Ana Santos

If course enrollments/sales aren't enough to measure the success of a course, what else can we measure? 👉👉👉 Course completion rates can be ONE thing to measure but they don't tell us everything. 🧐 First, let's review the concept of "metric" -> a way for us to measure something *cough* numbers *cough*. It can feel limiting sometimes, and I am not telling you to rely on metrics solely, but the truth is that they are needed. UX metrics are special in the sense that they focus on the User Experience. Well, in this case, on the experience of the Learner. 😎 What does this mean? Glad you asked! Experience is all about the interaction between the user and the product -> between the learner and the course. Most of us want to measure IMPACT. What a beautiful word. Not as easy to measure though. In order to measure "impact", we might need a combination of different metrics: - For example, how do learners feel when they navigate through the interface of our course? How about the materials? Can we measure this? Luckily for us, we have customer satisfaction scales that can be also used to measure student satisfaction. - How about the time students are spending reading the materials? Did you know that websites like @medium track TTR (total time reading)? - Did our learners find the content useful? And if that's so, did they actually apply? (that's why in this image I made the differentiation between "attitude" and "behavior"). & so much more... To get you in the mindset of measuring stuff, I'm sharing a few examples of UX metrics for online courses, but the options are endless, so always remember your goals! And... remember that a UX metric needs to be: - Observable - Quantifiable - Represented in a numeric format or counted in some way 💬 Are you measuring your learner experience? 💬 *** Want to know more about course creation? ---> Super deal - 17-27 August only <--- If you've been on the fence about whether you should grab my Ideal Learner Research workshop or not, then this is the time, as it comes with $5k worth of courses: https://ana-santos.com/radiant (make sure you use my link if you want to receive a bonus) ***

It's not about the transformation, fellow course creators... ...it's about the path towards that transformation! 🤯 Erm... What? But doesn't that mean the same thing? Not quite. First, let's define "transformation". Imagine you want to be one of the fastest runners in the world. There might be quite a few ways to achieve this goal. The transformation: your learner wants to be the fastest runner in the world. Your course: it'll help your learner become the fastest runner in the world. 😎 Cool, sorted, huh? Feeling already like the best marketer in the world? Of course you can't "guarantee" results because it'll depend on the work that people are willing to put into the course... ...but is that all, really? 👉 If you think that all your learners need to know about your course is the "transformation", then you're not a course creator, you're just a marketer. You may sell your course or not... Now, whether your course will be impactful or not, that's a whole different story. 👈 You see, there's the common misconception that people aren't interested in learning *gulp* Quite the assumption, uh? The assumption that we are all lazy and all we want is a magic pill to get to that "transformation" 🙄 This might have worked once, but the online course industry has been growing like crazy (and it won't stop anytime soon). Old tricks won't work anymore, if you can't deliver impact and real results to your learners. 🧐 So -> the path towards that transformation is key. And it's important to communicate that path too, give the control back to your audience. I need to know what the heck will I be learning to be the fastest runner in the world: - If I already did an intensive training and I am still not the fastest runner in the world, will this course solve my problem? Or will it be teaching the stuff I already know? - Or, pretty much the opposite, I haven't exercised in ages: Will I even be able to apply this information? ** Moral of the story: Inform your learners. It's not just about the transformation. It is mostly about the path to get there. **

⚠️ Warning ⚠️ I'm going to be doing that thing where I'm super vulnerable and transparent. My friends — I'm exhausted. . . . BUT not necessarily in a bad way, it has actually been an exciting month for me, full of new opportunities and projects. Now I need to tell you something, and no, this is not one of those vulnerable-speeches-that-end-in-a-pitch, and no, there won't be a call-to-action by the end of this post. Between you and me, maintaing a social media account like this one, which has been created a fair amount of time ago (and let's be real, it already had better glory days), is a lot of hard work. I already said this before, but you're constantly evolving: your needs, your priorities. And it's the same for your audience, no matter what social media gurus say. You can, of course, blame the algorithm, or the fact that "nowadays everyone is doing reels or video" and "carousels don't work" (and yet we have content-heavy accounts like @soyouwanttotalkabout that are massive). *audience gasps* "What...b-but how? People don't read and have a 5-second attention span, don't they?" The secret sauce is still your content and whether it's aligned or not --> not only with your audience but with YOU. Yes, my friend, you. It's perfectly fine to switch directions, shake things up, and post something that your audience didn't specifically say they wanted! ⬇️ *hiding from social media police* (anyway, we are designers, we know that what people say and do are different things...don't we?)... A LOT has changed about the content I post: I'm a lot more focused now on educators, leaders, instructors, and those who want to teach (mostly design) because for me Instagram has always been the easiest way to connect with individuals, people like you and me, not just companies, for an after-hours tea. And I'll continue posting UX content because learning+teaching has everything to do with UX and design, but you can just stay tuned if you want to understand why (*not a call-to-action* kinda). Happy week, and remember... ... take a break. Or, you know, just do what makes you happy.

