110 - Building an online group program from your offline courses and workshops Music Teachers: Expand Online

It is my pleasure and honor to be here helping you find the right way for your business to expand online and to support you through the implementation and launch!
This episode is about group programs. Some people call these incubators, accelerators and masterminds but I prefer to use the more general term. Essentially what we are talking about is a program with a weekly online live session along with complimentary worksheets and exercises and possibly additional touch points. Most group programs also have a private Facebook group or online forum component.
Group programs can be run for anything and like last week’s episode one of the compelling features is accountability and establishing relationships between participants and with you as the leader, mentor, guide or facilitator -- whichever word you prefer to use.
The prep work for a group program is different than a course because so much of the work and teaching is done live. But that’s not to say that we don’t need to prep at all -- in fact, most group programs have at least as much prep as online courses do! The format of your group program can be anything from straight lectures to mastermind sessions and from coworking sessions to critique or feedback or presentations.
So let’s go into each of the formats I just listed.
Lectures This is where you have a lesson planned out and you give it direct to camera and your members watch, learn and take notes if they want (or if you don’t provide summary documentation.) This may include live demonstrations or a slide deck and can also include playing of external videos or citing books and other sources or websites.
Lectures are a foundational element of most group programs because our members are looking to learn from us. But lectures sound so boring which is why I love tangible lectures which include plenty of showing and demonstration not just theory.
Mastermind sessions A mastermind session involves members coming together with you as the leader to help breakthrough challenges. There are several formats to mastermind sessions and they revolve around soliciting and providing feedback, recommendations and support from other members of the program and the leader.
Q&A Sessions Ask me anything or Q&A sessions are an open forum for group participants to get clarification, advice and feedback from the group leader or moderators. These sessions are different than mastermind sessions because they are usually more surface level and the responses are provided predominantly from you, as the group program creator and leader.
Coworking sessions Coworking sessions are just what they sound like. These are sessions where group members all come with work in hand and spend the time together moving forward on the project or assignment at hand. In these sessions most participants work through the theory that was presented in an earlier lecture session.
Presentations Presentations are usually provided by guest experts and follow a format of lecture plus Q&A. The idea of presentations is to add complementary information to the program that the leader knows will be of value to the participants but that the leader herself is not equipped to present.
Critique or Feedback Sessions These sessions are insanely valuable around the middle of a group program and towards the end. These sessions involve taking in samples of the members’ work in progress and sharing feedback in a group format. I’ll give an example of this format in a little bit so that you can get a better understanding of using this type of session within your program!
Just like with an online course, group programs are far more engaging when there is a nice mix of formats and styles.
Let’s build a group program together right now on the podcast. We're going to build this online group program for a drawing teacher. She teaches a 4-week fruit bowl drawing class through her local community Parks & Recreation programs. She wants to take this class and turn it into an