If you’ve had students go through your course before, take a few minutes to consider how they’d like to receive updates about:
- New course content and improvements
- Your insights on recent industry challenges
- Any new courses you’ve launched
As their mentor and expert, your students value your guidance and want to stay connected as they continue their learning journey.
Now, let’s discuss what key topics to update them on and which channels and tools are best for keeping your student base informed.
Video Lesson On Updating Your Students
What To Update Old Students About?
Course Updates
The first thing you will want to update old students about is updates to a course that they took. For example, they may have taken your class about Apple Final Cut version X, but there is a new Final Cut app called version X + 1, which they will probably be interested in.
New Courses
Your former students will likely be interested in your new course on a related topic. For example, if you teach a course on making stylish earrings, they’ll probably be excited to hear about your new artisan necklace course.
Resources & Templates
If your students learned singing or dancing from you, they’d likely be excited to receive a new warm-up routine. Even if your content takes a fresh angle, like 10 Tips for Warming Up for Your Next Recital in the Back Seat of a Car, they’ll appreciate your insights and creativity.
Community Topics & Events
If you had previous writing students, some may be very interested to hear that you’re hosting a live workshop or chat room on self-publishing illustrated children’s books for minorities. It would be a disservice not to share a quick public note about this learning opportunity.
In some cases, you may also be able to record the event, like a Zoom webinar, and reshare it with both past and future students.
New Tips
New advice can still be valuable to your past students. For example, if you’ve developed a new technique for cutting dresses in a trending style that wasn’t covered in your class, you can still share it with your former fashion students. Since they took a related course on cutting stylish fabrics, they’ll likely appreciate knowing about your new article or YouTube video.
How To Update Your Old Students?
Course System Messages
Once your students take the course, you may be able to send messages in the course system to all your current and prior students. Learning Management Systems (LMS) often have chat rooms by course and/or module. They also have tools for teachers to send notes to all their free and paid customers.
Emails
Depending on whether you host your courses on a marketplace like Skillshare or tech platform like Thinkific you may or may not have your student emails. Also even if you don’t have your students email from the course system, you may have had the chance to ask your students to sign up on your blog for more tips. If not, that is a good follow-up to mention at the end of your courses. Either way, email is still an important tool you can use to update your students.
Social
Your courses and content marketing may have attracted quite a few followers on your various social profiles like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and Twitter. So, leverage those when you have updates for your courses or you decide to offer a new course. Remember social can be a quick text message, a link to an article or sales page, or even a short video message with a preview of what they could learn.
Podcasts
If you host a periodic podcast as an expert teacher, don’t forget to update prior students and listeners with new tips, content, and course offerings. Business experts say that it is significantly easier to re-sell to someone who knows you already than to try to make a new sale.
Your Community
Whether you host a Facebook group, slack channel, or a more advanced dedicated membership community like circle.so, you will want to post updates there about your updated courses and new courses. In fact, since your community are your most loyal and understanding fans, you should let them know about new content before everyone else. You may want to have a message area or discussion room just for news updates, but you may also want to include content updates naturally within specific content chat rooms like sewing equipment.
Wrap Up
Whether you have a large student base or a small, niche group from your previous courses, don’t overlook your past students.
While you don’t want to be spammy, remember that they signed up for your course because they’re interested in your teaching. Think of it as sharing new lessons, resources, and offers with a community of fans who have opted in and crave your content.
Staying connected with former students isn’t just valuable for them—it can also spark new ideas for you. Their questions and challenges can inspire future creative work such as articles and course topics.
FAQ Do You Keep Your Prior Course Students Updated?
For more creative teacher tips to create, grow, and operate your online courses – check out our ArtsyCourseExperts blog.
So now, you’re a lot smarter. Thanks for hanging out!
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