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Why Take a Course if the Same Information is Free?

The Internet makes it possible to learn how to do just about anything you have an interest in. A couple of weeks ago I used YouTube to learn how to clean the carburetor on my snowmobile. After watching the video a zillion times and cleaning the carburetor, I discovered that a dirty carburetor was not the reason my snowmobile wasn’t running well.

Someone who works on snowmobiles for a living would have known that a dirty carburetor was not the problem. I, however, spent most of a Sunday learning that lesson the hard way. The point of this story is that even though I did learn how to clean a carburetor, I spent a lot of time working on a problem that wasn’t actually the problem. Had someone offered a “how to tune-up your snowmobile” course, I would have gladly paid for it so that I could learn how the whole system worked and ultimately save myself time and money. Instead I spent time guessing at what I needed to know.

I pay for online courses because while I think I know what I need to know, there’s always something that I don’t know that I need to know. This is true whether I’m taking a course about course design, about marketing, or about retirement investing (the course I’m currently taking). Sure, I could eventually find all of the information for free via Google, but I’d waste a lot of time, and in the case of retirement planning I’d waste a lot of money, on things that actually aren’t as important as they might seem.

When people ask me, “what’s in your course that I couldn’t find elsewhere?” I usually say, “not much” because if you know what to look for and Google for it long enough, you’ll find all of the information somewhere. What my online courses provide are lessons organized in a sequence that makes sense, pitfalls to avoid (after ten years of teaching G Suite, I’ve seen a lot of mistakes), and what you need to know even if you didn’t know you needed it. They’re based on years of experience, experience that includes answering the same types of questions from thousands of teachers, experience that includes watching people try something new because they didn’t know what they needed to know. That’s why I offer courses like G Suite for Teachers which is on sale this week.

G Suite for Teachers is an on-demand course that you can complete at your own pace. The course contains ten modules that walk you through everything you need to know in order to feel comfortable using G Suite for Education in your classroom. You’ll learn everything from the basics of collaboration in Google Docs through advanced uses of Google Sheets to streamline your workflow. The course is on sale this week for $77. That’s less than $8 a lesson. And the latest update to this course gives you options to ask questions right from the each module’s lesson page and to get a PD certificate in your inbox as soon as you successfully complete the final module.