Teacher Stories: Susanne Conrad of lululemon
Meet Susanne Conrad, Director of Possibility at lululemon athletica.
Susanne is a seasoned communication advisor with over 25 years of experience, helping others improve their interpersonal and business skills to achieve happier personal and professional lives. These days, she coaches a multi-year personal development program for executives and managers within incredibly popular athletic clothing company lululemon, helping them become strong communicators and powerful leaders.
Susanne is also the founder of igolu.com (pronounced I-Goal-You), is a body of innovative communication, vision, goal-setting and leadership training work that Susanne certifies others to lead and teach.
We sat down with Susan to learn more about her background, her work with lululemon and her experience teaching Author Your Life With Goal Setting on Skillshare.
What piqued your interest in teaching an Online Skillshare Class?
I saw teaching an Online Skillshare Class as a great opportunity to explore one of my goals—to have my work, currently up on igolu.com, running on a more sophisticated technological platform. I saw Skillshare’s Online program as an interesting approach to sharing my work in a more dynamic way and with a wider audience.
Tell us a bit about your class and how it ties back to your work with lululemon.
Most of the material I used for my Skillshare class comes from one of the many programs I lead at lululemon. I found it delightful to take an existing curriculum and repurpose it into an online format and make it available and affordable to a wider audience.
There were over 300 people in the class, and many were lululemon employees who would not have had the opportunity to work with me yet because I currently only work with managers and up.
Can you tell us what you think made your class so successful?
I read everything people wrote, commented on everything posted regarding projects and milestones and was quite engaged. I truly cared about the success of my students and I believe that commitment and honesty came through in my comments, feedback and office hours.
I believe people sign up for a course like this because they do want to receive help and guidance in writing vision and goals and there really aren’t many ready-made resources on the internet to help with this beyond very simplistic goal setting.
Something else that made this class successful was that the skillshare platform allowed for students to interact, form groups and meet each other and also to learn from other students by reading what they posted.
Do you have any tips for other teachers on Skillshare?
1- Become familiar with the platform ahead of time—know that the medium is the message so the more familiar you are with the platform and other types of interactions (such as google hangouts and the project system) the better you will be at teaching the class.
2- Know that your first class is also your own on-the-job training and be patient with yourself because you’re learning a new skill as well.
3- Trust that you can fully engage with the Skillshare team—they are open to your ideas about how to evolve their product. They are a willing and engaged group of young people who care very much about what they are doing and the product they are developing. This makes it fun to work with them!
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Be sure to add Susanne’s class to your watchlist, and check out the amazing community and products at lululemon.
Interested in becoming an online teacher? Learn more.
Teacher Stories: Jamie Viggiano of TaskRabbit
Meet Jamie Viggiano, San Francisco-based marketing expert and Online Skillshare teacher.
Jamie is Director of Marketing for TaskRabbit, the popular online marketplace for small jobs and errands, overseeing their brand strategy and corporate communications. Jamie’s previous experience includes various different roles at Johnson & Johnson, including business development, strategic planning, marketing and sales.
Jamie was one of our first-ever Online Skillshare teachers, sharing her marketing skills with students around the world in Startup Marketing: If You Had $1 To Spend How Would You Spend It?
We sat down with Jamie to learn more about her story and find out what made her class on Skillshare such a success.
So, Jamie, what’s your story?
I’m the head of marketing at TaskRabbit - a website and mobile app where you can outsource jobs and tasks to people in your own community. I have been managing TaskRabbit’s marketing function since January 2011, focusing on corporate marketing, PR, social media, and branding.
Tell us a bit about your online Skillshare class. What inspired you to teach?
My class focuses on how to apply lean start-up principles to marketing, showcasing case studies from TaskRabbit and other companies.
The “lean startup” methodology, a term coined by Eric Ries, advocates the creation of rapid prototypes designed to test market assumptions, and the use of customer feedback to evolve these hypotheses much quicker than via traditional processes.
At TaskRabbit, we use this approach to test and quickly iterate on various marketing tactics - everything from brand design to positioning to messaging to PR channels.
I am passionate about the topic and love sharing my experience and lessons learned at TaskRabbit. I hope that others who are working in small or resource-constrained environments can pick up some tidbits from my experience.
What were your favorite elements of the class experience?
I love the interaction between students that tends to happen organically. The students’ eagerness to help other students is awesome to see!
Has teaching this class impacted your professional endeavors in any way?
I learn a ton from my students as well! I love hearing their own personal experiences and lessons learned, which I can then apply to my own work at TaskRabbit.
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Be sure to add Jamie’s class to your watchlist, and don’t forget to use TaskRabbit next time you need a job or errand done for you!
Interested in becoming an online teacher? Learn more.
Teacher Stories: Nora Abousteit
Meet Nora Abousteit, founder of Kollabora.com, the popular craft and maker community for sewing, knitting, jewelry-making and more.
