5 Counterintuitive Ways to 10X Course Engagement
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5 Counterintuitive Ways to Increase Online Course Engagement and Results
LifterLMS founder Chris Badgett shares five counterintuitive ways to increase online course engagement: rethinking the passive income trap, building real community instead of solo self serve learning, using qualitative and manually graded assessments, mapping lessons to real world results, and rejecting the solopreneur myth. The session also covers a live demo of the course catalog shortcode and audience questions on private areas, social learning, and choosing an LMS.
What You’ll Learn
- Why chasing passive income alone caps how much a course can be worth, and how a private coaching layer changes the math.
- How community and social learning drive stronger engagement than a solitary, self serve course experience.
- Why qualitative, manually graded assessments create richer feedback than automated multiple choice questions.
- How to map course lessons to real world action instead of only delivering information.
- Why building an online course business works better as a team sport than a solo project.
Key Takeaways
- Add a private coaching or feedback layer to a higher priced course tier instead of relying only on a lower priced, hands off version.
- Build qualitative check ins that ask students what they learned and did, not only multiple choice questions.
- Design at least one assignment that sends students into the real world to take action and report back.
- Look for community, coaching, or a mastermind instead of trying to build a course business entirely alone.
- Use the LifterLMS course shortcode with a category attribute to build a custom course catalog page instead of relying only on the default catalog.
Frequently Asked Questions
A private area lives on the course website itself instead of pulling students onto Facebook, where it is easy to get distracted. It also stays deliberately lightweight, focused on conversation, cohort questions, and shared milestones rather than every social feature a general network offers. A private area is built for one to one conversation between a teacher and a student. Student to student conversation across a cohort is handled separately by the Social Learning add-on.
Not currently. Office hours runs as a live, weekly group coaching call, and recording it would change the dynamic of an open, in the moment conversation. If enough people ask for a recorded version, that is something worth reconsidering, but for now the format stays live only, which also gives people a reason to show up and participate rather than watch a replay later.
Office hours is a live, one hour group coaching call delivered over Zoom, held weekly, where a presenter takes business, strategy, and technical questions from whoever shows up. Anyone who purchases office hours, on its own or as part of a bundle, automatically receives an email with the Zoom link, and gets a new email whenever the login details or meeting link change.
The first version of private areas ships as one private area per student, per course or per membership. A shared space for a small group or team is recognized as the next logical step and stays on the roadmap, but it is not part of the initial release.
BuddyPress is a capable, free social networking plugin for WordPress with a strong community behind it, and LifterLMS keeps its existing BuddyPress integration. Private areas take a different approach, building the social pieces up from first principles, one step at a time, based on what actually mimics how students learn in groups, rather than including every feature a general purpose social plugin ships with by default.
A course automatically protects its lessons behind enrollment. A membership can bundle multiple courses together, or bundle in content that is not part of the LMS at all, and can be sold as an individual or group plan. A voucher hands out a batch of seats at once, which is the tool built for a scenario like selling a thousand seats to a single corporate buyer.
No, there is no direct integration between LifterLMS and GetResponse. The available workaround routes contacts through Mailchimp first, then uses an automation tool like Zapier to pass them along to GetResponse. There is not currently a direct path between the two.
They are close competitors that do similar things: managing an email list and building automations based on group membership. Mailchimp offers a free tier plus a more feature rich paid tier, while ConvertKit does not have a free tier. If a course business is already comfortable with one of them, switching mainly adds cost without adding much capability.
Full Webinar Transcript
Why the Passive Income Trap Limits an Online Course
One of the biggest issues in how people think about online courses is treating passive income as the whole goal. Getting too focused on passive income, automation, or the idea of making money while you sleep is a slippery slope. That concept is the reason we started building a Private Areas add-on for LifterLMS, a way for a course to open up a real feedback loop between a teacher and a student instead of staying purely passive.
About four or five years ago, a lot of the conversation was about membership sites. A membership site typically had a paywall and members only content, sometimes loosely structured into modules and lessons, but it was not really a full online course. The online course industry evolved from there, and a learning management system added a whole other layer: reporting, learning paths, and real structure. Some of the conversation out there is still stuck back at the membership site level, even though the tools have moved well past it.
How a Personal Coaching Layer Changes Course Economics
None of this means passive income is a bad thing. There is nothing wrong with it. I still run passive income sites that make money every month, including an online gardening course my wife and I built together, and a course business where I work more like a publisher, partnering with outside experts to create video courses with no live Q&A. Those courses are not priced as high, because they do not include the personal connection a private area is built for.
Private Areas exist for coaches, experts, and teachers who want to deliver a more personalized experience: private conversation, custom help, and a real relationship instead of a one-way video lecture. That changes the economics of a course. A $500 video course that adds a direct, personal line to the instructor, something like spot consulting for a student’s specific situation, becomes worth a lot more. Course marketplaces like Udemy show what happens without that layer. Pricing pressure has pushed their video-only courses down into a commoditized $30 to $50 range. What cannot be commoditized is a unique approach and the ability to help someone with their specific problem. A course business does not have to pick one price point either. A $100 self-serve course and a $1,000 version that includes private coaching can sit side by side, with the coaching tier offered as an upsell.