🤔 Ever felt like an impostor for not having the "right" answer? 🤔 Ever felt like the central topic of a meme every time you have to unavoidably say "it depends"? (because yes, it does!) 🤔 Ever felt like, even in 2021, you need to still look like someone who owns the ultimate truth? Things aren't as black and white, especially when it comes to learning! Even with the best of our intentions, sometimes we end up slowing down the learning process of our students, peers, coworkers, subordinates, etc. by imposing* our own views, our own solutions, and our own very-subjective-shall-I-say perspectives. *not to confuse "imposing" with "sharing". 🙌 But it's a learning process for everyone! Going from creative leader to learner-centered educator is a process. The first step? Being open, flexible and adaptable to different contexts, learners and situations. - - - - - - 📖 Free Ideal Learner Challenge "Find Your Ideal Learner" https://ana-santos.com/ideal-learner-challenge/ - - - - - - 💬 Ever felt like an imposter for not having the right answers? Let's chat in the comments!

Falling in love with your craft is amazing... but what happens when you're past the "honeymoon phase"? You're not alone if you ever get discouraged, feel lack of excitement about a project, or even apathy towards work in general. Myself I've been there before, way more times than I could care to count. As creatives, we may think that's never going to happen in our field — after all, we're doing what we love... right? More than that, we're getting paid to do what we love! How lucky can we be? 🤯 Well, that sounds great in theory, but add two glasses of meetings, half a cup of business requirements and a sprinkle of getting everyone on the same page, and it can get overwhelming quickly. In his book "Drive", Daniel H Pink mentions a study conducted by Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile, where twenty-three professional artists from the United States had to produce both commissioned and noncommissioned work. The result? Not only the commissioned pieces were rated as significantly less creative than the non-commissioned works, the artists also reported feelings of constraint and less joy when doing a piece for someone else. "It becomes more "work" than joy..." — one of them said. So what to do? 🤓 When people are in a relationship, they usually do date nights. For work, we can do passion projects! Passion projects are so important to keep the flame alive, no matter the field you're in. 👉 Attached in slide 2: E-learning passion project of mine in progress which I started as part of my LXD certification by @oregonstate as a full of constraints project. Now that I'm working on it and exploring more of the problem space beyond the course, it has been fun and more exciting than ever! 👈 So go ahead, my fellow creatives, volunteer for a social impact project you're passionate about, explore your own side projects, or simply upload that dribbble shot that you felt insecure about because "it didn't show the whole process". Passion can last a lifetime, but it doesn't survive on its own 💜

Myth #1: You need to be an expert to teach something. Myth #2: If you're an expert, you are automatically qualified to teach OR the next step for you in your career is to teach. 💬 Share your thoughts. Have you ever felt like you couldn't share or teach because you weren't "senior" enough? 💬

Bad courses are everywhere. ...and so are the good ones! 🤯 So why is creating a good course so much harder than what it seems? Same as any other product or service you provide, the experience you provide to your users (in this case, your learners), will impact your success on the long term. You might be thinking... of course you want your audience to learn, after all that's why you're an educator! Right? Yep, and this is why Learning Experience matters. But you also want your business to thrive, so whether you're training your own employees or selling your own course, Learning Experience matters for your business too! Good learning experiences make your learners engaged and motivated to learn, helping them achieve their goals and needs (without hiding behind vague promises!!) Still worried about your course sales? Good learning experiences lead to raving fans = social proof and free marketing + customer loyalty & customer retention which is > than customer acquisition. Bad learning experiences are not sustainable and don't create an impact. Make a difference ❤ #learningexperiencematters 💬 Remember a bad experience you had with a course you purchased? How about a good one? Let us know in the comments!

