About lectures
Lectures are the main 'building blocks' of your eCourse.
As mentioned in the what are eCourses? guide here in the knowledge base:
lectures can either be videos or articles and when you put them all together, in your own special way, they can transfer knowledge from you to your students all over the world
So a Lifecoach online coaching eCourse is a collection of either video or article based lectures, grouped together into relevant sections. You may choose to create your eCourse using 100% video based lectures, 100% article based lectures or a combination of the two mediums. It's completely up to you!
Creating your first lecture
As mentioned above in the screenshot, all eCourse sections must contain at least one lecture and therefore, every lecture must be placed into a section within your eCourse.
Adding a New Lecture
Click the 'Add New Lecture' button inside the relevant section of your eCourse. This will bring up the 'New Lecture' box.
Lecture Title
To get started, give your lecture a relevant title. Choose a title that's as short as possible while giving the student a clear idea about exactly what your lecture is about.
Click 'Save' and your lecture will be created.
Creating your new lecture will add the lecture into the active section and expand the lecture pane to allow you to start adding detail...
Choosing a lecture type
Use the 'Lecture Type' selector to choose whether to create either a video based lecture or an article based lecture.
Note: Lectures should be either video based OR article based. They cannot be both. Where you have a video, it's much better to create a video type lecture for each video, because you can always add written content to a video lecture as a 'Lecture Resource' (see below). Try to avoid adding videos as a lecture resources. The reason for this is that video lectures play through the online player, whereas videos added as lecture resources do not - they must be downloaded to watch and this may cause issues for students who do not have a video player on their computer.
Lecture length
Best practice dictates that you keep each lecture relatively short. Less than a 10 minutes for a video and the same for an article's reading time is good, although 2-5 minutes is ideal.
It's much better to break longer concepts or ideas down into multiple smaller lectures for the following reasons:
- Attention spans when using online content are typically short.
- Information is often best absorbed in smaller 'chunks'.
- For videos especially, and even more critical on mobile devices, shorter lectures allow faster download with less chance of technical interruption.
- The longer the video, the larger the file size. Keep videos short to avoid file size limits.
- Aim for around 5-10 minutes per lecture
Video lectures
Video based lectures give you a wealth of options to directly engage with your audience. You might choose to record yourself talking directly into the camera, record your screen as you run through a powerpoint style presentation, combine the two approaches so you appear in a small window within your presentation or create something more 'movie' like. The point is, the world is your oyster so think about what will work best for you, what you think will best engage your audience and what you would personally like to see if you were to enrol in your own eCourse!
Top Tip 1: Put yourself in your audience's shoes. Have you ever taken a really amazing online eCourse? What worked really well? Where could you get inspiration? Remember, it doesn't have to be complicated or use any professional equipment.
Top Tip 2: Some of the most successful eCourses are made with mobile phone cameras and free or readily available presentation software. We use Zoom to record our videos! It's. completely free and records high quality .mp4 format videos which is perfect for use in your eCourse. Here's a quick video guide if you'd like to try it yourself :)
Top Tip 3: Whatever you go with, remember to keep each lecture relatively short. Break longer videos down into smaller lectures over multiple parts for the reasons mentioned above. Do your best to keep lectures below 10 minutes.
Video upload
To upload a video into a lecture, either drag and drop a .mp4 video file into the drop-zone, or click to select a video file from your system.
At this time only .mp4 video files are supported. We are working to add more file formats soon.
Note the minimum requirements for video quality and file size before uploading.
When uploading a new video, it will automatically be added into your eCourse library, making it easy to find later.
Adding video from your eCourse library
Your eCourse library contains all of the videos that you have previously uploaded into your eCourse. To add a video from your library simply select it.
Use the navigator to page through your library if you have lots of uploaded videos.
Article lectures
Video is hugely popular but may not always be either possible or the best medium. Where written content is more appropriate as a delivery method, create an article type lecture. Articles can be structured as you see fit and can include media like images.
Lecture Resources
A lecture resource is an extra piece of content, in addition to your lecture video or article that allows you to share supporting information on the current lecture with your students. This may be something like a PDF file for example.
Including resources with each lecture is completely optional.
To enable including resources, simply toggle the switch to on to reveal the options for adding resources to your current lecture.
After adding one or more resources to a lecture, they will become available to students to download through a button on the relevant lecture in your eCourse.
Note: Although you can add videos as lecture resources, try to avoid this. Rather, try to use each video as a video lecture of it's own, and only add written content as lecture resources. The reason for this is that video lectures play through the online player, whereas videos added as lecture resources do not - they must be downloaded to watch and this may cause issues for students who do not have a video player on their computer.
Allowing lecture preview
It's completely up to you whether or not to allow users to preview certain lectures in your eCourse before buying your eCourse. We recommend that you do offer previews for some lectures to give students a feel for you as a Coach and what to expect from your eCourse. Data shows that previews significantly increase course sales, but choose carefully which lectures to enable preview on. You don't want to give too much away for free, but you do want to select lectures that draw students in and leave them wanting more from you.
To enable preview on a lecture, simply toggle the switch.