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 of those are going to be great for you, I think, you know, if if if you were like okay, I’m you know, I’m getting ready, I’m going to you know putting together this course on you know, c++ programming, and I, you know, I want to build a website and start selling it and marketing and that kind of thing, what I would do is get a teachable or Thinkific account. 

What I do like is that Thinkific has a free tier versus teachable has sort of a, I think it’s like a, you know, it’s a free trial, I guess is what it is. So you can with Thinkific you get you get that free tier, you know, as long as you stay within the confines of what is available in that free tier. So if you’re just getting started out Thinkific is really great for that because you can, you know, get a much more affordable rate. So that is one reason why I do recommend Thinkific then over over teachable, what I would do is use that you can build lead pages in Thinkific you can build, you can build blog articles, that kind of stuff, too, but it’s not necessarily meant to do that. It’s it’s intended to be a place for you to to host your courses, okay. 

And then what I would do is I would have a separate website that has your you, it’s your blog, it’s your main website, it’s got all of your contact information, it’s got your email list, that’s another piece of technology that you’ll that you’ll need is an email marketing software, I use ConvertKit I also have a link for you for ConvertKit there are others that are out there, they all work wonderfully. I’ve used MailChimp, Constant Contact another one, they all just have different features, different pricing levels, that kind of thing that we’re not going to go into necessarily in this particular video. But then what I would do is you know, like I said, Have your learning management system, and then you have your main website. Alright, and so on my website. 

So my An example for me is my website’s Heather Monthie. calm. And then my tech Academy where I have all of my courses is that learn.Heather monthie.com. And so that’s where you can see that I have Thinkific versus my blog. It’s it’s, it’s separated out. And what’s great is that with my blog, I can link them back to my learn that Heather Monthie calm. So now let’s get into more on how to teach technical things then online. So this is this is great, but you know, if you want to teach technical things, you How is it that you use Thinkific , or teachable are your blog, how is it that you use that to teach these technical topics, and what I what I really think that is, is very imperative when it comes to teaching technical skills online, is that there are very good quality demonstrations, that you are showing your students how to do a particular skill, and you’re doing it in short, little snippets, these should be no more than three to five minute videos shorter is preferred, where you are showing your students how to do a particular thing you’re walking them through, you are using something like screencast o Matic 

You know, there’s, there’s, there’s a lot of different screen capturing software that’s out there. You can even use zoom, I use zoom to record a lot of my videos and then do screen share. And you can walk students through the technical things that you’re having them do. So, but what you’re not going to do is just have this massive, just like dump of like, here’s what you’re going to do. 

And here’s how you do it right, you’re going to have these short snippets, these short videos, where you’re teaching your students how to do a particular task, but you’re going to have them it’s called scaffolding is the technical term in the educational world. And they’re going to build one upon each other. So if you’ve got a series of 15 short videos, where you’re teaching students how to say your say you’re doing a brand new hello world type program, we use Brand New c++ class, right, you’re not going to have had them do everything all in one shot, you’re gonna have small little 15 1520 videos, you know, three to five minutes, where you’re teaching students, you know how to install the SDK, how to, you know, all that kind of stuff, right, though that very, very, very tactical driven, break it down, make it short and simple. 

The reason for that is, because when your students need to come back to things, what they don’t want to have to do is go through a 35 or 45 hour long video, trying to find that exact thing that they are trying to figure out how to do. So if you label your videos, exactly the precise thing that you’re teaching your student how to do, you label that video when they need to go back, because they will get frustrated, they will get frustrated when they’re trying to do this on their own. 

And they’re going to need to go back and they’re going to need to watch videos over and over and over again. So make it easy for them take that frustration away, help make it easy so that when they want to go back and they they’re working on their project, they can go back exactly where they need to go back. That is I think probably one of the biggest things that I see people doing when they’re teaching technical skills online is is don’t make this a 45. 

To an hour long video of walking you through you can it’s fine to shoot the entire video all in one in one shot. But then take it and edit it and make it smaller little snippets of just one particular task that you’re teaching a student how to do, and then put them in the order in which they’re going to need to know how to do them. Alright, like I said, That’s called scaffolding. So when you get down to step number 12, if they haven’t done steps eight and three, and five, you know, they can’t necessarily do step number 12. 

So you want to make sure that you’re being very clear that this is the order and sequence in which your students need to work through the content. So now, you can have the videos doing the you sort of the hands on demonstration of here’s how to, you know, open up a c++ SDK, how to you know, how to write out the program, how to compile the code, you know, what buttons to press, etc, right? So you can have all the videos for that. But then what’s great about you know, your hosted learning management system, teachable, or Thinkific , is that you can put other media in there as well. So as you’re thinking through what kinds of things you’re going to have available for your students, you can put in things like PDFs, you can put in links to other websites, you can write out content, sometimes you just feel like this is something that needs to be written out and explained a little bit better, that you can explain it over over video and showing students how to do things. 

But you want to provide that additional support for your students and write it out as well. You can include that in there. So there’s a lot of different ways that you can supplement the learning materials. It’s not just you Recording, and putting videos up into this learning management system, you can provide all sorts of different media for your students to be able to learn that particular technical skill. So that is just one area that I wanted to share with you about how to teach technical skills online, it can absolutely be done. You’ve just got to take things into consideration of your student, the level of your student, the level of frustration that your student might or might not have, and keeping things orderly, in fact, in a in a way that is organized well for them, that they can go back when they get stuck, they can go back to right where they they need to pick back up. And they can get going on their journey with you as you’re teaching them your coveted technical abilities. So thanks for watching this video. 

If you’re interested in getting my tech teacher toolkit, you can go to I have a link in the description. It’s a bit.li slash tech teacher toolkit. And you can download my toolkit there where I’ve got a list of all of these different tools that you can use to help develop courses and offer them up online and to market them and to provide different ways for your students to to learn the skills that you’re trying to teach them. So again, it’s bit.li slash tech teacher toolkit. And the T’s are all capitalized tech teacher toolkit all capitalized. So thank you guys for watching, and I’ll see you in the next video.