Wouldn’t it be amazing if you didn’t have to wait until you create an elaborate, full-fledged course on your online school, before you actually got down to the selling part?
It can be a tedious process, yes.
Most course creators have, at some point of time, wondered as to how amazing it would be if they could start selling tiny bits of information WHILE creating a course side-by-side.
Creating and selling tinier bits of knowledge has two benefits:
A) your learners are more likely to invest their time in this bite-sized training material that’s not only cheaper than a course, but also quicker to consume. And B) it takes next to nothing on your part to create it and make it available for purchase.
This form of training is called “micro-learning”, wherein, you just create lessons/lectures on various topics, and sell them as standalone products from your school.
In School Builder, creating and selling a lecture is as easy as adding a lesson to your course, which we’ve already covered in one of our previous tutorials.
So, let’s get down to how you can capitalize on the benefits of micro-learning by adding lectures to your school, and speed up your selling process even further!
Creating a Lecture
The process of adding a lecture on your online school is similar to creating a course. Since courses are also standalone products in nature, the same functionality is applicable on lectures too.
From your school’s sales dashboard, click on the Lectures tab to add your first lecture.
Next, click on the Add Lecture button, which will open up a popup for you to add your lecture title.
Say, for example, we’d like to create a lecture on “A Beginner’s Guide to Guitar Playing”.
We enter the title in the field, and off we go to hit Save!
Ta-Da! The lecture is now added into the system, and clicking on Save automatically redirects you to the content section under it.
Once inside, you’ll be greeted with a fleet of tabs, starting from the very first tab – Lecture – wherein, you will add the contents of your lecture. The format? We’ve got provisions for all kinds.
Adding Video
Upload the video file of your lecture from here. Click on Upload to open our file manager and upload your file from there. When done, click on Save to move on to the next tab.
Adding Audio
Just as you would add a video file, you can add an audio file under here for an audio-type lecture.
Adding Text
Got an additional text to support your lecture video? Add that here.
Adding Attachments
Any reference material that your students could benefit from as part of this lecture can be attached from under here. Simply upload a PDF or a ZIP file and it’ll be available for the students to download right under the lecture on the frontend.
And, with that, the content section of this lecture is sorted. Now, we move on to the next tabs, starting with Summary.
Lecture Summary
Summarize this lecture in a few lines under this field. While completely optional, this section lets your students get familiarized with what’s inside the lecture.
Lecture Sales Copy
The Sales Copy and Sales Video tabs are more or less similar to that of a course. Just like you would add a sales copy and video to support your course, you may want to add the same for your lecture too. You are, after all, selling this lecture with a price attached to it!
Lecture Pricing
Just like you would add a pricing plan for a course, you would add a pricing plan for a lecture. We’ve covered the details on pricing plans here.
Hey-yo!
The process of adding a pricing plan for courses and lectures may be similar, but the price itself is not. Lectures are individual items of bite-sized information, and so, obviously, they’ll be priced much lower.
Lecture Settings
Enable/disable necessary toggles and even tweak the layout of this lecture on the frontend.
- Title and URL: Change the title or default URL of this lecture by tweaking their dedicated fields.
- User Reviews: Allow students to post reviews/feedback under the detail page of this lecture for better conversions.
- Is Free: Wish to keep this lecture free, and use it as a lead magnet for your other paid items in the school? Turn this toggle on. If, on the other hand, this lecture is going to be paid, ignore this toggle.
- Status: By default, this lecture is going to be published on your school as soon as you add it. If, however, you want to keep coming back to it for more editing, choose “Draft” mode from the drop-down and change the status to “Published” only once it’s good to go.
- Layout: A basic UI setting for your course bundle detail page, this drop down comes with two options – Centered and Sidebar. If you want the pricing plan to show on the right hand side of the page, choose Sidebar. If, on the other hand, you want it to show below the sales copy and video, keep it Centered.
Additional Settings
You may have seen these before, yes. The options under More here are exactly the same as those under Courses. Refer to our tutorial on managing your course for details on these options.
Enabling Lectures
All details entered, all content cooked up. Now, how does a lecture look on your school’s website? Where’s the link? How do you or your students access a lecture you just created?
First things first, go back to your Lectures list, and hit on the Enable toggle to make this a part of your school.
Next, go to your school by clicking on Preview Site, and just add “/lectures” after your school URL on your browser. With that, you’ll reach right to the lectures library of your school.
Now, our school URL is “thesoundofmusic.school.ventture.com”, right? Adding /lectures to this URL will take us directly to our lectures page.
See?
Click on Details just like you would for a course, and you’ll get to the lecture detail page where you’d have put all its details and prepped it for purchase.
In order to make this visible and easily accessible to your students, our recommendation is that you create a link for Lectures on your top menu or your footer, using the site menu option.
“Erm… what menus?”
Read our tutorial on customizing your school’s site menus here. Simply add a button called “Lectures”, and link it to your lectures page.
Selling tinier bits of information and creating a buildup for your elaborate courses was never this easy!
Now that you know what Lectures on your school are capable of, start populating the section right away and quicken your selling process.
