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Coursmos – Micro teaching for on-line educators – Micro learning for a new generation
Coursmos
I came across this website, Coursmos.com, that offer Micro learning. Yep I said micro learning. Let me explain by way of some quotes. “9/10 students on traditional online learning do not complete courses because they are too long. Coursmos are bringing education to generation distracted!” Tech crunch have said “It’s e-learning for the Twitter generation. A sprinkling of micro-courses to go with your micro-blogs.”
Micro Learning is not new. In fact, I would regularly look up short “How to” tutorials on YouTube. The concept of this site, is that tutorials are less than 3 minutes, and you can combine tutorials to make a short course, and you can combine courses and make a school.
Set up and use of the site is rather easy. You can sign in with many of the social media profiles available. It only took me a few minutes to set up my first course. As I am launching Spreadsheet Auditing on all sites, I decided to take a section from this course. I selected the section on Setting Up and Hacking Excel Spreadsheet protection. In the full course, this is just one video that is 14 minutes long. So I made a quick intro video, and I broke 14 min video into 4 videos. One of these videos is 7 min long and I was able to upload it, which surprised me. 7 minutes is not so micro. So on further investigation, I have found, on the FAQ section that you can upload these videos, then you should contact Coursmos and they will break this down for you. Happy Days!!
So Coursmos is relatively new, and have just secured another round of investment to the tune of $600K, but I’m a little confused about their model. The FAQ page says you get 70% commission from the course price that I set, I think, as they are micro courses, the maximum price I can set is $5. But on the learner side, I see you can get premium access for $15 per month. I also haven’t found anywhere to give my PayPal details and get paid. Thankfully I’m not too concerned about this at the moment, because I have the course on Coursmos free, but I do hope to eventually charge.
With the course live on Coursmos, I made a post to G+ the 31stJanuary. Yesterday I had 400+ student. I also sent a PM on Facebook to Coursmos to ask them to promote my course, chancing my arm as you do, and to my surprise, today they made a post. It got over 200 likes and I now have over 550 students. I like working with these guys already! So I set up a school.
There is another very cool feature to this site. Learners can request courses and tutorials, and these requests can be liked by other site users. This gives educators a real opportunity.
I would like to be able to see some analytics, add my PayPal account, clarification on commission structure, maybe an instructors community group and a few other tweaks, but overall I do really like this site. This site will complement my own site. Courses on my own site are up to 7 hours of video, and some people only want one or two sections and so don’t buy. Now I have the option of sending them to my Coursmos School, where they can just purchase the section that they want. Seems like a win win situation. Coursmos does compete with YouTube, but people are interested in paying for quality with a brand. Coursmos must be careful to ensure that they provide just that, course’s that are quality micro courses
If you have a Coursmos course, please feel free to share the link below. If you are a learner on Coursmos, I would love to hear your feedback.
Reference
Coursmos (n.d.) Micro learning. The Excel Club. [Blog site] Retrieved from https://becominganonlinetrainer.wordpress.com/2015/02/07/coursmos-micro-teaching-for-on-line-educators-micro-learning-for-a-new-generation/
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