Justin Ferriman

Justin has made a career as an e-learning consultant where he has implemented global training programs for Fortune 500 companies.

Passionate about e-learning and WordPress, both Justin and LearnDash have been featured in multiple industry publications, including ELearning! Magazine, Training Magazine, INTERCOM Magazine, EdTech Magazine, Chief Learning Officer, and Learning Technologies by the Association for Talent Development.

Justin’s experience-based vision has helped make LearnDash the most trusted WordPress LMS plugin for major universities, continuing education providers, and entrepreneurs world-wide.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Justin’s success

Structuring content

Result if you follow the steps in Justin’s session

An online course that is structured in a way to achieve your objectives for your members

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

It starts with before you even choose the technology. It starts with the content and how you structure it.

Now, I’ve always been a fan of storyboarding which is just a fancy word of saying structuring your content, be it in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint and you can call things lessons and topics or what-have-you, but placing your content in buckets. So, your learners can logically follow the topic at hand and then they meet the objective.

Now, when you have a course or we have content online you should have one objective for the set of content. So, if we’re using lessons, for example, your lessons should have one objective. Now all these lessons in the course can feed up to the course objectives which can be one to three objectives usually.

But this this kind of top-down structure, I’m kind of like a tree and as you storymap, storyboard I say the content out, it will become clear what those objectives are and then you know you can find ways to measure that and form your course or structure your content in that way all right.

It doesn’t have to be linear. It certainly can, I think everybody’s familiar with a linear progression path but you know we’re like going back to what I was saying, we get distracted easily.

So if you can keep your content concise, we call it micro content, if you can create micro content and let people get these early small wins and check the box for an objective, then that’s going to compound over time with all your content, otherwise it’s pretty overwhelming if you’re just kind of somebody comes into a membership site and they see everything there and they don’t know where to go to begin, or at least to start.

So, what I’ve seen to be quite successful, actually, and we used to do this one where, I used to do this while setting up courses and I’ve seen it in people that are using learn dashes though start with a linear progression.

In the beginning, it’s kind of the reading process and then open it up and let people choose what they want to learn as they kind of get more familiar with the basics and have a solid foundation it’s important to create that foundation across all the learners, all the members of the membership site so, everybody’s on the same page.