Researching, Reading, and Writing Your Way Into the Conversation

Find and Invite Folks to be Your ‘First 10’

Building a course alone is a daunting task. We guarantee that co-designing with a crew makes for a more successful online community. To wit, we invite you to:

Start a new topic on discourse under the new courses category to tell people about the course you are building.
Poke through the forums to find folks who might be interested in the topic or could give you some tasty feedback. Mention them in your post by attaching @ to their username. (For example, Dirk is @dirk).
If you have pals with interest or expertise in this area, send them the link to Discourse and ask for their feedback and ideas.

This is a good opportunity to grow your network and to get other people to work with.

Post to the “New Courses” category

How will people join your community?

A good on boarding experience will help new people find their feet in your course community. Communities have different identities and different ways of introducing yourself will work in different communities. In Play With Your Music, a course about music production, we asked people to list 5 of their favorite artists when they sign up. Without prompting them, people started sharing this information when they introduced themselves to the community.

Other ideas are asking people to make something, share a GIF that reflects something about them or tell why they wish to join the course.