How much support should I offer in my course?

 How much support should I offer in my course?

by Dr. Catrina Mitchum

This question popped up in a course creation group I’m in. I answered it there, but felt like comments on social media don’t give enough space to do the answer justice. 

And so here we are. 

TL/DR: It depends. 

It depends on you, the course goals and content, and your learners. These are the key three that impact most of the choices that you’ll make in your course, and support is one of them. 

Because it can be easy to burnout on support, I like to start with three lists across those three areas.

You

What kind of support are you willing to give? What kind of space do you have in your life to give support? You need to start with you for a few reasons. 

1. If you don't have the time and energy to support the kind of course you want to create, then you have to rethink the kind of course that you want to create.

2. It will help you actually set boundaries and design your course in a way that you feel like you can support it. 

You’ll want to ask yourself questions like: 

How much time do I actually have in a week to give the support for this course?

Be ruthless and honest here. Take a good look at your schedule. You might even consider tracking your time for a week so you can identify a consistent range and even potential times during the week where you can schedule support in. This will help you set those boundaries, too.

What kind of support am I willing to give?

This might be a list to come back to after you create your course needs list, but to get you started you can think about some common umbrellas that course support falls under. 

• Asynchronous support - this can be something like responding in a chat program, giving feedback on activities, basically anything where you and the learner AREN’T in the same space at the same exact time.

• Synchronous support -  this can be a live in the group or an ask me anything sessions, basically anything where you and the learner ARE in the same space at the same time (these can also become asynchronous support for later)

It’s important to start from where you are and what your life needs are in terms of supporting the course. It’s going to take some introspection and being honest with yourself, because if you're not honest with yourself, then you're going to be designing a course that isn't going to work for you, and then you won't be able to give your students the support that they need.

Knowing the support you can provide might also change as you move onto determining what support the course needs, or you have things in your life that change, so also remember to come back to this list occasionally and reevaluate. 

The Course 

So the second thing that you need to consider when you're trying to decide how much support you should give, is the actual course itself. At this point, you should have an idea of what your big goal is and what the outcomes are for the course. You'll know because you are the subject matter expert, right? You're the expert in the thing that you're teaching. 

When considering what the course needs, ask yourself:

How complex is this thing? 

Is the content or are the activities going to need extra support and feedback becomes of the complexity of the topic or how squishy it is. This can depend heavily on the next question -

What level are my students coming to me with? Compare it to the level of the course. 

So is this a beginner calligraphy class or the intermediate? Is this advanced? What level are they now? Knowing this will help you determine when the support needs to happen and how much support needs to happen at each step.

How is my course designed? 

So some support can actually be built into the design. So for example, if you're asking your learners to use a specific technology in doing whatever it is you're asking them to do, then you can pre-build in the support for “this is how you use the technology and this is how you use it in the way I'm asking you to use it.”

This is also where you can go to get help from the company. Don't forget that support doesn't just have to come from you; if you're asking them to use a very particular product that has support built in on the website, definitely pull that first. There's no need to reinvent the wheel, although sometimes it does help if you're using it in a way that's not intended.

In a nutshell, the goal here is to try to anticipate those questions, and build them into the design of your course. 

Regardless of the kind of support your course needs, it should all have a structure and a purpose within your course. So don't just offer Ask Me Anything sessions when you don't feel like your students are going to have questions.

For example, something that you might build into your course, if you’re going to offer feedback on certain things, is a form or a survey. So that might be an instance where you want to outline very specifically what they can turn into you, what to expect from you, what kind of turnaround time that they should expect, and ask them to give you areas to focus the feedback on.

This makes it so the onus of the feedback is not just on you. You might have space for them to say 

• this is the thing I'm turning in

• I am really concerned about x, y, z. 

• Could you specifically give me feedback on that?

That doesn't mean you can't give them feedback on other things, but it gives a place to start and can help you work within the boundaries you want to set.

You can do this for live sessions. It doesn't have to be just like show up and do whatever. 

Identify Pain Points

The other thing that you need to do is actually figure out where in the course they need support. This is another instance where you as the expert know where the pain points are. You know this because you went through it, or you’ve been doing this a long time, or you just know this piece is a cognitive jump. This is this is going to be a place where someone taking your course is going to have more questions, or going to want feedback on something because they're going to be unsure of what they’re doing. 

So go figure out where it needs support and what the best type of support for that particular thing that you're trying to teach them.

As you’re doing that, continue to return to the goals and the outcomes and the things your learner is going to get out of this course to make sure that the support aligns with those things.

The Learner

Okay. And the third and often forgotten about element that you need to consider when thinking about support is actually who your learners are. 

The previous section asked about their level, but also: 

• What type of learner are they? This isn’t learning styles; this is whether or not they're comfortable asking questions, comfortable being a beginner, 

• What kind of educational experiences they’ve had that might make them more or less likely to be able to move through something independently?

• Do they have specific accommodations for a disability? (this can be overwhelming, so see my post on taking small steps toward accessibility to get started)

Having an understanding of what your learners needs are is going to be another important point in support. Now, some of that you can act about beforehand and try to build into the design, some of that is going to just need to be responsive, and you're going to need to figure out how to adjust for those learners. 

Those are things you can keep around in the next round of things, and is why feedback and iteration are so important. 

Ask questions that will help you determine what support is working and what isn't working. It’s vital making sure that the support that you're offering is doing the things that you want it to do, because if not, then don't do it. It’s wasting your time and your learners aren’t benefiting.

Keep Offering Support

I was actually really excited to see the question in that group because I feel like a lot of times people are not supporting learners in online courses. They want an “evergreen” course. This means that in the course creation industry, there are not a lot of opportunities for mentorship and professional guidance that are offered within courses. 

But there should be.