Nora has built her DIY empire unconventionally - through publishing. Previously to founding Kollabora, while working for German publishing giant Hubert Burda Media, she was appointed to revive an old but iconic sewing magazine that had been languishing for years. She ended up reinventing the entity into DIY fashion community BurdaStyle.com, now with over 750,000 members, and established herself as an entrepreneurial icon in the sewing, craft and maker community.
Nora’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Wired, BusinessWeek, Women’s Wear Daily, and Fast Company, and she currently sits on the board of the Craft and Hobby Association. Long story short, when it comes to all things knitting, crafts and DIY, Nora knows her stuff.
Naturally, Nora’s Skillshare class was a hit. Nora used Skillshare to teach hundreds of students around the world the art of knitting in Learn to Knit with Kollabora, which launched in August of 2012. Students knit cowls from home, shared their knitting progress in real-time, critiqued and praised each other’s work, and even ordered their own knitting supplies from Kollabora to continue practicing what they’d learned.
How was your experience teaching an Online Skillshare Class?
I love teaching on Skillshare. Teaching used to be something you only did face-to-face and in-person. I think with the tools that Skillshare now supplies, the way people are taught is changing - so many more people can be reached simultaneously and that is wonderful. On Skillshare, you can reach a lot of people but there is still this kind of intimacy that makes it so special.
What was your favorite part of the class?
I loved the contact with the students, and I learned a lot about my own teaching skills from the feedback I received from the class. I learned a lot from my students behavior, and these students are our site’s potential users, so those insights alone were incredibly valuable.
We had students become customers, and even have students who stay in touch. I am definitely going to teach more.
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Interested in becoming an online teacher? Learn more.
Teacher Stories: Elliott Curtis
Meet Elliott Curtis, New York-based designer, entrepreneur, and teacher of one of the most successful online Skillshare classes of all time, Sneakerology Studio, selling over 1100 tickets, bringing together a community of sneaker enthusiasts from around the world and producing some of the most creative projects Skillshare has seen yet. We sat down with Elliott to learn more about his story and find out what made his class so successful.
What’s your story?
I’m from Brooklyn, Mass., 25 years old.
I landed my first internship at a sneaker company at 19, through a camper of mine whose parents worked in the footwear industry, and shortly after developed the first version of my Sneakerology class - the world’s first college class dedicated to sneaker culture.
I eventually ended up at Rebok where I met tons of cool people and played basketball every day at lunch. It was great. During my time there I created a Sneakerology collaboration sneaker - a limited run of 101 sneakers inspired by my class. It really kicked off my deep involvement in the footwear industry.
Fast forward a few years, and I’ve spoken at universities, agencies, high schools, grade schools, schools for kids on parole… It’s amazing how sneakers can really apply to so many ages, backgrounds and interest levels. I also just because Skillshare’s most recent employee hire, and I couldn’t be more excited about it.
So what’d you end up teaching on Skillshare?
I started teaching Sneakerology, The History of Sneakers from Chucks to Cha-Ching, last year as a local Skillshare class. I taught three in Boston and one in New York. They ended up being really successful, so the Skillshare team asked if I’d like to teach an online version of the class when the online format was first released. From there we built the Sneakerology Studio, which was an online class geared toward teaching students the process of sneaker creation, from from inspiration to sketching to tech pack to marketing plan.
Your online Skillshare class was incredibly successful. How’d you do it?
In terms of the reach, we had 1100 students in the class, and there were kids in the discussion boards from Lebanon, South Africa, New Zealand, Shanghai… it was an incredible experience to be in the class and see people talking about sneakers coming from incredibly different backgrounds, literally different ends of the globe, all talking about shoes.
What were your favorite elements of the class experience?
It’s the discussions and collaboration between students. To see people giving each other feedback and constructive criticism, and even setting up meetings in their towns, and using it as a platform for discussion far beyond their projects, was amazing.
I know it’s not unique to sneakers, but one thing about sneaker culture—it’s a unifying bond. If I meet someone that cares about sneakers or has waited in line for a new release, we already share something, and I saw those connections being made within the class.
I was also amazed at what students created in class. I had students create incredible sketches, vector illustrations, clay models and even design entire clothing lines inspired by the sneaker concepts they created in my class.
Has teaching this class impacted your professional path in any way?
Well, I’m working for Skillshare now, which is huge. I think the success of my class impressed Mike the CEO and he was happy with the amount of press the class received in areas that Skillshare hadn’t seen before. So yeah, it’s completely affected me as a person and my path. Skillshare has become part of that path now, not just Sneakerology.
What was your marketing strategy for the class?
As a teacher, I can’t stress how important it is to market your class to your own networks.
If new teachers have an interesting concept, I’m sure there is a blog or website that is related to that concept, and has a whole following that cares about that concept. Target the most appropriate blogs to the concept you’re teaching to spread the word to the exact people that’d want to know about it.
