Creating Online Courses for your Medical or Dental Practice can be a little time-consuming up front, but they can also build over time to be an amazing added source of revenue for your practice. So often we find ourselves packed tightly into our physical business world, waiting for that new prospect to call, a new client to walk in the door that we don’t realize there is a greater role you can play to attract new ‘soft’ clientele.  How many of your loyal customers, ones who love the service you provide have moved out of town?

What if there was a way to serve them still and at the same time bring in extra revenue for your practice? Whether you are a Doctor, Nutritionist, Dentist or even a Health Coach – Online Courses are a great way to accomplish both of these goals.

Online Courses – LMS

LMS or Learning Management Systems are online tools that you can use through your website to teach uses pretty much everything. How they work is pretty simple. You create a Course (Videos, Downloads, Recipes, Multiple Choice Q & A’s) and give users the ability to purchase and then access these courses online through your website.

How to Build an Online Course using an LMS

Setting these up can be a trying experience. But once you have the content a few days later, you could have an online course ready to sell. Firstly you will need to install and configure an LMS system. Then it is all about adding your content, but here are a few steps involved.

1. Install and Configure LMS on your site
2. Create Modules (Example Stage 1: Getting to Know your Bad Habits)
3. Create Lessons under Each Module (Example Stage 1 – Lesson 1: Cleaning out your Pantry)
4. Creating a Product (This will give access to your course from people  that purchase this product)

Install and Configure LMS on your site

LMS Systems like Sensei is pretty difficult to setup and configure. But you can do it; it will just be a little trial and error. Best to read the documentation properly. Or get your web designer/developer to do it for you. The secret is to do it by the book and not try to go outside of the parameters of the software until the revenues allow you to expand the product.

Create Modules

Modules are parents for the lessons. You could/should create an intro video to each of the modules, explaining to your students what they can expect from this module and the lessons it will contain.

Create Lessons

Each lesson should be a video or audio with some accompanying text; you can add downloadable files, link to other articles, recipes, etc. Pretty much anything you can include in a WordPress post can be added to a lesson. As it is an online course, it is best to keep the content consistent throughout. This way the student knows what to expect from each lesson.

Creating a Product

Sensei as an example – is built by the same company as WooCommerce so you can tie a product to a course for easy integration and access. Once you have all the modules created and all the lessons created under each module, it will be time to create your WooCommerce product. You pretty much create the product like any normal product. From the LMS it gives you the ability to tie in any WooCommerce product. Once purchased they get an email to access the course.

Students

Students who have purchased your online courses can log in and access the courses they purchase at any time and start off from where they left off each time. You can also choose to grade students and allow students to ask questions.

Optional Extras

You might want to offer two variations (a variable product) to access the course. One is just for a straight course. The other is the course and a one on one or group Video Conference. Google Hangouts is a great tool for this. You can not only set a date and time for the Hangout, but you can also have up to 10 people in one Video Hangout.  You can also record the Hangout and offer it privately to the student/students.

Some Notes: If you want to be able to have greater control the videos you create, best to use a service like Vimeo for this. Vimeo allows you to control who sees videos, how your videos look, control elements in the video and also not have ads and other nonsense overlaying the videos!