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How the Power of Seasonal Marketing Can Help Attract Students
There’s a reason you see more advertisements for florists in the weeks before Valentine’s Day. It’s the same reason gyms capitalize on the “new year, new you” weight loss trend in January. These businesses use seasonal marketing to make their promotions and campaigns feel more timely and relevant. Your organization can do the same for its courses.
Seasonal marketing taps into the collective emotions, experiences, memories, and traditions associated with each season to create compelling marketing. These campaigns provide a sense of urgency by making courses feel timely. They also drive engagement because they align with what students are likely to be thinking and feeling at any given time of year.
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Educating Arts Educators: 6 Ideas for Professional Development
All educators benefit from professional development. Teachers in the arts are no exception. In fact, art teacher professional development serves a double purpose. It helps professionals hone their teaching abilities while also improving their artistic skills.
Making art and teaching it are two separate but related skills. The best artist-educators find time for their own creative pursuits and also take opportunities for teacher professional development.
Fortunately, there are organizations that offer specialized workshops and classes for art teachers and other arts educators. We’ve rounded up some resources and suggestions for where to find these opportunities so art teachers can continue to work on their craft while supporting their students.
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The Best Course Evaluation Questions and How to Write Them
Course evaluations can help make your classes better. They collect meaningful data about students’ experiences, what they learned, and how they felt about the class. You can use that information to improve your courses and make them even more attractive to future students. But getting useful and honest feedback from students takes some finesse.
Good course evaluation questions invite students to share their real opinions. They offer insight into the student’s experience so you can make changes based on data, not guesswork. Each question must be carefully written and designed with a specific aim in mind. Here is some actionable advice you can use on your next class feedback survey.
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Course Marketing Made Simple With Ideas From Author Leidy Klotz
Welcome to the first post in our blog series reflecting CourseStorm’s core values: Simplicity, Growth, and Helpfulness. Our mission is to streamline access to education to empower personal growth through our impossibly simple course registration software. In this post, we’ll be discussing the value of simplicity.
If you don’t think of yourself as a marketer, and sometimes even if you do, course marketing can feel like a complex task with too many moving parts. You might find yourself wishing for marketing made simple—a way to do less, but still get great results. That is the very theme of the book Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less by Leidy Klotz.
Through research and anecdotes, Klotz explores how subtraction can help us address everything from climate change and racism to city planning and play. If subtraction could help in all those areas, couldn’t it also apply to course marketing? Let’s find out.
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5 Ways Art Teachers Can Balance Teaching and Creating Art
Whether you teach painting, drama, music, creative writing, or anything else in the arts, it’s sometimes difficult to find time for your own artistic pursuits. Art teachers spend so much time and energy teaching art to their students that there may not be much left over for their own work. But your work as an artist is valuable to both you and your students. It keeps your creativity sharp and fuels your passion for the subject.
Fortunately, there are ways for artist-educators to carve out time for their art. From crafting a well-structured schedule to harnessing inspiration in the classroom, we explore five ways you can integrate teaching art and your own personal practice of making art.
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What Is Bloom’s Taxonomy and How Can It Improve Your Classes?
As an instructor, your main goal is to help students learn. That may sound simple, but meeting the needs of a class takes planning. Building courses around a clear structure can make a big difference to the student experience. Bloom’s Taxonomy is one way to do that.
But what is Bloom’s Taxonomy and how can it help you offer a better student experience? Think of it as a framework that helps you structure your classes. Although it’s not the only option out there, it is widely recognized as a useful tool for instructors. Learning more about it can help you provide a better learning experience for students.
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6 Tips for Teaching Tech to Older Learners
The pandemic triggered a boom in online classes. More programs added online learning, and for many, virtual classes are here to stay. This offers convenience and accessibility for learners, but some—including seniors—may feel left behind by newer technology. Figuring out how to teach technology to seniors now seems more important than ever.
Programs don’t want seniors to miss out on learning opportunities, but sometimes computer-based learning really is the best choice. To help find a solution, we turned to former CourseStormer Chris Suggs. Chris taught basic computing to older adults as an AmeriCorps volunteer. He shared six thoughtful tips on how to teach technology to seniors.
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Fun Icebreakers for Adults to Use in Classes, Meetings, and More
Even if you’re not familiar with the term “icebreaker,” you’ve likely participated in one. An icebreaker is simply a question or activity that helps “break the ice” between strangers and encourages people to open up and talk to each other. Icebreaker examples include an impromptu “Where are you from?” while walking to class, or a scheduled team-building exercise at work.
Icebreakers can be especially useful in classes for adults, since grownups often do not interact as easily as children do. Find out about different types of icebreakers, examples of in-person and Zoom icebreakers, some tips to help icebreakers run smoothly, and what to do and avoid to make sure your icebreakers are inclusive.
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4 Ways Instructors Can Help Create Course Marketing Materials
Creating effective marketing materials for your courses can feel like a never-ending task, especially if you have a small team. Marketing your classes with fresh and relevant content takes all of your resources. Yet there’s one valuable resource you might be overlooking—your instructors. They may not be marketing experts, but they have a perspective worth exploring.
We’ve talked before about how instructors can help attract students by sending emails, making announcements, sharing on social media, and leveraging community connections. Instructors can also help you create marketing content that feels personal and relevant. Let’s look at how you can work with instructors to make marketing materials for your classes.
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How to Learn Art: 5 Easy Ways to Inspire Your Inner Artist
Hundreds of people interested in how to learn art search the web for relevant information, resources, and classes every day. Needless to say, that approach can yield millions of results, quickly becoming overwhelming and time consuming.
At CourseStorm, we believe in making learning accessible, so we’re cutting through the complexity to offer five ways to learn art and improve artistic skills. If you’re an instructor, you can use these techniques to enrich your art classes for learners or to inform how you market your classes. You might even share this list with students so they can explore the world of art on their own. For those curious about how to learn art or expand their knowledge, these tips make a great starting point.
