How to Discover What Your Students Want to Learn (NOT What You Want to Teach Them)

Ladies & gents, my name is Brandon Stover, and I’m the founder of Plato University. Welcome to Theory into Action.

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If you've seen my video about how to create a course, you know one of the very first steps to do is to go ask your students what they want to learn.

Today I'm going to break that process down into five easy steps for you to follow so that you get a full understanding of everything that your student wants to learn and be able to create a very robust course, answering all of their questions and tapping into their internal motivation to want to finish the course.

Step 1: Finding Your Students

Finding your students is going to be pretty easy if you already have an existing student base, a set of employees that you're creating training for, or you've already created a following or online community around the type of content that you want to teach. You can just go to them and ask them questions directly.

However, if this is your very first course, you may not already have a community that you can go ask them what they need to learn. Instead, you can go onto the internet and search for communities that are already congregating around the subject matter that you want to teach.

Why Find Your Students?

Well there's two important reasons.

1. First, you're going to have an infinite well you can return to in order to source questions your students need answered. The type of things that they want and need to know.
2. Second, these are places that you can begin building your own community, so that when you're finished with your course, you actually have people you can launch it to, and you're not just sending it out into the abyss.

How to Find Your Students

You have two sources.

First, you have your existing community.

• This is going to be your student body, if you're in a more of an academic institution.
• This might be your employees or volunteers if you're a for profit or non profit.
• And if you're a content creator, this might be your different social media channels and YouTube.
• Basically anywhere these people are already congregating around the type of material that you speak about. Go to those places and start opening up lines of communication with them if you haven't already.

The second place that you're going to find your students are in other communities.

• Because of the wonderful world of the internet, we've created a dozen places that people begin to congregate around specific topics they enjoy talking about.  
• Online forums: If you just do a quick Google search around the topic that you want to teach. I guarantee you that you're going to find some sort of communities and forums that are already congregating a bunch of questions around your topic.
• Reddit: There's probably a Reddit community for almost about anything. You can go on Reddit, search there, and find the different communities that are meeting around your topic.
• Social media groups: Places like Facebook have groups that build communities from people all around the world that are focusing on this specific topic.
• Content creators: People that are talking about the same topics that you are. Even if they're super academic topics, I guarantee that there's somebody making content around this. You can go to their social media pages or their YouTube channels and interact with the people that are in the comments of those places.
• Courses: People covering the same type of topic that you are. These courses often have communities built around them, people that have already gone through the course. So it may be worth you getting into that course and going through it yourself so that you can interact with that community. Or interacting with the people that haven't started the course yet. And they're congregating around different questions that novice people around that topic usually have.
• Meetup.com: Finding different groups that congregate around your topic is a great way to meet people in person.
• Conferences: A lot of times these are going to have experts and professionals that talk about Those materials, but the audience members are the ones that you're going to want to talk to because they're the ones that want to learn this material.
• Again, basically, you're looking for anywhere where people are grouping together more than one or two people around this topic that you want to teach.

Step 2: Answer Their Questions

That's right. Before we go asking them anything, we're going to start helping them by answering the questions they already have.

So in this step, you're spending time in the communities that you found, looking through the questions that they have, and answering those to the best of your ability.

Why Answer Their Questions?

Now why are you going to start doing this before you ask them any questions? Well, there's a few different reasons.

1. You gain an awareness around the needs that these particular people have. You'll begin seeing questions that are asked over and over and over again, and that's a good signal that these questions need to be included inside of your course.
2. It's going to position you as an expert on this topic, which will lead to more people asking you questions in the future and interacting with you more generally in those communities.
3. The big reason that you're doing this is because you're providing value to that community before you ever ask them for a favor. You've come in, you've answered a ton of questions, people see you around the community. So when you come later to ask them for a favor, maybe like taking a survey, which I'll cover here in just a moment, or launching your course to them, they're going to be more likely to want to interact with you and take action on those things.

How to Answer Their Questions

Go join the communities that you found and follow whatever orientation or beginning steps that they have in that community to to the fullest ability to really show that yes, you belong here and here's everything that they would want to know about you.

