How do I create learning products as an indie teacher?
What is the process for creating learning products?
The first step of being an indie creator is creating something. For an indie teacher that means creating a learning experience, which might be a class, a book, a workshop, a webinar, a coaching service, or some combination of these models. Part of the joy of being an indie teacher is that you are not constrained by the standard academic calendar or format for journal articles or textbooks. You can use the framework that makes sense to you and is aligned to the content and to your learners.
How can Agile Wayfinding help me deal with uncertainty in the design process?
Many people start to write books or develop courses, and many fewer ever do. There are many reasons for this. People may not be clear on what direction to take. They may become paralyzed with too much information or not enough information. To address these risks, I have developed an approach to planning called “Agile Wayfinding.”
Agile Wayfinding is an approach to planning that stresses learning by doing. The more we do, the more we learn. When we put something out in the world, the results help inform what to do next.
Agile Wayfinding describes how we take a journey. We begin with the Departure, leaving where we are. The Journey itself will involve many decisions and actions, and finally we will Arrive.
The Departure is critical. We need to be clear on our purpose before we leave. Without this clarity, we will never know if have made it to where we intended. We can also be distracted along the way and stray from out path. Part of our Departure planning can be articulating a mission, identifying a strategy, and establishing values that will allow us to measure the quality of the journey and to know when we have arrived. Departure requires an orientation to where we are now, where we are seeking to go, and how we are going to get there.
The Journey is a series of decisions disguised as adventures. One of the challenges in decision-making is the fear that once an option is selected, other alternatives will disappear. This leads to “FOMO” (the fear of missing out). By being afraid of losing out on an opportunity, we can fail to pursue any opportunity, leading us to wander in the wilderness. The idea of a design sprint helps address this by creating a structure for decision making with clear deadlines to ensure progress.
The Arrival is when we get to where we are going. Sometimes that might not be what we thought at the beginning. Sometimes we got to where we are going, but we regret it. Sometimes everything comes together even better than we expected. The reality that the Arrival is never the end. It just marks the start of another cycle of Departure. Based on what we have learned, we can improve our understanding of where we want to go. That may mean starting something entirely new, or it might mean improving what we already have.
How do I determine my destination?
Before you start your learning design project, you should have a clear idea of why. Who are you hoping to serve? Are you motivated by financial rewards? Do you have a topic that you are passionate about sharing with others? You may also be interested in a particular strategy like writing a book or developing a course. Sometimes it can helpful to write a personal mission statement. Personal values are also an important dimension of this process as they can help tell you what you want to do and what you do not want to do. You don’t need to worry about getting this perfect. As you go your journey, you will learn more and have many opportunities to update your purpose.
One of my guiding values has been how to provide resources and services to indie teachers that were affordable. There are many online train the trainer programs that cost $1000s of dollars. There are services that cost $100/month for software to do online training. My goal has been to provide the training and support at an affordable price with bundled services to help people try out indie teaching with a low risk. I also make resources like this guide available for free. I am not even requiring that someone provide an email to access these resources. The truth is that many people will never even start a book or creating a class, and one of my personal values is that I do not want to take their money.
How do I use design sprints?
Paul Simon tells us that there must be 99 ways to leave your lover. There are probably more than 99 ways to create learning products. The approach I am going to recommend and describe is a learning design sprint.
Design sprints are a process that developed out of Google Ventures. Traditional design sprints have specific elements that make perfect sense if you are Google. For one person working on their own, especially someone who is working on a project on a part-time basis, absolute rules of design sprints are not helpful.
The key is to have a structured series of four steps that are time boxed. This means you allocate a certain amount of time for each step. This prevents the project from getting bogged down at any one step. It is easy to get lost in analysis or in designing presentation slides. At the same time, there is a decreasing value in doing those activities. The design sprint structure forces us to move on so that we get something we can give to the world sooner rather than later. Remember a key benefit of our digital age is that it is easy to make revisions and release a new version as 2.0. Back in the day when I worked in IT, we used to say never to trust a release ending in a zero because no developer caught the bugs on the first iteration. Unless you are designing medical devices, what you are working on does not involve life or death issues.
The traditional design sprint is 5 days with each step taking one day. If you have five days in a row to dedicate to a project and ideally 4-5 colleagues to collaborate with, then a traditional design sprint is a well-documented process. I am going to assume that those conditions do not apply to you.
Instead, you should take the number of days/weeks/months you have before you want to launch your product into the world and divide that into 4 equal phases. For example, a 1-month schedule would be four seven-day periods. Obviously, units in increments of 4 days make the math easier, and you can block out time for vacation or holidays. The key is to develop a timeline for the four steps of the sprint prior to starting the project. If you do not do so, you will likely add time at one point or another because there is one more thing you want to do during that step. There will always be one more thing. Make note of it and save it for the next version.
The four steps in the design sprint are:
- Ideation – finding your idea
- Design – research and mapping your topic
- Build Out – creating a learning experience based on the design
- Launch – release your learning experience into the world
The design sprint provides a structure for our Journey. In Agile Wayfinding, we are constantly making decisions about what route to take and then monitoring that route to evaluate whether we are making progress to the Destination.
How do I know if/when I have arrived?
The Journey does not really end when you launch your creation. In the final stage, Arrival, now you have the opportunity to review the Journey. What did you learn along the way? You can also go back to the goals you began with in Departure. Did you achieve those goals or fall short? These reflections provide the basis for deciding what to do next.
The next trip you take might be to go back and update or expand on what you have already built. You might also find that you need to pivot, scrapping or re-purposing what you have to develop something that is a better fit for your audience. You may also be happy with what you have accomplished and decide to take on something new.
Contents
- The Indie Teaching Manifesto
- Why should I become an indie teacher?
- What would I do as an indie teacher?
- How do I get started as an indie teacher?
- How do I create learning products as an indie teacher?
- Ideation and Validation
- Design
- Build-out
- Publish-Launch
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