What to do when you have a course completion problem
When you spend time and energy creating a course and people don’t complete it, it can cause that big old ugly imposter syndrome to rear its head. Before we toss it and start all over, it’s useful to get to the bottom of why it’s happening.
My latest podcast guest, Dr. Luna Munoz, came to our conversation with a completion problem. Luna helps early and mid-career academics take their skills from higher ed and translate them into nonacademic speak for nonacademic audiences. We’;re using my conversation with Luna as a real life example of a business owner struggling with course completion.
Through her business, Luna Leadership, she built a course on creating that CV and resumes, and the course worked as a supplement to her coaching programs. BUT people were not finishing her CV course for academics leaving academia. She had data showing people were getting into it and accessing it, but not actually getting to the end.
Listen for the full episode
AND the BS Breakthrough (where I break down how this all applies to you)
At the core, when you’re wondering why your students aren't completing your online course, you need to figure out the gaps.
Diagnosing the Course Completion Gaps
Everyone has different gaps and different barriers that they accidentally set up for their students in their courses. To figure those out we need to dig into what data we’re actually looking at, what the goals are and for whom.
In Luna’s case, it was clear, pretty quickly, that the course completion problem stemmed from having a half built course for the audience she was targeting.
People in her Life After Academia and Building Beyond Academia programs, had access to her CV course as an added value. That means she could say, “okay, now you're ready to go do x, y, z in the CV course.” The key to diagnosis here is that they worked alongside Luna.
But when they tried to take it as a standalone, they weren’t actually creating the resume.
My diagnosis? The course worked as a supplement. Which is not surprising the coaching programs were doing that foundational work. Luna was helping people figure out what their skills were, translate them, figure out what they liked to do, and figure out what they wanted to do.
And the course was just kind of like that final execution piece where they're pulling it all together.
She had the “let’s do this shit” piece down; she was showing and telling how to write a nonacademic CV. BUT if you tried to take that alone, you hit a wall.
You can't write a nonacademic CV if you haven't translated your skills, and
you can't translate your skills if you haven't figured out the roles you're going for, and
you can't figure out the roles you're going for if you're in the waffling phase where you realize you can do anything and everything or you're just completely overwhelmed.
So she was missing the foundational pieces before that. The part where you figure out what skills you have, what do you want to do, how all of those things translate. And without that foundation, people couldn't actually execute. And so they just stopped.
Basically the course was starting at step three when people needed steps one and two first.
So that's why I'm calling it a half course problem. Luna built the latter half, which is not a bad place to be. It just means there's other work that she's got to do.
This is exactly why it’s so important to do learner research.
How to use your course completion diagnosis
Once you know the gaps, look to see what you already have before creating things from scratch. It might mean doing some tweaking, but iteration is key in good learning design (and business in general imo).
And that’s what Luna realized, too. She actually had pieces that would fill the gaps already.
She'd created freebies on translating skills.
She had a quiz.
She had an assessment with this custom calculator that will tell you your strengths and your motivations.
So she had all these things sitting there, not being used because she wasn't realizing what she was missing. So the solution wasn't fixing completion.
The solution was reorganizing the course to include that discovery work and pulling in the things that she already had, and then adding a coaching call early in the process where, you know, she knows people tend to waffle the most.
Three things to help you determine why your students aren't completing your online course
These three things are about recognizing where your learners are, focusing on what you’ve already got, and making your course fit the context.
You might have half a course
When you’re an expert in something, it can be really really hard to remember what it was like to not be where you are right now. You build the thing that you're good at. The thing you know how to teach, the final output piece. That sometimes means you end up with gaps in your curriculum.
So in Luna's case, it was just about half of a course. She had built the doing part without the prep work, and that's why it only worked as a supplement. In this case, it was how to write a CV, but it could have been how to launch your product or how to build the website.
Think about the brainstorming and the figuring out what the thing actually needs to have. That’s what was missing and that piece is messy.
It’s the figuring it out phase. It's where people go back and forth and they second guess and they spin their wheels and they realize they could do anything, and then they get completely overwhelmed.
And it's also where people tend to get stuck because they're doing that waffling piece, right. Sometimes you just need another human or you need the next right step, in order to stay on track with the kind of harder work that you're trying to do.
So if you have low course completion and you are just jumping in with the execution only, without doing the part where you're asking them to dig figure sh!it out, ask yourself: what do people need to figure out before they can execute? Because that might be why your students aren't completing your online course.
For Luna, it was what skills do I have? What do we want to do? How do my academic skills translate? What roles am I looking for?
Once you identify the discovery work, you can then build it into the course or build it from things that you already have.
Stop creating and start integrating
One of the top mistakes I see business owners make is continuing to build from scratch when iterating and refining are the better option. It’s worse than shiny object syndrome because you’re literally making more work for yourself.
Luna had a quiz. She had an assessment. She had a freebie on skills translation. And they were all sitting there unused. Sometimes it can feel like more work to go and audit and pull the things that we already have.
But at the same time, it is less creative work that we have to do, and we can then spend our creativity on actually designing the experience if we already have something to start from.
So even though Luna's first instinct was to create something new, as we got into it, she realized that she did have all of these things, and she just needed to take them and tweak them and adjust them to the purpose of this particular course.
If you see a gap and you create something to fill it, and you're not integrating into your existing systems, it's just going to sit there unused and then you're going to see another gap and then you're going to create something else new.
Before you start creating new things, take a look at things you already have that might be polished to include or iterated on to include in your course. Ask yourself, do I already have something that does this or does something similar to it? Can I repurpose it? Can I pull it into what I'm already building?
Coaching calls are not failures, they're features for course completion
Everyone thinks the evergreen course is the dream. That passive income will come if you just build the evergreen course. But self-paced courses that are also self-led can make it hard to get through the sticky parts of learning.
So one of the things that Luna and I talked about adding was a short coaching call early in the course, at that discovery phase where people tend to spin their wheels the most. She was hesitating. And that is understandable, because if you add a coaching call to a course, does it mean the course isn't working? Does it mean you failed at creating a standalone learning experience?
I'm always going to argue no; it just means that you understand the sticky parts, the places where people get stuck, and you are being proactive about building support into the structure instead of being reactive.
Certain work is hard to do alone. That figuring out phase is where people need a sounding board. They want someone to help them see patterns they can't see themselves because they're so frickin close to it, and they want a reality check. So a 20 or 30 minute call at that point is not a failure of the course. It is a feature of the course. It helps people to get unstuck and actually get to the part where they can execute and leads to more course completion.
If your course has a spot where people consistently drop off, consider adding support right at that point, not as a band aid, but as part of the design. And you can price it accordingly by including that in the course fee or offer it as an upsell. Just make sure that it's in there if you have sticky bits.
How to Apply This to YOUR Course Completion Diagnosis and Get More Students to Complete Your Course
Step one. Map the learning journey that your course actually needs.
If your course starts with execution, which is the doing part, back up and ask what work needs to happen before they're ready to do this. What do people need to figure out before they can execute? And don't skip the messy figuring out phase just because it's hard to teach, because it is hard to teach.
Step two. Before you create something new, audit what you already have.
Do you have freebies, quizzes, assessments, lead magnets, sitting unused? Can you use any of those to fill the gaps in your course?
I’ll be honest. A good part of my course is things that I had used in workshops and as freebies, and as little ticket items that I was like,” oh, I'm already having people do this. I'm going to pull these into a course that has support.”
That's absolutely okay to do. In fact, it makes it a better activity because you’ve tested it.
If you are sitting on a course that people aren't finishing, maybe you have half a course still, or a third, or two thirds, a Course Audit would be perfect for you.