Why Solo Self Serve Learning Misses How People Actually Learn
Our next counterintuitive insight is to rethink the me generation approach to online education, where the goal is to give someone the power to come to a website completely alone, learn something, and never interact with anybody. That is the airport model: get a boarding pass, get a ticket, do everything yourself, never actually talk to another person. It is not necessarily what learning is all about.
Look at why something like Facebook works. It works in part because it mimics how real human friendships actually form, and it evolves in ways a purely personal network cannot. Think back to a time before the internet existed. How many of your own learning experiences happened completely alone? Some things get learned alone, but a lot of learning happens in groups. Community, teams, cohorts, and classrooms are an important part of how people learn. Someone else asks a question you would not have thought to ask. You stay motivated because you are going through the experience with somebody else.
Lessons From the Wilderness on Why Community Drives Engagement
I have a background in outdoor leadership training and wilderness expedition work. I spent time at the National Outdoor Leadership School in a remote part of British Columbia with no trails, and I have done mountaineering trips in the North Cascade peaks of the Pacific Northwest. At the National Outdoor Leadership School, I was learning survival skills, navigation, and how to be smart and careful in the wilderness, all with a group of people. Those are some of the best learning experiences of my life, and there was definitely a community component to them. It helped with motivation. It made the experience fun, engaging, and meaningful.
Why Students Stay for the Community, Not Just the Content
You hear this expression when people talk about membership sites or building a tribe online: people come for the content, but they stay for the community. That is a real achievement. When it happens, a course creator is not just building a training method, they are creating a tribe of people that has value on its own, with or without the creator actively involved. Sometimes two people using the same software and talking to each other in a shared Facebook group is enough to form a genuine connection around a common interest.
It is completely fine to build something that helps someone in isolation, solve a problem or take an opportunity on their own. But it is worth thinking about what could happen if social components got added to a learning platform, the learning journey, or the methodology being offered. That thinking is what shaped the Social Learning add-on we were architecting for LifterLMS: a lightweight, built-in alternative to sending students off to a separate Facebook group, starting with something like a wall where students can interact, and where accomplishments and milestones get shared automatically unless a student opts out in their profile settings.
Renaming Tests and Quizzes to Make Assessment Feel Less Like School
We see this a lot in LifterLMS translations. Open source contributors often do more than translate the software’s dynamic text into another language, they also swap English words for different English words. A test does not have to be called a test, it can be called a challenge. A quiz can be called something more fun. Achievement badges can be called prizes. If a word gives students a reaction like boredom or a bad memory of school, that is worth paying attention to. Sometimes the fix is as simple as changing the name of the thing.
Why Manually Graded Assignments Create Richer Feedback Than Multiple Choice
Right now, LifterLMS question types are mostly multiple choice, and more automated types are on the way, but some assessments genuinely need manual grading, and they do not have to be boring. A student can be asked to submit what they learned from a specific lesson or module in their own words. Opening up that qualitative feedback loop, instead of staying strictly binary, right or wrong, is a more real experience. It treats students like people instead of automatons moving through a machine and being scored like a standardized test.
That kind of feedback lets a course creator see what is actually sticking and what is not, and adjust the material, or step in and help an individual student in a private area if they are heading in the wrong direction, or heading in an even better direction than expected. Both can happen, and a course creator can learn something too.
How to Reality Check Learning With Real World Assignments
At LifterLMS, the belief is that a course is not just about knowledge, it is about results, transformation, and mapping the learning experience to the real world. That means it is worth what we call reality checking the learning that is happening. At the bottom of a lesson, a student can be asked to go out into the real world and do something. If a course teaches how to start a business, an assignment could ask a student to register a business name and open a business bank account, then report back on how it went and what they learned picking a name. That turns the assessment into a qualitative feedback loop that is mapped directly to reality, instead of a check box.
Why Results Beat Information as the Goal of Your Course
The next counterintuitive insight is that results, not knowledge, are the real goal. If information alone were the point, a platform like Udemy would not have pushed video course prices down to the $30 to $50 range. Good information matters, but the most important thing is that people get results.
Think about a consultant who charges by the hour. Their clients are not thinking about how much they want to pay per hour, they are thinking about the specific result they want, a problem they want to stop, or an opportunity they want to open up. Hiring by the hour is just the best option they could find. That is the opportunity: ask what kind of online course could completely disrupt something people currently pay consultants or hourly advisors to do. That is a different way to think about a course than just packaging good information.
Why Information Alone Does Not Create Transformation
Map your learning objectives to the real world. Do not just give people good suggestions and good ideas. Communication is an important part of learning, but ask students to go out into the world and actually do something with the information, whether that is in a relationship, a business, or their health. Teaching somebody a yoga pose is one example: the information about the pose is one thing, the practice of actually doing it is a completely different thing, and a course needs both. That is why manually graded assignments are part of the advanced series of LifterLMS add-ons. When you give information, always think about how it gets applied. Give solutions, not just good ideas, and map it back to the real world.
