach out to others to create communities and networks that can provide resources, guidance, and support.None of us has
At last Saturday’s community meeting, we discussed the questions can we ask ourselves, that will help us survive and thrive under all conditions, and especially, the conditions we are all dealing with now in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic. We decided to use the questions we came up with, to develop a sample cognitive strategies
The delightful bus stop cartoon that is this week's featured image, is
Teaching, at its highest and best, is a soul-focused activity.To teach effectively
How can you ensure learner success in your online course? Just as
How can you ensure learner success in your online course? Just as
How can you ensure learner success in your online course? Just as
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