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Increasing the visibility of your online academy can be challenging, particularly when there are numerous online schools providing comparable educational content to students. However, there are simple steps you can take to improve your online school's presence. In this article, we will outline four essential strategies that any school can implement to enhance their growth.
1. Prioritise Student Experience for Better Results
Prioritising your student's educational journey from the beginning is crucial for their satisfaction and can increase the likelihood of them recommending your school to others. This can be achieved by:
Designing from the outset with the learner experience in mind - where are these students going to consume this content? How do they like to learn? What devices do they use? How much time do they typically spend each session? Knowing the answers to these questions can help you design content and experience around the learners’ preferences and lifestyles.
Looking at the available technologies that can enhance the learning experience for your users. Various Learning Management Systems offer different features that can add to the learning experience.
Asking for regular feedback within the course and outside it - you can make it more attractive for students to leave feedback by offering them a voucher or other incentive for doing so.
2. Make Updating Your Content a Priority
Ensuring that your content is up-to-date is crucial to providing students with high-quality educational material. This is true both in terms of content and format.
To achieve this in terms of format, stay abreast of the latest developments in the online learning space and regularly review and refresh your content. If you find your content needs a format update, seek out innovative ways to present information, look at available technologies and authoring tools, and plan for creating more interactive material.
When we upgrade content format here at Kurricula, our senior Instructional Designers work with empathy and deep understanding of the learner (both in general and your learner avatar) to identify areas of your content that can be improved to enhance learning experience.
Consistently updating your content, both by introducing new courses and revising existing ones, will keep your offerings relevant and appealing to new and existing students alike.
3. Build Community
Building a community around your online academy is a great way to increase engagement and visibility. Helping students to interact with each other, and with the academy itself, instils a sense of community that can increase brand loyalty, and inspire learners to recommend the academy to their friends and family.
It also has other benefits, including increasing repeat business and Customer Lifetime Value. Having students engaged with the brand on a continuous basis also allows you to discover more about your learners, optimise your content, and come up with new ideas and ventures to address customer needs and interests.
4. Make Your Students Proud to Share
Creating shareable content across your social media, email and from within your course can be a powerful way to boost presence. Ways you can do this include:
Creating certifications that can be shared on Facebook or LinkedIn when learners complete a course will mean learners share their achievements with friends, family and their industry.
Creating shareable content about lifelong learning on social media can boost visibility.
Creating shareable infographics or progress status from within the course can boost visibility.
Consider creating an email newsletter or similar that introduces the new course subjects you have coming out each month and links them to blog posts. Creating readable articles and blog posts around the subject matter rather than just promotional material improves credibility and shareability, and also can improve SEO.
As a closing note, it’s worth investing in making sure that you provide an exceptional learning experience and enough opportunities outside of the learning experience to satisfy students and increase engagement and visibility. This includes designing with learner interest in mind from the beginning and throughout course development, coming out with relevant new and updated content, creating community, and creating shareable content.