Here are some questions potential instructors might have:

What are the criteria for accepting my course?
Why should I work with you as opposed to just starting my own web site and
offering my course directly?
How will I know what kind of market exists for my course idea?
Do I have to pay anything to propose or teach a course?
What is my obligation, beyond simply presenting the material or teaching the course?
Who provides technical support?
Is a high-speed Internet connection needed to teach?
Will I have to grade papers?
How do I make sure my students attend class?
How frequently will my course be offered?
Who owns the copyright to my course?
How will I be evaluated?
How much can I earn?
How will my course be promoted?
What is the application process?

What are the criteria for accepting my course? Okay, so here’s the deal. I’d like to have a website that offers unique, maybe unusual, certainly relevant, and highly focused courses. Will all of these courses attract a huge audience? I don’t know, but I don’t want to be restricted by that requirement. In other words, I could do market research and tell you what the likely size of the market is, but I don’t want to discourage you from providing something that is truly unique just because no one is searching for it right now. I would rather offer something that is not offered anywhere else that maybe doesn’t have a huge audience. The only way to do that is to keep the costs for producing the courses low. I think we can do that. Should you be discouraged if there’s competition in your area for your course? No. That just means there’s an audience.  The Internet is a vast supply of potential students. There’s plenty of room for all of us.

Why should I work with you as opposed to just starting my own web site and offering my course directly? Well, you can certainly do that. In fact, that was my original plan. I intended to find one particular niche that I was pretty accomplished at and promote that one course on the web. What I discovered when I got into this game is that it isn’t the same as it was a few years ago. There is a lot of competition, and the Internet marketing methods and techniques are sophisticated, technologically intensive, and time intensive. This might be sad to say, but for many people offering courses on the Internet, it’s more important to market well than it is to produce high quality content. There is no doubt that people who succeed succeed mostly because they do a good job of Internet marketing.  I discovered very quickly that I couldn’t focus on both the content and the marketing/promotion/management of my course.  If you want to do that, more power to you.  I think we both have a much better chance of success if we work together to produce, promote, and market your high-quality content.

How will I know what kind of market exists for my course idea? Part of our job is to work with you to identify those niche areas relevant to your expertise that look like they have some kind of market. We can do that through Google adwords research. We can even identify your competition, and how much web traffic they’re getting, so your course can be positioned appropriately.

Do I have to pay anything to propose or teach a course? No.  If I came across this webpage, I’m pretty sure I’d ask myself, “is this guy trying to sell me something?” You know one of those deals ; “take this course for $500, and you’ll learn how to get rich”. In other words, am I trying to make money by selling you the tools to create these courses?  The answer is no.  I want to do everything I can to provide you as much support as possible using free or inexpensive tools to create the courses. You and I will both succeed only if you do a good job creating the content. Your commitment is basically the time needed and the knowledge to do a good job. If you succeed, I succeed, and our partnership will succeed. I’m determined to keep the out-of-pocket costs small for both of us. We want to keep the cost of courses affordable, while still making it worth our while.

What is my obligation, beyond simply presenting the material or teaching the course? Your course will be promoted, marketed, and offered using a variety of methods : blogs, forums, articles, audio/video and a structured product launch program. I will teach you how to teach online using tools that are free to you. If you want to buy and use your own tools, that’s probably fine too. We can talk about it.  Of course, you have to be an active participant in promoting your course, but to be honest, the greatest risk on your part is the time it takes you to develop your course. We won’t promote a course until it’s at least 90% finished and awaiting community feedback. Community feedback is a vital component for both designing and promoting your course. To learn more about this aspect. I encourage you to provide your name and e-mail in the fields on the right. I will then send you  more information on the process for developing and offering your course.

Who provides technical support? – as I mentioned, if we agree to offer your course, we’ll teach you what you need to know to teach online. We’l provide technical support, and we don’t expect everyone to be technological geniuses.

Is a high-speed Internet connection needed to teach? Yes, we’ve seen too many distance education efforts effectively stifled because of the restriction of a dial-up connection. This is true for both students and teacher, so you should assume that your students also have a high-speed Internet connection.

Will I have to grade papers? Well now, that’s up to you. Together we’ll define  the course objectives – these are the tasks that students should be expected to be able to do upon completion of the course. If there are elements of your course that are highly dependent on preceding components of the course, you may want to have some kind of homework or self test or some other criteria that students must satisfy in order to move on. Otherwise, you spend all your time going over material that you’ve already covered.

How do I make sure my students attend class? It’s important that students attend class. We want them to be successful. We want them to recommend the course to other potential students.  So we’ll make every effort to create material that is engaging, interactive, and leaves the students satisfied upon completion. We’ll teach you techniques for maintaining active student engagement at a distance. You’ll receive coaching in how not to leave students behind.

How frequently will my course be offered? Well, that also depends. I think the key point here is that we don’t have a strict academic calendar. It could be once a month. It could be once every two months. Or maybe it makes sense to conform to the standard academic calendar for most k-12 or post-secondary schools.

Who owns the copyright to my course? You do, with certain permissions granted.  For example, if heaven for bid, you cannot complete a course that you started, we’ll ask  someone else to finish the course using the materials that you’ve already prepared. But beyond that, we don’t own the material. It’s your intellectual property, and we will ask you to certify that it is your original work. Now this is a tricky business, and we can talk about it in detail later. Most work that you create is a reflection of ideas gathered from other references. Ideas can’t be copyrighted, but the specific language and expression of those ideas can be. We can work out the details together.

How will I be evaluated? – there will be student evaluations, and the summary results will be made public, along with testimonials to encourage other students to sign up.

How much can I earn? This may be the hardest question of all, but if you provide your name and email, I will send you information on how to access an initial interest survey. After you complete it, we’ll send you an excel spreadsheet that allows you to play “what if”, so you can see how much you might earn as a function of how many students sign up for your course, how frequently the courses are offered, how much preparation goes into the course, how much time you spend per week on the course, etc. How much you earn should not be your primary motivation for selecting a particular course topic. Otherwise all you’ll be teaching is courses on how to get rich quick, how to lose weight, or how to find a date. We want more diversity than that. And you want to teach courses you really enjoy teaching. Our challenge is to scour the Internet to find everyone who might be interested in what you have to offer. And we’ll need to do that together. I’ll give you the details on how we’ll launch these courses after you provide your name and email and complete an initial interest survey.

How will my course be promoted? We’ll be using a product launch sequence that’s intended to build community and product anticipation using email lists, adwords, search engine optimization techniques, potential print advertising, affiliate marketing, and some other modern internet marketing methods. You’ll be involved in this process. We’ll need to work together to develop a product launch sequence that makes sense for your course.

What is the application process?

• First of all, please provide your name and e-mail address in the opt-in box on the right, so we can send you directions on receiving more detailed information.
• Fill out an initial interest survey .  Then, we’ll send you information on teaching
  tools, teacher training, financial forecasting, and product launches.
• Upon approval, you’ll be ready to send in your course proposal.
• Then we’ll arrange teacher training and schedule the launch of your course.