#AdobeAmbassador Personas can be useful, and they can also be useless... for example, when they're not part of an iterative and collaborative process 🤯 Luckily for us, there are books like "The Persona Lifecycle" which I drew tons of inspiration from in order to come up with this use case! I LOVE facilitating workshops, and the energy in person is irreplaceable. However, this doesn't mean things have to stop when we work remotely. Much the opposite! In this example I'm using Adobe XD + Whiteboard plugin to run a scenario mapping workshop which works beautifully with the new live coediting feature. 💬 What collaboration or mapping technique would you like to see next? Leave a comment below 💬

Have a bunch of knowledge lying around? If knowledge cannot be "transferred", then how do we convert it into a learning experience? 🤯 It's easy! Well, easier said than done, but that's the point, because learning is a process. You can't truly learn if you don't: 👉 Reflect on what you read 👉 Apply what it's taught to you 👉 Discuss and seek different perspectives 👉 Observe what others are doing through a critical lens 👉 Experiment, even if that means failing at first 👉 Research several sources and come to your own conclusions 💬 Now tell me: When was the last time you "learned" something new?

Can we blame design education for... a culture of entitlement? 🧐 👉 What is a culture of entitlement? The culture of entitlement is a “you owe me” attitude. It's believing a society, a company or government owes you something and you do not have to earn or deliver value for what you receive. 👉 Translating this concept to the design community, this can happen everytime someone sends requests such as "Can you answer me NOW?", or "Why can't you help me for free?" (in the case of paid services). Hmm.. how about education? What has this to do with design education? And why should anyone care, if we all have the power to say NO? 🤓 Good question! I was interested in this topic because of its connection with design education. In fact, many creators, educators and designers I highly respect have already stated in social media that this overload of "help requests" largely happens because the design education is flawed. 🤯 But.... Can we blame design education? Can we blame bootcamps that don't go into depth? Can we blame degrees that don't go into practical approaches? I, for one hand, as a bootcamp mentor and instructor, had nothing but pleasant experiences with students who invested in a program and also appreciate and value the limited time (that I'm being paid for) that I can dedicate to them. 🤓 Bottom line: No, we can't blame design education, regardless of being flawed or not. There's no excuse for entitlement. Respect everyone's time (and work), and they'll respect yours ❤️

If "learning styles" are a neuromyth, what are "multiple intelligences?" First things first: These are definitely not the same. Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, explained in his 1983 book "Frames of Mind" states we all have different kinds of intelligences. The "official" list made it to: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, visual-spatial, interpersonal and intrapersonal (later added the naturalistic). This is perhaps one of the most misunderstood brain theories, especially when used to describe / or apply to learning styles. If you remember our previous discussion about the left vs right brain myth, it's very easy to succumb to labels when it comes to teaching. Yes, we all have our preferences when it comes to learning; and yes, we all have different types of intelligences that can't be measured with a simple assessment. And that's exactly what Gardner wants to tell us. Not that we are limited to a single way of learning, but that we should teach in a way that is inclusive to everyone's weaknesses and strengths. For me, Gardner's work (which I had to read for my post-grad) is inspiring and refreshing. It reminds me that we, as educators, need to be constantly coming up with new and creative ways that stimulate different types of intelligences and that no student should be left behind. This means we need to make even more of an effort to be inclusive, to educate in an universal way, diversifying the ways we teach, without being afraid of experimenting with new tools and methods. 💬 What do you think? 💬 (Note: I was reluctant at first to post this pinterest-y instagrammy graphic as that can be so limiting and lead to wrong conclusions such as "hey I'm visual-spatial, I'll never be good at Math" which defeats the whole purpose and prevents us from having a "growth mindset". Because MI's theory is so much more than that!)

I talk a lot about using social media to educate your audience, but... what is "educational content", really? When it comes to social media, there are many misconceptions about what can be considered, in fact, educational content. This doesn't necessarily have to do so much with social media but with our own understanding and experiences related to learning and teaching. Teaching has commonly been seen in the past as a method to "transfer information". On social media, it seems many still see teaching as a way to simply transfer information. We often associate tutorials, carousels and other step-by-step instructions as "teaching". Well, teaching is so much more than that. Educational content is so much more than that. The problem with "only" providing information is that we are not promoting the process of learning at all. In order to learn, people need to think. They need to reflect, they need to challenge (yes, they need to challenge you too!) Even in a traditional setting, the teacher is no longer the authority figure who's supposed to know everything. We've learned a lot about learning since then! Same here on social media. Being seen as an expert doesn't mean you have to know everything, or much less convey the idea that there's only one "right" way to do things. Being an expert is about sharing your own perspective and welcoming others to share theirs. It's about being informed, having researched different sources and experimented different methods. It's about opening a discussion, a debate. Show your audience not one, but different ways to achieve the same result. When you start thinking about educational content this way, you might just as well realize, that social media is the perfect place to educate and being educated. 💬 Over to you. How do YOU educate your audience? 💬