Why the Solopreneur Myth Holds Course Creators Back
The next counterintuitive insight is about the solopreneur myth. I am not really a solopreneur, I have business partners and a team, but I used to be a solopreneur website builder, and I know what that is like. Even then, there were armies of people contributing to the WordPress community, and people behind the tools used to run a business and build a school online. Nobody is really doing it alone, even down to something as simple as hearing a good idea on someone else’s podcast and then implementing it solo.
There is a mindset in the digital entrepreneur and online course building world that says you have to do it alone, in complete isolation, just following the steps that were laid out for you. That is not actually how it works. It helps enormously to be around other people doing what you are doing at a high level. I go to an event in Cabo, Mexico every year where people running premium WordPress service and product businesses come together, and I learn as much as I give. There is a bootstrap, pull yourself up mentality out there that says muscle through it alone, but nobody actually has to.
What LifterLMS Office Hours Actually Delivers
That belief is why LifterLMS Office Hours exists: a weekly group coaching call where people can bring business questions, strategy questions, technical questions, or just a problem they want to brainstorm out loud. Back at codeBOX, the company that builds LifterLMS, we used to do a lot of hourly consulting work at a real hourly rate, and Office Hours delivers that same kind of advice in a group format instead. Being in the room, even just listening, can surface a problem you did not know you had yet, along with a solution for it, well before it becomes expensive to fix.
If demand for it grows enough, the plan is to have people submit topics in advance so the sessions can focus on the most common trends and questions, which rewards people who plan ahead and know they are going to attend.
A Quick Recap of the Five Counterintuitive Engagement Strategies
To run through all five quickly. First, watch out for the passive income trap, and consider doing things that do not scale, like opening up a private, feedback-rich space per student instead of staying purely passive. Second, rethink the power of community. When marketing a course or designing the learning journey, bring in social learning, teams, and community instead of treating the offer as just good information handed to one person at a time. Third, be qualitative when assessing students. Give them a chance to talk back about what they learned, and do not feel obligated to call it a test if that word does not fit. Fourth, focus on results. People want transformation, not just knowledge, words, and videos to watch. The information age is giving way to a transformation age. Fifth, let go of the solopreneur myth. Think about all the people who came together to support you as a digital entrepreneur, and remember there is no requirement to do it alone.
Why a LifterLMS Private Area Beats a Private Facebook Group
A private area lives on the site itself. On Facebook, it is easy for people to get distracted and drift away, especially when what is being taught requires real focus, and Facebook is built by people who work every day to make exactly that kind of distraction effective. A private area also stays intentionally light. Rather than chasing every feature a general-purpose social network could offer, the plan is to focus on the small set of things a learning community and a learning team actually need: real conversation, the ability to ask a cohort a question and get an answer, a teacher or helper who can jump into that conversation, and a visible place where progress, achievement badges, and completed courses get shared so the platform does not feel like a ghost town.
Private areas and the Social Learning add-on solve two different problems. A private area is built for one-to-one conversation between a teacher and a student. Student-to-student communication across a whole cohort is what the Social Learning add-on is for.
Why Results Beat SEO When Marketing an Online Course
There can be an SEO argument for keeping student interactions on Facebook rather than a private course site, and it depends on the goal. If the goal is to optimize for search inside Facebook itself, then yes, activity there can help. But content that is locked behind a paywall, whether that wall is on Facebook or on a course platform, does not get much indexing priority from Google either way, because it is not publicly accessible.
That is why it matters to have some content on a course website that is not locked down: a blog, course description pages, and anything else Google can actually crawl and index. Even so, SEO is a side strategy. The main strategy is building a course that delivers results good enough that people talk about it on their own. Before building a course at all, it is worth testing whether five blog posts on the topic can be written. If they cannot, that is a sign the course itself may need more shaping first. Free content, a blogging habit, and some free video are all worth doing on the way there, and social proof follows naturally once a community is actually sharing results.
How to Build a Custom Course Catalog Page With the Course Shortcode
To build a custom course catalog page instead of using the default LifterLMS course catalog, create a new page, add whatever introduction content and images fit the page, and then place the [lifterlms_courses] shortcode wherever the course listing should appear. Adding a category attribute to that shortcode, for example [lifterlms_courses category=”free”], filters the listing down to just that category. That makes it possible to build several sections on one page, each with its own heading like free courses or a subject-specific course list, by using a different category value in each shortcode instance.
How LifterLMS Compares to LearnDash on Product Philosophy
One clear philosophical difference shows up in how quiz functionality gets built. Some competing plugins add their question types by bundling in a separate, free third-party plugin for quiz functionality. LifterLMS deliberately avoids that approach, because it would create a dependency where the core codebase relies on someone else’s free plugin. Building an independent quiz system from scratch takes longer, but it avoids that dependency risk entirely.
There is real respect for competing products and their communities in the WordPress ecosystem, and the most useful way to evaluate any two learning management platforms is to actually test both: install the free version of each, build something in it, and see which one fits the way a specific course or business actually needs to work, rather than relying on a feature checklist alone.
