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Hi. Welcome to the course, creators edge. This is a weekly podcast with two episodes each week. The first episode is on Monday mornings, and it is called strategic Monday. And that's about, how do we keep up with the trends? What are the forward things that are happening in this course creation segment of the Creator digital economy, where you take what you know or know how to do and want to turn it into a product to sell to others, to influence others, thinking, behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, knowledge and skills. And when you're doing that, you're wanting to give them that education product, and in return, you're wanting to make money. So this is the course creator's edge, and this is what is offered on Thursday each week. Is the Master's way. And that's the distinctions of what it really takes to have a quality education
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product. So whether you're offering
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programs or courses, you're coaching, you're writing perhaps you're writing instruction manuals, perhaps you're writing a book.
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They are all based on the principles
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of education, and when done well, we can help our customers learn and advance some part of their life, and depending how many courses or products you offer, you may be helping them learn and master an entire skill and knowledge set. And so welcome to the Master's way Thursday's Podcast. I'm Michele. I'm your host here, and as we work each week, the whole purpose of the course creators edge is to help you advance the quality of your
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courses and your
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programs and the products that you use to educate, to influence others, to learn how to do something or do something better, or to know or know something deeper. So this is the influence business, but this is specifically the course creation segment of the Creator economy. Welcome, and let's get to it. Today's topic is all about the three main pillars of what it takes to build a truly quality course, program, education product. Now this is what your business stands on, is quality, and there has been a lot of loss of trust, and even some people are saying that courses are dead, that you can't make money because people are not buying them as easily as they were in the past. And there's a good reason for that. A lot of the courses out there are those courses in a weekend. Now we've got the dilemma of courses. Let AI create them. There's a lot of misunderstanding. I do believe
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that people really do want to provide
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quality courses, but the problem is there's no such thing as a course in a weekend. There is no such thing as a quality course that you just ask AI to do it for you. J cron and Kenny at Kajabi have referred to that kind of AI production method of, oh, it's so easy. You can get it done in a weekend. Let Kaja let AI create your courses. The team there at Kajabi refers to that as slop. And I would have to agree, I'm pretty aware when I'm taking a garbage course, because I've been a teaching professor for many years, and I have a lot of education behind that. But more importantly, I've worked in developing economies, and I've worked with people that truly value education, and it can change a person's life. Now, it could be education about how to bake a cake, it could be education about how to mow a lawn, and that's no small thing, because a person who learns
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a new skill,
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they may be able to make a career out of it. And so you can look at the Apple mortgage cake, woman who's just a remarkable person, and look at her movie. She had one recipe, just one. Her grandmother had taught her how to bake an apple cake. It was a very good apple cake. It was a quality apple cake. No steps were missing, and in the 2008 recession, when a lot of people lost their homes, and she was one of them that was faced with a huge balloon payment due in a very short period of. Time she was actually able to take that one apple cake and make enough money to keep a roof over her kids head, and this was the home she had grown up in. Now that's no small thing to know how to do something well and to be able
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imagine, I think it was close to $40,000
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that she was able to make from one apple cake. And of course, she had friends that helped her, but she had a skill. She had a knowledge set. So there is no such thing as a small topic when you are influencing the thinking skills, knowledge behaviors, attitudes, understanding of another person. And, you know, we do not need to look far to see the damage that is happening in this whole well, it began being by being called the World Wide Web. Now we just shortcut that and call it social media and the many. There's even the dark web, the influences that are hurting other people because we're messing around with education. There is no such thing as a course in a weekend, and courses are not the same as curriculum and are not the same as instructional design. So that's our topic today. What is the difference and why is it important between curriculum, courses and instructional design? Ladies and gentlemen, these are the three pillars of a quality education product.
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So if you have a program, a book, a
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course, whatever you're calling it, even if you're writing a blog or doing YouTube videos. And what you want to do is take what you know or know how to do, and you want to impart it to another human being. Then that you are in the education business, and while as many people that believe that they're all the same thing, I've heard the biggest names in this business interchange. Well, this is my curriculum. This is my course. This is instructional design. I've heard instructional designers say that I'm an education expert. There's just a lot more to it than that. And while I know everyone is trying to do their very best, and it's hard to be a solopreneur when you get these distinctions right. You are set up to be able to have products, whatever form they take for you, where you're trying to help someone else learn something, you are setting yourself up to truly have excellence, to truly have a world class course, you can put legs under that table. So let's get going here, and what is the difference between curriculum, course and instructional design. Now, again, I've said these are the three pillars of an educational product, right? This is your product that we're talking about. This is what your business stands on. If you are all about being a course creator in this digital creator economy, let's take a look at curriculum. First. Curriculum is the map. It's the big picture, and you've all been part of curriculum many, many times in your life. Here's the most straightforward example. You learned how to read. So how did that start? The curriculum started out by letting you know what the alphabet is, what language is, what words are. You had to learn the ABC song. You had to learn how to write an A, how to sound out an a, what a capital letter A is, and it used to be. You had to know both lower and upper case, but you had to know cursive as well how to be handwrite. So as we look at that, then think about your journey. Where did you go from there? Well, then you started learning simple words, then you started putting bigger words together, and there were suddenly more than one syllable, there was a couple syllables, then there were multiple syllables. Then you started understanding the meaning of what you were reading.