🤔 Why do you think we need to challenge our learners? In a generalized way we can say, because we want to motivate them, of course. We've been discussing how motivation is complex and while it can come from external sources, the most desirable one is the intrinsic one, the one that comes from within. Isn't it amazing when our learners are naturally motivated? There's no better feeling for an educator. 🧬 Neuroscience explains this very well — with the reward system! (disclaimer: the process here is simplified for illustrative purposes) 🤯 Have you ever thought about dopamine as the "happy hormone" or the "pleasure chemical"? Well, that's a widespread myth, and it's wrong. In fact, dopamine is your "go-get-it" ally! It's all about "wanting" or have the motivation to pursue something. And we want our learners to have heaps of those. Pretty cool, huh? Understanding how our brain works is pretty essential because the learning process cannot be separated from it. So let's dive in. 🍎 📖 Here's a quick 3-step overview to design your next challenge: 1) Get their interest and FULL attention. Remember: no dopamine, no motivation. 2) Chose the RIGHT challenge. Get this wrong, and your learners might as well give up. 3) Provide more than one solution to the challenge, and enjoy the diversity of perspectives and interpretrations your learners have about the same subject! 🤓 In fact this is super important, because there are different types of intelligence and we're often unconsciously blinded by bias and preconceived notions about what intelligence is. The expectations you set are going to influence your learners' actions (google Pygmalion effect if you want to dig deeper). 👉 👉 👉 If you want to craft the right experience for your learners, you need to know them. Grab my mini-workshop while it's still at the introductory pricing phase at https://ana-santos.com/ideal-learner-research if you want to learn how to identify and impact your learners. 👈 👈 👈 💬 Tell me more about how you motivate your learners! What has worked well? And not so well?

Information is everywhere 🤯 It can easily demotivate those of us who are in the business of educating and teaching others. Right? But providing information is NOT teaching. And receiving information is NOT learning. 👉 Story time: Today I engaged in an interesting discussion about accountability and self-paced courses. As some of you might know this is a topic I've been exploring as part of my research, investigation and final project of my LXD certification. The funny thing in that discussion is that many of us actually LOVE self-paced courses and zero accountability. Some people even consider that the goal of a course is not to "complete it" but rather obtain the information they need from it. The truth is, we love to purchase something that will hopefully solve some of our problems, and we hope to obtain the information we need, with as little effort as possible. The issue? This is NOT learning. Information design and learning design are different things. Learning requires us to think, reflect, apply. This is because of how short term memory, working memory and long-term memory work (a topic for another day). There are many types of learning gaps, and sure, some things can be solved with information. If the problem you're trying to solve for your learners is lack of information, how lucky are you, because that's an easy one to solve ;) However, most of the time that's not the case. This is great news for us, educators, course creators and educational content creators! There's this huge opportunity for us: the need to design meaningful and impactufl experiences. ❤ ** P.S: Almost-shameless plug: we just wrapped up a pretty awesome workshop at @questkit.co and we're providing access to the raw replay + slides for the price of the standard ticket for those who are interested: https://gum.co/ux-storytelling **

Let's play a game. Can you memorize these words: challenge, work, family, course, job, children, time, Blake, two? If you focus for a bit, I'm sure you can, but... ...most likely you won't remember them if I ask you again tomorrow. Short-term memory is selective, which makes sense. If those words are part of a story though, that's a different story (no pun intended). You might not remember the text word by word, but you can easily remember what the story was about. Better yet, it'll stick! That's the beauty of storytelling. We're humans, we connect to stories. Storytelling is such a huge part of teaching and learning, because of how easy they make it for you to store (and retrieve) that information for good. However, today, I want to focus on how to use storytelling effectively in order to create compelling case studies. Imagine being able to tell a story that sticks! Imagine that your case study can become easily memorable, increasing your odds to stand out. Why am I talking about this topic? Because today is the LAST day to sign up for early bird tickets ($27 only) to attend the live workshop "How to use storytelling to write a compelling UX case study" I'm doing with my partner Werner @brandflex.co as part of @questkit.co. After tomorrow, the price goes up, including the recorded version. Don't worry if you can't attend the workshop live, because we'll be sending the replay to everyone who signs up :) By the end of this workshop, you’ll be able to: - Recognize the importance of storytelling - Identify at least three popular storytelling frameworks - Identify the hero, the villain, and other storytelling elements of your UX case study - Apply storytelling frameworks to your UX case study - Structure your case study in a logical manner - Justify the decisions in your UX process through stories PLUS, we'll have the chance to do practical exercises during our time together, so bring your old case studies and stop proscratinating! Let's revamp and rewrite the whole thing together. Sign up at https://questkit.co/workshops --> See you there 👋