How to teach technical skills online

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How to teach technical skills online. 

So in this video, I’m going to share with you a couple of different ways that you can teach technical skills online. I think a lot of times people think that when they are learning hands on skills, or they are teaching hands on skills, it can be very difficult to do online. 

And it while it is a little bit different than teaching some of these skills in person, many of these skills can absolutely be taught online, you just got to use a, you know, some of the technology that’s available out there. And so what I wanted to do is just go over what some of the pieces of technology you can use to teach technical skills online. 

Now, this is not going to be for any sort of technical hands on training that needs to happen on a very expensive piece of equipment, for example. So if you have a piece of equipment that costs $10,000, and you want to give your students hands on training on said piece of equipment, and you may be able to give sort of informational online sessions to show students how to use the piece of equipment. 

But if you want to teach that sort of, you know, the hands on you having students have that opportunity to, to practice the technical skills, it’s not necessarily going to work for you know, some of these things that do require some very expensive pieces of equipment, this is really going to be related to it skills, technology skills, coding skills, teaching social media, anything that really is done either online, or it can be done using either free or affordable software. 

So the first thing that, you know, when people are thinking about teaching online, they start thinking about Well, where is it that I’m going to put my course? Where is it that I’m going to put all of my information that I have prepared for my students? And your answer is going to be? It depends? The answer is always it depends. For every question that you guys ask. It’s always It depends, right? But so what you can do is you can use online marketplaces, I’ve spoken about these before, you can use online marketplaces, where you know, people just put all of their courses, they’ve got a lot of information, a lot of different types of courses out there. Udemy is probably one of the more popular ones within the it in the technical world. And, you know, the thing is, with Udemy, couple different things, there’s a lot of stuff out there, some is good, some not so good. But you as an instructor, if you put a course out on Udemy, you don’t necessarily you don’t get contact information of all all of your students. So you want to use Udemy strategically, you want to use it as a way that you can help bring draw students into you and your ecosystem and all the different other offerings that you have. And so you can use online marketplaces, they’re absolutely a wonderful place to start out. They’ve got everything is hosted for you, you create an account, you log in, you upload your videos, you upload your course content, and bam, you have an online course. Alright. 

The other option that you have is to build your own learning management system, which you know, you can use, there’s some open source ones that you can install, and build and configure and all that on your own website and your own web server. I’ve done that. And it does require a lot of maintenance, a lot of just stuff that happens on the back end, any of you have who worked on websites before know that websites don’t just run themselves, somebody’s got to, you know, maintain them, update them, that kind of stuff. So when you build your own learning management system, that’s what happens is that you’ve got to maintain it, you’ve got to, you’ve got to have somebody dedicated to that. 

So if you’re just getting started out, and that might not necessarily be the best place for you to spend your time, you might have the technical skills to be able to do that 100% I know I had a hard time sort of letting that go. Like I know that I can I can do this, I can build it, I can maintain it, you know, I can do all that. But then what ends up happening is you spend all of your time building and maintaining that website. 

So you can use there’s there’s plugins like LearnDash that you can use with WordPress, Moodle is one that you would install yourself. You know, if you’ve got web hosting, there’s probably an option to install Moodle. And so those are those are a couple that are out there. But you know, like I said, you may have the technical tools to do it. But unless you have the time or the extra money to pay somebody to maintain that for you, your time is probably better used elsewhere. So this is where you get into hosted learning management systems. And there’s quite a few out there. 

There’s Canvas is one that’s very popular used in university settings, k 12 settings. So if you have taught at the University of taught in K 12, you are probably familiar with Canvas. Then you have some of these big behemoths that are used in universities such as Blackboard. That’s probably one of the more popular ones. If you Starting out and you are teaching your own classes and you want to build your own learning management system, your own website and market it yourself. 

Blackboard is definitely not for you, that is more on the enterprise side it is for, you know, universities, colleges, community colleges, schools that have a lot of courses, a lot of faculty and a lot of sections of their courses. So you know, you can, you can take a look at it, but it’s not what you necessarily looking for. So now we’re getting into some of the hosted LMS is that are really targeted towards people like you and I who are taking their content, their knowledge, and sharing it online. 

And so you’ve got probably three big major players here. kajabi is one teachable is one and Thinkific is one, there are others out there. But I think if you if you get online and do some searching, those are the ones that are going to pop up for you as really good options. So full disclaimer, I do use Thinkific , I do recommend it for a lot of different reasons, I have an affiliate link for you that you can use. 

So if you click on it and make a purchase, you know, I’ll make a little bit of a small commission, which is great because it helps support all the stuff that I’m doing to help bring all of my knowledge and content to you. But let’s talk about them. So we’ve got kajabi kajabi is a hosted platform. kajabi does everything it does absolutely everything. It’s a blog, it does lead pages, it does your email, marketing, it’s everything all in one, okay. So you pay a little bit more for it. But you have all of your everything is taken care of all in one spot.

 There’s pluses and minuses to that you don’t have to maintain it, you don’t have to worry about the maintenance on the backside of things, they’re doing all that for you everything’s all in one spot, you don’t have to try to build a system to make all of your different platforms work together. So kajabi is great is great for that if you just you know, just don’t want to spend any time working on bill building and putting out your system. One thing I don’t like about kajabi is that you know, it is a you know, it’s a blogging platform, it’s got your emails, got all that kind of stuff. But let’s say that you want to separate out your blog and going on to a different platform, your, your blog is is hosted on there. So you have to export all that all on your own, and then essentially reset it up. So that really does affect Google Analytics, whole outside of the scope of this of this video. But I’m just I’m not a huge fan of a hosted blogging platforms for various reasons. So kajabi is great. But that is the that is probably the main reason why I don’t recommend it to people because you do need to be blogging, and you do need to be putting content out there. But you also need to own it. Alright.

 So then we get into things like teachable and Thinkific . Either one are great, I’ve used both of them, I work with companies that use both of them, I personally just use Thinkific , I think that they’ve got a lot of really great options, a lot of really great tools that you can use, like I said, teachable is wonderful as well, they do it, they do a fantastic job. And so either one