Creating Courses to Sell vs. Courses to Train: A Guide for New Instructional Designers
By Justice Jones
Lead Instructional Designer and Trainer
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Creating Courses to Sell vs. Courses to Train:
Welcome to the multifaceted world of instructional design! If you're embarking on a career in this dynamic field, understanding the distinctions between creating courses to sell products and courses intended for training is crucial. This blog post is designed to guide you through the different goals, strategies, and instructional theories associated with each type of course.
Understanding the Purpose
Courses to Sell:
Courses designed to sell are primarily marketing tools to promote a product or service. The ultimate goal is to convert viewers into customers by demonstrating the product's value and benefits. These courses are crafted to persuade and are often short, focused, and highly engaging.
Courses to Train:
On the other hand, training courses are designed to enhance skills, transfer knowledge, and foster professional growth. They are structured to ensure learners acquire the necessary competencies and are typically more detailed and prolonged than sales-oriented courses.
Instructional Design Approaches for Each Course Type
1. Courses to Sell:
Creating a persuasive course that leads to sales involves understanding both marketing and educational principles:
Engagement and Persuasion:
Use multimedia content, emotional appeals, and storytelling to make the course engaging and persuasive. This approach helps potential customers visualize the product's impact on their lives, creating a personal connection and increasing the likelihood of a purchase.
Marketing Strategies:
Incorporate strong calls to action, create urgency, and leverage social proof such as testimonials or expert endorsements. These elements are integral to designing courses that inform and motivate the audience to act.
Simplification:
Focus on the core benefits and features of the product or service. Avoid overwhelming the learner with too much technical detail, which can detract from the main message and cause decision fatigue.
a. Relevant Learning Theories:
Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM): This theory explains how messages can influence attitudes through different processing routes (central and peripheral), which is crucial in persuading customers.
Core Concepts of ELM:
ELM proposes two main routes to persuasion:
Central Route: This route of persuasion is used when the audience is motivated and can think about the message. Here, the quality and strength of the arguments are crucial. The audience actively and carefully considers all the information, including facts, logic, and evidence presented in the message. Persuasion via this route tends to be more enduring and resistant to counterarguments because it is based on high elaboration—the careful scrutiny of the persuasive arguments.
Peripheral Route: This route is employed when the audience is either not motivated to process the information profoundly or cannot. Persuasion through this route involves superficial cues such as the attractiveness or credibility of the source, the presence of specific signals or endorsements, or the emotional appeal of the message. Because the elaboration is low, the attitudes formed via the peripheral route are typically weaker, more transient, and more susceptible to change.
Application in Instructional Design:
Courses to Sell:
In the context of designing courses to sell products or services, ELM is invaluable. For instance:
Central Route Strategies: When targeting an audience likely to be receptive and interested in detailed content, an instructional designer should focus on clear, logical, and strong arguments that directly relate to the product's efficacy and value. This might involve detailed demonstrations, robust data on performance, and comparative analyses with competing products.
Peripheral Route Strategies: For an audience less likely to engage deeply with the content or under conditions where the learning environment is more distracting, designers might rely more on the attractiveness of the presentation, user testimonials, expert endorsements, and visually appealing graphics. These elements help create positive feelings and ease the acceptance of the persuasive message without requiring deep cognitive processing.
AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action): This marketing model helps structure your course to effectively capture attention, build interest, stimulate desire, and prompt action.
Breakdown of the AIDA Model
Attention: The first step is capturing the learner's or consumer's attention. This is crucial in an environment flooded with information and distractions. Practical techniques to grab attention include striking visuals, compelling headlines, engaging videos, or intriguing questions. The goal here is to stand out and make the audience pause and take notice of what you have to offer.
Interest: Once you have their attention, the next step is maintaining their interest. This involves providing more detailed information about the product or service, focusing on relevant features to the audience. It's about sparking curiosity and delivering value that keeps them engaged. Techniques include storytelling, presenting exciting facts, or demonstrating unique benefits that resonate with their needs or solve specific problems they face.
Desire: Moving from interest to desire involves shifting the focus from the product's features to its benefits. Here, the aim is to make the audience feel an emotional connection, envisioning themselves benefiting from the product. This can be achieved by highlighting the product's ability to meet needs or fulfill desires, such as improving efficiency, increasing satisfaction, or promoting well-being. Testimonials, case studies, and user reviews can be powerful in this stage, as they help to create a personal link and enhance credibility.
Action: The final stage is getting the audience to take a specific action, such as purchasing, signing up for a newsletter, or engaging in a free trial. This stage requires a clear, compelling call to action (CTA) that is easy to follow. It might involve providing a special offer, a limited-time discount, or simply offering straightforward instructions on how to buy or sign up. The key is to make the action step as simple and barrier-free as possible.
Application in Instructional Design
Courses to Sell
When designing instructional content aimed at selling, integrating the AIDA model can help structure the course to lead potential customers through each stage effectively:
Attention: Start with an eye-catching introduction that highlights the unique aspects of the product or service. Use media effectively to stand out.
Interest: Provide engaging content that thoroughly but interestingly introduces the product's features. Use examples or scenarios where the product might be used that are relevant to the audience's context.
Desire: Connect the dots between the product features and the benefits. Help learners visualize the positive impact the product could have on their lives or work. Incorporate endorsements and success stories to enhance appeal.
Action: End with a solid call to action. Make it clear what the learners should do next if they are interested in the product. Ensure the purchasing process is straightforward and the next steps are clear.