Most teachers are coming from a network or community. Because they’re experts in a subject, they’ve been involved in the field so they should know what the best outlets are. It’s the teacher’s responsibility to get in touch with their own community. Skillshare will take care of the tech press, the Skillshare community stuff, their network, but it’s important to think about how to get more specific and bring in that other audience that might not know about Skillshare.
WIth Sneakerology, we looked at Nice Kicks, we looked at Hypebeast, Soul Collector. These are sites that I had connections with prior but you have to reach out to them about your class or else they’ll never know.
And you need good content to share. You need video or photos or something that can go along with the post - just a little text press release doesn’t do it anymore. I put some of my own money into producing marketing videos that would increase the buzz around the class. You need to show people why they should take your class - they won’t figure it out for themselves.
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Check out Sneakerology Studio to learn more about Elliott and his Sneakerology class series.
Interested in becoming an online teacher? Learn more.
Teacher Stories: Julian Cole
Meet Julian Cole, New York-based digital strategist and one of our most popular teachers on Skillshare. Julian’s led the Digital & Social Strategy for Coca-Cola, glaceau vitamin water, Rockstar Games, Boost Mobile, Axe, Johnnie Walker, Baileys, Universal Music amongst other global brands. He’s been using Skillshare to share what he’s learned over his successful seven-year career in digital.
In October, Julian taught his three-week course, Become a Great Digital Strategist, to 480 students. His first week’s class lecture on ‘What is Digital Strategy’ has had over 150,000 views since the class.
We sat down with Julian to learn more about his story and find out what made his classes on Skillshare such a success.
So, Julian, what’s your story?
I am an Australian living in New York City, working as a Digital Strategy Director at BBH New York. I have been working in Advertising Agencies in a Digital role for the last 7 years, getting started in Social Media, then eventually moving into Digital Strategy. Both of these disciplines don’t have much information available about them, so I had to teach myself along the way.
As I progressed in my career, I loved sharing what I’d learned through my blog Adspace Pioneers, but over the last two years I noticed that Advertising Blogging really died off. So when I got asked to teach a course on Digital Strategy I saw this as a great opportunity to get back into teaching and sharing the insights I’ve developed over the years.
Tell us a bit about the classes you teach on Skillshare.
My classes on Skillshare are all focused around digital advertising skills. I recently taught Become a Great Digital Strategist, and on December 10th will launch the Guide To Creating a Great Social Media Campaign. It will be looking at how you create great Social Media Campaign, how to create social products your agency can offer a client and how you price these products.
Your recent online Skillshare class was incredibly successful. How’d you do it?
I put a lot of time aside to take a step back and really think about what goes into my role as a Digital Strategist. From there, I came up with a framework using actual examples of my work. I think it was successful because no one had really attempted to define the role of a digital strategist and talk about the day to day.
I think students were happy with the class because I really made a point of responding to everyone who commented and participated in the class. If students go to the effort to complete their assignments, then the least I could do is take 10 minutes to give them some feedback, and folks appreciated that.
What were your favorite elements of the class experience?
My favorite elements of the class experience were definitely the discussions. I learned so much from the students and it was great to see everyone’s approaches to the class assignments. It was amazing how much I learned from the students themselves.
I also really enjoyed the Groups feature, where I could connect with small groups of students via Google Hangout. It was great to have a small group of people ask really specific questions, and I felt like the group got a lot out of it. It was also great to faces to names that I had been interacting with online.
Has teaching this class impacted your professional path in any way?
Before I started teaching the course, I really didn’t have a clear definition of what I did as a Digital Strategist, because a clear definition isn’t really available out there today. I couldn’t even tell my mom what I did. Having time to think about it and reflect has been great. Because of this class, I have been able to better define what I do and let my coworkers know how I can add value to the Agency.
I also love that I’ve created a great set of tutorials for anyone I will need to personally hire and train, and that others can access this for their own career advancement.
What was your marketing strategy for the class?
The discount codes that Skillare enables me to create is where I see the most value. Giving people a discount on the course gives them the feeling they are getting extra value and incentivises sign-ups. Blogs and online publishers also like receiving custom discount codes because they get to give something back to their readers.
The one that I am doing at the moment that seems to be working well is tweet for a discount on the course. It is a win-win situation, I am able to offer a discount to the students and they help to promote the course to their own social network.
The other big success was creating a slideshare presentation around the topic of what I would be teaching. For the Social Media Course I created the Digital Strategy Toolbox with Amber Horsburgh who is also teaching a course on Music Marketing. The presentation has had over 85,000 views on Slideshare, so I have had people sign up for the course from the exposure that created.
As far as other marketing advice goes, the thing you need to do is just experiment with a number of different promotion sources. I have given free passes to teachers from my college, bought advertising in business networking newsletters, Facebook ads, Google Adwords, and promoted it in LinkedIn Groups. You learn something from everything you do.
Teaching a class is the best thing you can do if you want to build your brand or your career. You don’t need to be a top expert in your field—if people walk away from your class with two or three things they didn’t know before, then it was a success.
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Interested in becoming an online teacher? Learn more.
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