Katie Linder:Hey YGT listeners, before we start the episode, I want to give you a quick reminder in case you haven't caught the last couple episodes of YGT, that my How-To: Academia Webinar series on writing and publishing that I'm posting every month, a webinar 2017-2018, is now live. You can visit it and learn more at howtoacademia.com. This series option and the Institutional Membership purchase option are going to expire on September 15, 2017, so if that's of interest to you, make sure to go over there and take a look. You're also welcome to email me at , if you have specific questions about the series. Now onto the episode.
You're listening to You've Got This, Episode 61.
Welcome to You've Got This, a weekly podcast for higher education professionals looking to increase their confidence and capacity for juggling the day-to-day demands of an academic life. I'm your host Dr. Katie Linder.
As an avid reader and writer, I'm thrilled that this episode of You've Got This is sponsored by Stylus Publishing, a leading independent U.S. publisher that focuses on books for teachers, administrators, and policy-makers in higher education. YGT listeners receive a 20% off discount for all books purchased through the Stylus website at using code YGT20. So make sure to check out their catalog to see if you can find your next great read.
On this week's episode, I thought I would talk about some of my current favorite tools for creating. I have been creating a lot of things lately, and I've found some tools that are very cool and allow me to create in really easy ways, and that make the creating super fun. So I wanted to share some of these tools with you.
Admittedly, many of these tools are being used in my How To: Academia Webinar Series, so this is also a little bit of a plug for that because there's just two days left for you to buy the whole series, and I just finished wrapping up creating the first set of materials for the first webinar that's taking place on September 22nd. And you guys, it's gonna be super cool. I cannot tell you how excited I am.
The first tool I want to talk about is called Teachery. This is a course platform. There are several that are out there. There's one called Thinkific. There's one called Teachable, and I'll link to all of these in the show notes. So there's several different ones you can choose from. The one that I chose to house the webinars that I'm creating for people who buy this series, and also people who buy individual webinars, you get the replay in this kind of course platform. It's really kind of aesthetically nice. It's not just a link to a video.
The reason I chose this course platform was because I really like the simplicity of it. It kind of forces you to be minimalist in how you design your course. Originally, I had looked at the course design platform, Thinkific because it had so many different options, and there were lots of different things that you can do, but I actually found myself getting kind of overwhelmed. I chose Teachery also to house all of the content for my new course I'm building on promoting academic books. As I build out both the webinar series and this course, I know it has been the right choice.
What's interesting about this platform is it's super easy to use on the back end. It has really kind of a simple structure, in that you can create lessons and sub-lessons, and then you can link kind of multimedia content or text content. Basically, I mean you kind of have to go ... Again, I'll link to it in the show notes. You can go and see kind of a walk through, so you can see what it looks like. There's lots of different examples on the website.
It's probably very kind of typical to what a learning management system would look like, but I just have found it to be so easy to use. It makes me so happy to go in there and create these courses and these resources because I feel like people who are going into that space, also are not going to feel overwhelmed. That was kind of my ultimate concern. If I'm feeling overwhelmed building it, if people come to it, will they feel overwhelmed. So this has been a super fun tool to use. This is Teachery.
The second tool I found, which I don't know that I've talked about it before, and if I haven't, I can't believe I haven't talked about it. There's this software product called ofCoursebooks. Again, I will link to it in the show notes. When I first heard about it, I was intrigued, but I wasn't quite sure how I could use it. Now I'm using it for everything.
OfCoursebooks is a product where you can create an interactive kind of workbook-style guide, I guess for lack of a better word, that you can imbed into a website using code, or you can just provide a link to people to go to the link and fill in the workbook. When the people go to fill in the workbook, they can sign in with ofCoursebooks, and then they can save the workbook and all of their answers that they've typed in, or they can download the workbook as a PDF if they want to save it.
I've seen this used in a couple of courses that I'm currently taking that I purchased, so I was like this could be kind of interesting for the course that I'm building, to be able to have this kind of workbook style thing that I could imbed in the course that people could be filling in as they go throughout the course. Well, now I'm basically creating a workbook for every video that people engage with in my course on Academic Book Promotion.
Then I'm also creating workbooks for the webinars as well. So for all of the different kind of mini-topics that I talk about in the webinar, I've provided a workbook that people can use to kind of reflect on the questions that I'm asking, and to jot down their own notes about things that might be challenging for them, or things that they're learning. Again, this is super easy to embed in the Teachery course site that I've created, but I can also just provide a link to people.
This is a really cool tool if you are in the classroom, and you want your students to be doing digital workbooks in real time, where you just provide them with the link. The other totally cool thing about this, is that the students who are engaging in the workbook can share their answers, and people can see what each other is writing in real time.
I'm sure there are lots of other tools that do this in some way, shape, or form, but I've never seen it in this kind of workbook style. So if you have other tools that you know of that are kind of similar to what I'm describing here, I would love to hear about it because I think this is just such a neat way to do audience engagement, whether it be asynchronous or synchronous.
This is a tool that I'm gonna be testing out with some of my keynotes as well, especially because so many people bring digital devices with them when they are coming to a talk, and I think it would be very cool to provide this as a handout, but then also to provide the link where people could go in and write in their responses digitally.
That tool, again, is called ofCoursebooks. I will link to it in the show notes. The aesthetic of it is also really beautiful. The designer who created it pays a lot of attention to things like font choices, and so there's lots of different options of how you can kind of style the workbooks, and also how you can brand them to particular courses or products. That's a very cool thing as well. If you end up buying the How To: Academia Webinar Series, any of the products, either an individual webinar or the series as a whole, you'll get access to a bunch of workbooks that I'm building that hopefully, will help you to reflect on the materials.
