Keeping your students engaged and coming back to watch your classes is an important part of teaching on Skillshare. Read on for tips and tricks for increasing your minutes watched and retaining students.
Run A Contest
Motivate students to watch your class and complete your class project by hosting a student contest! Depending on the subject matter of your class, you can offer students a free month of a particular software, a paint set, or a 30 minute portfolio review with you as a prize.
Hosting contests is also a great way to increase minutes watched in your older classes. When you include your older classes within a contest, it encourages students to watch your older classes, helping you earn more revenue on classes you created months or even years ago.
Utilize Social Media
Encourage students to share their projects on social media. Create a hashtag so you can follow your students work and not only engage with them, but also their followers. Faye Brown created a Facebook group for her Skillshare student’s: Faye’s Skillshare Tribe. Through this group, she is able to engage with her following and provide them with helpful resources on a regular basis.
Create a Survey
Brad Woodard will periodically put out a survey to his followers to find out what he should teach next! Through this survey, he gathers valuable insights about his students – what skills they want to learn, aspects of his classes they particularly like or dislike, and how they came to find his classes. This is a great way to retain students since it shows his followers that he values their inputs and insights and helps that inform his future content!
Post a Welcome Message
Create a welcome message in the class discussion of each of your classes. Let students learn more about you by sharing links to your Skillshare profile, your social media profiles, and any other relevant sites.
Manage Your Class
Keep a pulse on the discussion board of your class. Answer questions, provide feedback on projects, and be on the lookout for any trends or patterns. For example, if several students have trouble with a certain aspect of the class project, their pain point could be a great topic for your next class.
Teach Again
Your followers are notified every time you publish a class. As a result, one of the best ways to retain students is to give them more content to watch. Develop a regular publishing cadence that works for you. For some people this may be one class a month and for some it may be one class every three months.
By regularly engaging with your students through contests, social media, and the class discussion board, you will be able to retain a higher percentage of your students and increase minutes watched in your classes! Start a Class
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