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At first it was just cat,
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and maybe your teacher showed you a picture of a cat so you knew what that word was. But you started getting associations, and by the time you finished high school, you were able to put together your own words in reports or in stories, and then you may have taken the s a t test to get in, to get into college, and you may have understood that there was synthesis, that you had to interpret language, right? So that's the curriculum, that's the reading curriculum. And there are standards, there are guidelines. Because there are competencies that you had. A competency means what you can do and at what level, how well you can do it, and that is the curriculum of reading. Okay? Another way to think about curriculum is it's the whole map. It's what you have to do, for example, to go from New York to Los Angeles, you're going to go through very different states. There will be different prices for fuel, there will be different foods, there'll be different road conditions. You may go through different weather. There may be things you want to do along the way, different experiences, sites and different learning that will happen as you go from New York to Los Angeles, and so what you first do is you get a map of the journey. So think of your curriculum like you learned your ABCs you didn't know how to read when you got started, unless you were a savant, but then you went all the way to being able to synthesize, put things together, interpret and even use language. That's a curriculum. It's what's called an articulation model. Articulate. That means you move from one one level to the next, one set of learning builds on the set of learning before it that, ladies and gentlemen, is a curriculum. Okay, so what's different than about a course? Well, a course is part of the journey. It's how do you do one thing? And again, let's use the ABC example in kindergarten and first grade, you were only learning the alphabet, and you were only learning how to write the letters, say the letters, and perhaps you were starting
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to put them into little
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words like cat and dog and all that fun stuff. And that was the course. It wasn't the whole curriculum. You can't can't be at the master's level, because that was the novice level of learning how to use words, alphabets, letters, right? So a course is a how to of a very specific
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part of the
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curriculum, and of course, has to be quite complete. It is. It is a lot of work to create a course. It is not something that you do on weekend
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or even a week.
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You know, a lot of people say, Oh, teachers get the summer off. Well, I can guarantee you that we really didn't ever get the summers off. That was when we redid our courses. That was when we developed new courses. That was when we went through the course evaluations that we've been through. And it was one of the busiest times of my year, was during the summers, and sometimes I taught summer school because it was at the university level, and we had different courses to teach, but it is, it is an effort to create a course. It is not the same as a curriculum. I hope you can see that now, I hear you saying, Okay, so what's instructional design? Well, instructional design is something that will inform your teaching or your training or your coaching, depending on which one I'm going to tell you right now, those are not the same thing, and
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people interchange those all the time.
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But that's not our topic for today. You'll find that in another podcast. But for today, let's look at instructional design. So if curriculum is the map, and a course is the how to of one piece of the map, then instructional design is exactly what it says. How do I design this so that I can impart learning to my customer as a learner? Okay, so that means, will I have a slide deck? You may be familiar with the term PowerPoint, where there's a slide in words, will you be just using a slide deck like a PowerPoint, and you'll be talking in the background and they can't see you? Will you have part of it be the camera too, that's looking at your face. That's called face to camera, so that you're that kind of talking head. And will you just be on camera and words will cross the slides across your video occasionally. Will you have a handout? Will you have a workbook? Will you have little quizzes? Will you have show a video of something or someone else you see? That's the instructional design. Will you have a discussion group? Will you have a membership? How will
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you take that course and
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bring it to life in the very best. Way for your customers to learn it. So that's what instructional design is. It's the delivery, it's how it's the method that the customer is going to learn from you. And these are three very, very different, very, very different pillars of how you create quality courses. And when you learn this, when you're able to do this, when you learn what a curriculum is, and you're able to design your curriculum, and just a little hint here, your curriculum should be your value ladder. A lot of people disconnect those they should go together, but mostly in this industry, they don't. We have a value ladder with cost, but we do not have a value ladder with capability and competency and and learning. Just a thought there, ladies and gentlemen. So we've got a curriculum, and when you learn how to develop a course, how did how do you design a course? How do you develop it? What are the pieces of a course, and then you learn, Oh, these are the instructional strategies. This is how I deliver this course, and that we have to talk about teaching with that and training and coaching, which when you're planning on doing, because that should inform your delivery method. And you need to know who your customer learner is there, but we'll get into that more right now. For today, I just want you to understand curriculum, course and instructional design are definitely integrated, but they are absolutely not the same thing, and they get mixed up in this course, creator digital, creator economy, because people are making it up there. They may be an influencer. Who are they very good at showing you how to put makeup on and promoting the products they're selling. But that does not mean that's a course. Okay. They're very different. They're not the same. Purpose and influence influencers. Job is attraction and marketing. Okay, a content creator's job is what it's for information. But when you become a course creator in this economy, your job is education. So please understand these clear distinctions. Curriculum is not the same as course or the same as instructional design, but they are the three pillars of how to create a quality and, if you will, world class course in this creator economy. So stay tuned for next Thursday. That's it for today, and next Thursday, we're going to be getting into a little more detail in what curriculum actually is. And we have a rotation of courses here at the course creation lab, where we look specifically at curriculum. We look specifically at what I call c3 customer centered courses, and we look at instructional design and production and each of these with the adult learner, the customer at the center of it. We also look at what quality means and how AI can inform this without turning this industry into
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more slop.
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Influencing the thinking and skills and knowledge, behavior, etc, of others is a big deal. It's a sacred obligation. I've been in in education for a long time. Please don't mess with it or belittle it. It matters
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how we influence others.
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Let's do it well. And if you'd like a copy of the try it and apply it guide that goes with this episode. Check out the podcast page on my website at course creation lab, calm, and you will find a link to a free try it and apply it guide for how to think about curriculum, course and instructional design in your business. As a course creator, I wish you the very best. I know we're in this for the goodness, and let's let's get quality to be right up there at the forefront of everything we do,
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blessings and very best wishes to you.