The third tool that I know I've talked about before. I've certainly blogged about it before, but it is completely worth it, I think, to bring it up again here is Canva. Canva is an online tool that you can use to create kind of visually engaging, well all kinds of things. I mean, you can use it to create social media art. You can use it to create flyers, postcards. You can use it to create slide decks, and that is the thing that I've been using Canva for most recently. I've been using it to create slide decks for the webinar series and also for this course I'm building on Academic Book Promotion because I want everything to look kind of the same. Even if I'm going into different content, I want to have kind of the same branded look for both the course, and then a separate branded look for the webinar series.
If you've seen the webinar series website, you know that I have certain kind of fonts I'm using and certain kind of images I'm using. I wanted the slides to match that, and eventually, I'm going to be kind of building a course out of what I do in this first year of the webinar series. So I wanted to make sure I put in a lot of that design work on the front end because I don't want to have to go back and kind of redesign all the slides to make them look the same and to create kind of a look that is cohesive.
I've been using Canva to create the slide decks for the webinars and for this course I'm building, and it is such a nice thing to have a digital tool, where you can create a product, like a slide deck. Then you can resize it in whatever way you want because most recently, today actually, I was creating some of the materials for the first webinar. I created the slides first and realized that there were a bunch of templates that I wanted to use from the slides as handouts for people to kind of print out and write on because I was talking about all these different methods for how you could organize or prioritize your work if you're juggling multiple writing projects.
So I took those slides, and I just resized them as 8.5 x 11 sheets, and did a little bit of tweaking here and there. But those became a PDF that are going to be downloadable with the webinar for this month. So Canva just made it super easy to kind of redo something in multiple sizes, and that is something that I do pay the monthly fee for. It's part of their premium account to have that resizing option, but I use it so much.
It's like worth its weight in gold because I will create something for social media, then I'll want to resize it for a bunch of different platforms, or I'll want to turn it into something for a slide deck. Or someone will contact me for like a logo for something that I do, and they'll ask for it in a slightly different size for their website. It's super easy to go into Canva and just make all those changes, so that's been super fun.
Then the last tool that I want to mention is actually a course platform where courses are not to build a course for yourself but to take courses to help you with your creativity. This a website called Creative Live, and it's an interesting idea because they do courses where people come in and do like a live version of the course in front of an audience. Then they video record it in a studio, and then they kind of tweak and edit those videos and put them up online, and you can purchase them.
The way that their business model works is that if you are available during the live taping of that course, you can watch it for free. But if you're not, then you can buy the replay, which I think is a very interesting strategy to use as a business model. I ended up buying a course that was over a couple of days about creating a marketing plan. This is something that I've been working on more for different parts of my business, and it's something I have no training in, don't have a lot of experience in, and know there's a lot that I can learn.
There was someone that I follow, Tara Gentile, who has a couple of podcasts I listen to that had a course on Creative Live, and I thought, oh I'll go ahead, and I'll purchase this course. Most of them are under $100. They're constantly running sales, and they'll have like 50 courses for under $50, so I definitely encourage you to just kind of go and take a look around.
The range of courses is very broad. There's a lot of stuff on things like photography and other kinds of art forms, but there's also a whole section related to business and writing, which has been really interesting for me to peruse. I will link to that in the show notes as well.
But about this course, I'm creating a marketing plan, and I've been slowly working my way through it. I just find it really helpful to go back to school. I haven't been in a classroom as a student for quite some time, and this fall, I'm really immersing myself in that through the coaching program, and the training that I'm going through for that.
But I really do like taking a course every once in a while, and I think Creative Live is a great platform because they put so much thought into the design of the courses, and also the kind of materials that are downloadable along with the courses as well as supplementary materials. I definitely want to put in a plug because the stuff that I've been able to download and watch from there, I've just really enjoyed.
The four things that I talked about on this episode, again, all will be linked in the show notes, are the Teachery course platform, the ofCoursebooks software, Canva, and Creative Live Courses.
One final plug there are two days left to get in and purchase your webinar series option, or if you are on the fence about the Institutional Membership, both of those things are going to go away on September 15th, so head over there, take a look. I hope you'll join us. There's a really nice crowd that's already going to be there. I'm excited to build up that community, and I think it's going to be so much fun.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode. I'm Katie Linder, and I'll be back next week with another episode.
Show notes and transcripts for each episode of You've Got This can be found at YGT for You've Got This, podcast dot com. That's ygtpodcast.com.
Don't forget that if you're looking for a good book, this episode of You've Got This is sponsored by Stylus Publishing, a leading independent U.S. publisher that focuses on books for teachers, administrators and policy makers in higher education. YGT listeners receive a 20% off discount for books purchased through the Stylus website at using code YGT20.
To comment on today's show, suggest a topic for me to discuss, or ask a question that could be featured in a future episode, connect with me on Twitter at Katie__linder or at YGT_Podcast, or by emailing .
You can also hear from me each week on the Research in Action Podcast available on iTunes and SoundCloud and through my newsletter, The Academic Creative. Subscribe to this newsletter at katielinder.org to receive an essay focused on topics like productivity, resilience, and what it means to be a creative academic delivered directly to your inbox each week.
If you find the You've Got This Podcast to be a helpful resource, please consider leaving the show a review in iTunes. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the show, so you never miss an episode. And tell your friends and colleagues. The best promotion for the show is definitely word-of-mouth.
If you want to learn more about my work and projects, or how to hire me as a consultant, workshop facilitator, or speaker, visit my website katielinder.org. Thanks for listening.
YGT episode 61 / Page 1 of 6