If you previously had students go through your course then you may want to spend a few minutes thinking about how they would want to hear about your content updates, your point of view on recent challenges, and any new courses you created.
You are the mentor and expert to these students and they want to hear from you as you continue leading them through their journey to learn new skills and achieve certain creative goals in life.
So let’s talk about what topics we should update our students about and then what channels and tools can we use to update our student base.
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 old students will probably be interested in hearing about your new course about a related topic. For example, if you are teaching how to make cool earrings, your students will probably be excited to hear about your new artisan necklace course.
Resources & Templates
If your students learned how to sing or dance from you, they would certainly be excited to get a new warm-up routine from you. Even if your content takes a new angle, like 10 tips on how to warm-up for your next recital in the back seat of a car.
Community Topics & Events
If you had prior writing students, some of them may be very interested to hear that you are hosting a live workshop or chat room focused on self-publishing illustrated children’s books for minorities. It would be a disservice to your prior students if you didn’t at least post a quick public note with this learning opportunity. In some cases, you may be able to record the event like a zoom webinar, which could be reshared to future and past students.
New Tips
New advice can still be very important to your past students. For example, you may have developed a new technique on how to cut dresses in a new trending way that wasn’t previously included in your class. But you can still let your prior fashion students know that this article or youtube video exists especially because they took a closely related course that included cutting stylish fabrics.
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 as well as 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. Also, 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 really niche set of students from your prior courses, you shouldn’t forget about your prior students.
While you don’t want to be spammy, these students signed up for your course and are excited to hear from you and the topics that you teach. Take the approach that you are sharing new lessons, resources, and offers to your community of fans that have opted in and crave your content.
Don’t forget, staying connected with your ex-students is not only helpful to them but can provide a world of new problems and questions for you that can help inspire future creative work such as articles and course ideas.
For more creative teacher tips to create, grow, and operate your online courses – check out our ArtsyCourseExperts blog.
