Xpand Online Learning

Over the last 10 years online education has taken a massive market share of learning. Universities have shifted a big chunk of students to solely online. Covid shifted a lot of people to realize that going in person to class doesn’t always mean better results. With ever advancing technology and shorter attention spans people if asked which they prefer most people are shifting their responses to online training versus in class. 

Angela Duckworth, author of the book “Grit” studied individual Grit Scores. She wanted to figure out what made people successful, and what attributes really drove results. She conducted a case study around spelling bee champions. She made 3 control groups and decided to test which method of study preparation would produce the most consistent spelling bee champions: 

• Group 1 = Study Flash Cards with a Partner 
• Group 2 = Play spelling bee interactive games on a computer
• Group 3 = Read the dictionary and study origins alone in your room 

Group 3 consistently outperformed the rest because they “Deliberate Practice.” It takes focus, and commitment to do something on your own. If your mentees solely rely on you giving them the answers, and they assume by sitting in the classroom as a participant they are going to see speedy advancement in learning they are wrong. They have to apply themselves, commit to being the student for their own good. 

John Maxwell at a mastermind event I held answered a very powerful question.

“Out of all my people, who do I know who to spend the most time with?” 

He simply replied, “Those that are willing to spend the time on themselves.” 

The way to measure this is by checking reports on how many videos, time, and consistency they are watching online training. The ability to have the metrics of their activity is massive. Why would you take an extra hour out of your day as a coach to help your people if they aren’t willing to take an extra out of their own day and search for answers in provided training? Xpand has Reports on Videos, Time, watching times, and a lot more.

As a leader it is more important to empower your people to learn on their own, instead of making it feel like you hold the only keys to success. Help them see that they can be resourceful and think for themselves and don’t need to come to you with every problem. For example if they want to know what is the capital of Honduras, they would google it, not come to you. The question is have you provided your own personal GOOGLE?  Meaning a library of content, organized and searchable with all resources, guides, videos, and training to answer the most common questions you are getting. Do you have step by step solutions mapped out for your people they can access at any given time they want. 

Most people have egos and are afraid to ask you for help. The reality it takes balls to come to a leader and say, “I Don’t Know.” But oftentimes behind the scenes your people are dying for help. If they had resources they could easily access help at any given hour of the day, despite how busy people’s agendas are, they would leverage those resources. 

Accessibility creates lower influence. The more accessible you are, the less important and productive you will come off to your people. Your people must respect your time, because they know how much you value your time. Most leaders make themselves way too accessible. This will drown you. Eventually you will scale your team or community large enough where this will start to backfire, and have the opposite effects you want. Obviously you have a big heart and want to be there for your people as much as you can, but if you start to sacrifice your own needs too much, you won’t have anything left to give. 

Do your people the favor by building out Online Training on the front end and save yourself HOURS and HOURS of unnecessary calls and texts. Whether you are a business owner, manager of a department, coach, industry Xpert, etc.. The simplicity of creating an online training system with the technology, and quality of phone cameras today could take you less than a day! 

In the Xpand platform we have built in a LMS (learning management system) where you have the ability to upload content, create quizzes, and run reports on the engagement and performance of your users. 

There are thousands of LMS platforms out there, and personally I have used about 5 of them over my Leadership Career. When I say used, I mean in depth learned the ins and outs, implemented and picked apart many of them as well. Why? Because running My company D2D Experts, one of our core business models was to go to Door to Door sales companies (Pest, Alarms, Roofers, Solar, Etc..) and custom build out their sales training platforms. We would white label an LMS and help them manage their own training system, with some preloaded videos that we supplied to help speed up and improve the system. 

We have a full time team of videographers and training partner managers that would fly out to dozens of companies every month and: 

• Film
• Edit
• Upload
• Manage Continue Edits
• Gamify
• Play producer on future improvements 

With over 300 companies and all their employees onboarded to this point we perfected the process of helping companies understand what videos to film, shoot/edit videos in volume and speed, then manage people’s user experience. We never wanted to just give people a platform and say, “good luck” 

We have a corporate office with a full blown studio in Sandy, Utah we have people often fly into if they want a more professional shoot as well. 

Well as we built out Xpand we said, “Why don’t we offer the same service.” Now we have helped many types of Xperts. Influencers, Marketing Agencies, Call Centers, Coaches of all Types. 

Why do I find the service side of what we offer so important? Because I have found so many people, myself included, download technology, get way excited and then never get anything off the ground. I would invite people to make their own content, but I kept finding people didn’t take the time, they wouldn’t know what to film, they didn’t have the right equipment, excuse after excuse. Who were the people suffering due to leadership’s inability to produce an amazing platform and fast? The people they led! I feel it is a leader’s duty to provide the ultimate training experience for your people. 

Stop complaining about underperforming employees or clients. You can confidently say you did your job when you have laid out clear training for them and now it’s up to them to watch and apply it. If they are left to fend for themselves, and just “figure it out” you shouldn’t be able to sleep at night knowing you have given your people the tools to be successful. 

Whether you use our Xpand turn key solution and services, or you go out and get your own platform, I would highly recommend taking the time to lay a foundation of training you can reference back to and stand out as the Xpert you are.