Benefits of Using AIDA in Instructional Design
Structured Content Delivery: AIDA provides a clear framework for organizing content in a logical flow that leads learners toward making a decision, which is particularly effective for marketing-oriented courses.
Enhanced Engagement: By capturing and maintaining attention and creating desire, the content becomes more engaging and interactive, increasing learner retention and satisfaction.
Higher Conversion Rates: Courses designed with AIDA in mind tend to have higher conversion rates as they effectively guide learners from awareness to action.
Targeted Content: AIDA helps create more relevant and impactful content by targeting the audience's preferences and needs at each stage of their journey.
2. Courses to Train
Training courses demand an organized and systematic design approach to ensure practical knowledge and skill transfer:
Comprehensive Content Development:
Develop modules comprehensively covering the subject matter, structured from basic to advanced complexity. This ensures a solid foundation before advancing to more complex topics.
Interactive Learning:
Incorporate practical exercises, simulations, and assessments that allow learners to apply what they've learned in real-world scenarios. This reinforces the material and aids in measuring comprehension and retention.
Feedback Mechanisms:
Integrate regular and constructive feedback mechanisms to guide learners on their progress and areas for improvement. This is essential for adaptive learning and skill mastery.
Relevant Learning Theories
Bloom's Taxonomy: This framework categorizes educational goals and fosters higher-order thinking skills crucial for practical training.
Bloom's Taxonomy is a framework for categorizing educational objectives first outlined by Benjamin Bloom in 1956. It's widely used by educators to facilitate higher-order thinking in students, such as analyzing, evaluating, and creating. The taxonomy was originally presented as a hierarchy, traditionally depicted as a pyramid, and later revised in 2001 by Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl to reflect a more dynamic conception of educational processes. This revision included renaming and reordering the categories to emphasize the active nature of learning.
The Revised Bloom's Taxonomy includes the following six cognitive levels:
Remembering: This is the lowest level of learning and involves recalling facts and basic concepts. It's about recognizing or recalling knowledge from memory. Techniques include memorization of terms, basic concepts, or answers.
Understanding: At this level, learners understand the material by explaining ideas or concepts. They might classify, describe, discuss, explain, or identify information they have learned.
Applying: Learners use information in new situations. This could involve applying laws, rules, methods, or theories to practical situations, demonstrating the practical implementation of abstract concepts.
Analyzing: This stage involves breaking information into parts to explore understandings and relationships. Learners might differentiate, organize, or attribute relevance to data, possibly conducting comparative analyses or explaining motives.
Evaluating: Learners judge based on criteria and standards at the evaluating level. They might critique ideas or assess solutions, possibly reviewing particular proposals' reliability, validity, or effectiveness.
Creating: The highest level involves combining elements to form a coherent or functional whole, reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure. This could include formulating new patterns, making predictions, or constructing designs.
Kolb's Experiential Learning Theory Emphasizes learning through experience, making it ideal for designing hands-on activities that enhance skill acquisition and retention.
Developed by David A. Kolb in 1984, Kolb's Experiential Learning Theory emphasizes the central role that experience plays in learning. This theory is presented as a four-stage cycle:
Concrete Experience (CE): Learning begins with the learner actively experiencing an activity, such as a lab session or fieldwork.
Reflective Observation (RO): After the experience, the learner consciously reflects on it. This might involve reviewing what happened, pondering successes and failures, or thinking about what could have been done differently.
Abstract Conceptualization (AC): Learners then use these reflections to develop new ideas about the world or how they might act. This stage involves forming generalizations, theories, or models that integrate their observations into logically sound schemas.
Active Experimentation (AE): Finally, learners apply their theories to new situations, experimenting to find new ways to do things and solve problems. This stage completes the cycle and leads to the following concrete experience.
Application in Instructional Design:
Kolb's Experiential Learning Theory is especially useful in designing training that requires active participation and practical skill application. It encourages designers to create learning opportunities that include hands-on tasks, simulations, or real-world problem-solving. This ensures that learners can directly apply what they learn in practical settings, enhancing retention and skill mastery.
Integrating Bloom's Taxonomy and Kolb's Theory
Both models complement each other and can be integrated effectively within instructional design. For example, while developing a training program, an instructional designer can use Bloom's Taxonomy to ensure that the learning objectives cover a range of cognitive processes from remembering to creating. They can then employ Kolb's Experiential Learning Theory to design the actual learning activities, ensuring that learners engage with the content through concrete experiences, reflect on these experiences, abstract conceptual insights, and apply these in new contexts. This dual approach ensures a holistic learning experience that promotes depth of knowledge and practical skills.
Conclusion
For new instructional designers, understanding these distinctions and applying the appropriate strategies and theories can dramatically increase the effectiveness of your courses. Whether you are persuading potential customers or training the next generation of skilled professionals, the success of your courses relies heavily on how well they are tailored to their specific purposes. By mastering these differences, you set yourself—and your learners—up for success in an increasingly competitive educational landscape.
Embrace these insights as you craft your instructional designs, and remember that each type of course offers unique challenges and opportunities. Your journey as an instructional designer is not just about creating content but creating impactful learning experiences that meet diverse needs. Happy designing!
Discussion Question:
Join the conversation and participate with the 24/7 Instructional Design community by answering the DQ in the comment section below:
In the evolving landscape of instructional design, how can designers balance the immediacy and persuasive nature required for courses designed to sell with the depth and ongoing engagement necessary for effective training programs? Are there innovative ways to integrate elements from both types of courses to enhance learner engagement and meet diverse educational goals? Please share examples or strategies that have successfully combined these approaches.
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