Insight Mapping 201 - LIVE on Skillshare

My second Skillshare class is now live. This will be a different experiment.  While the first class was free, this second class is going to be set as a "premium" class.  Under the Skillshare model, it means that you need to be subscribed to Skillshare to take the class. You cannot pay per class, you pay a monthly subscription.

I have more than 100 students in the first class but none have been overtly active, meaning that none have posted a project or interacted with me in any way.  There are four positive reviews and no negative reviews.  

Here are my questions:

• How many of the students in the current class will enroll in the second?
• How many new students will enroll at no added cost to them because they are already subscribers?
• How many new students will subscribe because they want to take this class (or because I brought them to the platform and they saw other premium classes of interest)?

Getting new students to subscribe is entirely up to my external marketing efforts.  Getting students to enroll in the class from within the existing Skillshare membership was relatively easy when the class was free because there are many ways of getting a free trial membership. 

Creating this second class was MUCH, MUCH easier than the first and I think it is at least 50% better in terms of production quality.  The first class almost looks like a draft of something that should never have been published.  I'm considering redoing it entirely.

Another milestone - 100 students

Today, I reached 100 students in my Skillshare class and I'm still at 100% positive reviews.  I'm going to celebrate those two numbers and NOT go into what such wonderful metrics don't tell you.  There's always a story behind numbers.

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KM and Happiness

There are two types of meeting notes:  1) Notes meant to reflect what was said, so that anyone not in attendance would get a sense of what the meeting covered in terms of content, and 2) notes that reflect what you, as a participant in the meeting, thought was relevant for you, what you connected to and what it meant for you.

The following notes are of the second category... in no way meant to be construed as an accurate summary of the meeting.  They also feel very much like a work in progress.  They connect to a pattern of ideas I've encountered in a variety of settings in the past year or so and to a range of interests that I did not previously see as very connected.  For example, my interest in neuroscience started around a research focus on synesthesia for a personal fiction project which at the time I did not connect at all to my work around Knowledge Management.  Now, the cognitive psychology and neuroscience aspects of Knowledge Management are surfacing while AI and cognitive computing still remain a great mystery.

Click on the image to view larger in separate window. 

A great "thank you" to Michael Lennon of George Washington University who was presenting great materials for insights and further questions.

Insight Mapping 201 - Mapping for Creatives

Insight Mapping 101 is doing well with 55+ students.  To be honest, the target was 25 students in the first two weeks, so having doubled that, I am wondering if 25 wasn't a very low threshold.

I'm working on the second class now, which is going to be a little more advanced and tackling three different insight maps.  Since Skillshare is a platform primary designed to allow creative types to share their knowledge and learn, I've decided to develop something that is going to help all of them, whether they are students, teachers, or both: Insight Mapping 201: Mapping for Creatives.

Here's the outline for the class:

Outline for Insight Mapping 201; Mapping for Creatives

Key insight from the process of creating Insight Mapping 101:  There has to be an easier way to put the videos together and a better way to manage the audio stream.

Yes!  The learning curve is steep at this point, so the leaps ahead are quite interesting.  Instead of creating "slides" which I can then narrate, I am creating each video lesson using the concept mapping tool's presenter mode and recording all of it as a screencast. After about 8 hours of working with the presenter tool, I think I know what I'm doing.  Each slide in presenter mode is a "view" that can be used the same way a step in animation can be used in PowerPoint.  Individual presentations (a set of related animations) can be easily hyperlinked and they will transition automatically in presentation view.  I had no idea this was possible until I tried.

Here's what it looks like for the introduction video.

Coming up

• Insight Mapping 101: Workshop when I reach 75 students
• Insight Mapping 201: Launch early March 2016