If it's an online community:

• Start looking through the posts that other people have made and see the type of questions that they ask.
• If you're able to answer that question from your expertise around the topic you want to speak to, go ahead and take the time to actually do so.
• When you're looking through these posts and seeing which questions to answer, think about quality versus quantity. It's way better for you to do one post that's well thought out than doing a hundred posts that is just a one sentence response. A one sentence response is not going to help that person. So when you're writing out a response to this question, think about doing much larger responses in the thousands of words rather than in the hundreds of words.
• As you're answering, make the response as personalized as possible to that person, but also including examples that apply to to the general readers of that forum or that online community. This way you're showing that you understand the context of that person and your expertise applies to them, but it also applies to anybody else that may have this similar problem.

If it's an in person community:

• Try and talk to as many people as you can, asking them the type of struggles that they're having around the topic that you're all meeting about.
• As they tell you about their struggles and the questions they have, try and give advice when it's applicable.

Pro tip: As you're answering these questions, try and take notes or record the questions and your answer somewhere in a document.

• So if you're doing it online, you can directly copy the question and copy your response and put it into a document. This is going to save you time in the future, because a lot of these questions get asked over and over again. Now, you already have a well thought out response to that you can paste to that question. Of course, always take the time to personalize it to the person asking the question.
• The second thing that this is going to do is allow you to start creating a question and answer bank That can be the beginning of your course outline. You can take all those questions and put it into a course outline, and take your responses and that becomes your course content.

If you're struggling to find these communities,  you can also use a tool called Answer the Public, which congregates all the questions that people ask around a specific topic.

• So if you went to answer the public and you typed in digital marketing, it'll give you all the questions that people have asked on the internet about digital marketing and which ones get asked most.
• Then you can go and create content, maybe a YouTube video around a very popular question and start to publish that answering the public's questions in general.
• However, whenever possible, I recommend doing it directly in communities because these are the people that are going to be the ones taking your course in the beginning. Those are the people that know and like and trust you, so they're more likely to take action on that than a general person who's just seen your YouTube video once.

Step 3: Running a Learner Survey

A learner survey is a short set of questions to uncover more of your learner's needs beyond what they've already posted somewhere else.

Why Run a Learner Survey?

You're an expert. You have the curse of knowledge, a cognitive bias where we incorrectly assume that everyone else knows as much about the topic as we do.

By asking our students directly what they want to know, we avoid assumptions about what they already know, or what they don't already know, allowing us to better tailor what foundational concepts we need to teach in our course.

Additionally, you're probably an expert in this topic because you love learning about it. However, most people are not as nerdy about it as you are.

So by asking students what they want to learn, you tap into their internal motivation, which is going to be the key to keeping them engaged in your course and succeeding with learning the material.

How to Run a Learner Survey

First, create your questions. I recommend keeping the amount of questions that you have as short as possible, but still gaining the amount of detail that you need. Use as many open ended questions as possible. You want to hear the learner's needs in their own words. Not in the ways that you describe them.

Possible questions could include:

• Describe your level of understanding (novice, intermediate, master, etc.)
• What do you want to know about x topic?
• What is your single biggest challenge in understanding x topic?
• Tell me about the last time you encountered this problem.
• Why is this hard?
• What, if anything, have you done to try and solve this problem?
• What don't you love about the solutions you have already tried?
• What do you desire most from learning x topic?
• What is your biggest fear about learning x topic
• Anything else you would like me to know about your learning?

Next, create your survey. There are dozens of survey tools out there, but the ones I paticuraly like are:

• Google Forms
• Typeform
• Airtable

Finally, post the link to your survey inside the communities that you've already been adding value to.

Even better, go directly message the people that you've answered questions of and give them the link because they're the ones that have gotten the most value from you being in the community and more likely to actually take this survey. They are more likely to give detailed responses because you've given detailed responses to their questions.

Step 4: Do 1-on-1 Learner Interviews

Our next step is to do one on one interviews with some of the people that have taken our survey. Learner interviews are 15 to 30 minute one on one interviews over something like Zoom, where you dive deeper into that specific learner's needs.

You're going to get a very detailed, nuanced response to these questions that are going to give you more insight.

Why Do Learner Interviews?

When you just run a survey, you don't get the full depth of a response. Surveys often lack detail or emotion that's behind the responses that they're giving. Some people may be very busy and you're just getting one sentence responses. That's not going to be very useful for you to understand what the learners actually need.

Additionally, when you're talking to somebody directly, like on a video call, and they give you a response, you can probe deeper into understanding what they meant by their response, or asking follow up questions that give you greater insight.

How to Do 1-on-1 Learner Interviews

To setup the interviews:

• During your learner survey, I recommend collecting the emails of all the people that respond. This way, when you go to do your interviews, you can email the people that have already talked to you.
• In your email, you can let them know that that you want to make the best course possible for them and would like the chance to understand them more. This is going to make them feel very special and more likely to want to actually sit down and have an interview with you.
• Make it super easy and use an online calendar, something like Calendly, to block out time and give it to people for them to choose whenever they're available to do the interview.
• If you use Calendly, it automatically creates a Zoom link and sends out a calendar invite. Making it more likely that that person actually shows up.

Starting the interview:

• Make them feel comfortable by having a little bit of small talk, and then telling them what you're going to do during the interview, and why you're doing it. Reiterate that you want to make a really excellent course, and you want to know as much as possible about your learners.
• Before you start asking them questions, ask if you can record the interview. This is going to allow you to focus directly on them and their responses and be more likely to ask good follow up questions, rather than focusing on taking notes and making it look like you're distracted or not paying attention to them. Later on, you can go through the recording and take more detailed notes focusing on their responses in that way.

Conducting the interview:

• Ask your questions. You can actually use the same questions from the survey, but the ones that you want to focus the most on in this interview are three: What are you struggling with? What are you afraid of most with this topic? What do you desire to do most with this knowledge once you've learned it?
• As they answer and give you responses to those questions, look for opportunities to go deeper, to ask a follow up question, or to probe deeper into what they meant by their response.

Ending the interview:

• If you have time left over at the end of the interview, I recommend asking them if they have any questions for you. You'll be surprised the type of questions that they come up with.
• Thank them for giving some of their time and then try and connect with them on any social media channels that you're not already interacting with that person. This is just going to give you one more line of communication to that person when you launch your course.

Step 5: Fill in Gaps in Their Knowledge

Up to this point, you've gathered a lot of information about what your future students don't know. However, students don't know what they don't know sometimes.

This is where the magic of you being an expert comes in. You can identify the gaps in their knowledge and the foundational concepts that are needed to fill those gaps.

Why Fill in Gaps in Their Knowledge?

As you're gaining insights about what students want to learn, there's probably going to be some portions of a topic that they're super excited about.

However, as the expert, you know there's several foundational concepts that come before that portion that they want to learn. If they want to learn that portion effectively, you know that they're going to need these foundational concepts.

So as the expert, you're the glue between all the exciting parts.

By the time that they get to the end of the course, they're actually able to have the outcomes that they want, the things that they desired most to do with this course. You've led them every step of the way.

How to Fill in Gaps in Their Knowledge

First, look over all the questions that you've collected and answered in your time in the communities, all the responses from your survey and the responses that you got during your interviews.

• What questions are asked most often?
• What things are people most excited to learn?
• What challenges do they have when trying to learn those things?

Next, you can take the answers to those questions and start putting them in a logical sequence. That becomes the outline of your course. As you put those questions in a logical sequence, you're going to notice that there's some steps missing.

Finally, fill in those gaps with the foundational concepts that bridge those exciting parts.

Struggling to Find Your Students?

Although the benefit to you and your students is tremendous, uncovering your learners needs can be quite a lot of work.

If you want help, I facilitate this process during the discovery phase of creating a course with you.

So let's schedule a free strategy call together to see if I help you to turn your wisdom into actionable education.

Let's build something great together.