Online Lessons vs Face to Face Lessons

How to create an online dance course?

Learning online was not so common a few years ago, but now, due to the global situation, it has become more commonplace.

Of course that the experience of being in a face to face lesson, doesn’t have comparison with an online lesson, but in fact the online brings a lot of advantages in the learning process.

First, it will allow the student to take the class at their own pace, having the possibility to stop the video and repeat everything they want and need.

Second, it allows students to have easy access to instructors who live far away.

Also another advantage is that the students will have more patience to focus on details, like theory and technique, during an online lessons.

As a teacher, we need to adapt our communication and angles shown on camera, taking in consideration that the students will be seeing us through a screen.

Even now, returning gradually to the studios and face to face lessons, the online will be an amazing complementary tool. 

You, as a teacher or as a dance studio manager, can create specific exercises and specific lessons to be part of an online program, that can be sold to your active students or even for the ones that are not geographically close to you. The online increases a lot the range of possibilities in terms of niche.

Check some of our free live lessons or take a 7 days free access to our Online dance course

What I need to start an online dance course

You will find on the market several different tool options that can serve you easily.

We are with you, knowing that precisely because of this, it can be very difficult to make the decision which tool to use. We’ve already been there and invested a lot of time studying and testing different possibilities.

That’s why we’ll share with you how we do it and how we manage it, making it easier and more profitable.

Depending on your budget you can have different setups to record, edit and upload your videos.

Honestly you don’t need the top quality most expensive material on the market, to have a professional final look result.

Use what you already have and maybe do some small investments, mainly if you are starting. With the time you can upgrade your gear, as your start monetising the project.

To record, a smartphone and a tripod is more than enough. Nowadays almost all the smartphones have already High Definition.

It is important to have good light, that will influence a lot in the vídeo final result. You don’t need a fancy professional very expensive light system. If the place you will record have natural light that is amazing, if not you can try to find a light system adapted to your budget.

Sound capture maybe will be the place where you will need to do some investment. It is not mandatory, but if you are able to buy a wireless microphone, the quality of your video lessons will improve a lot. There are also several options on the market for different budgets, the one we use are the BOYA BY-WM8 PRO-K2. It is a good gear comparing quality and price.

In order to combine everything we record the lessons in OBS that is a free software and works as a simple TV studio. You can find hundreds of YouTube tutorials on how to manage it, although it is very intuitive.

We have live online lessons that we record to after upload to our online academy and we also have pre recorded lessons to be uploaded to our ALC Kizomba & Semba Academy. In both situations we use the OBS software to compile all the gear.

In resume:

• Connect the smartphone via usb cable to the laptop, entering that signal to OBS. 

• Connect the microphone to a sound mix table.

• Connect a speaker to the same mix table

• Connect the mix table to the laptop via usb

That way the OBS software will receive the signal from camera, microphone and music. You can control the volumes at the mixtable also allowing you to listen the music through the speaker.

Where to upload the video lessons?

We studied different online platforms, for our online dance course, trying to find the one that combine the best price, the best back-office to easily manage the courses and students and also the best experience for the students.

We choose thinkific.com 

If you are whiling to create your online academy this is really an amazing option.

You can create the course you want, dividing them by modules and lessons.

You can have private communities.

The platform have integration with zoom to easily schedule live lessons allowing your students to enter directly through your online academy.

The platform allows you to create web pages where you can advertise each course with videos, photos, descriptions, testimonies…

They developed now recently an APP store, where you can easily integrate with several services like, email marketing, invoices, other online stores.

An amazing thing, is that you can have one month free access to test everything and check if it really suites you.

We are very satisfied with the platform and by the surveys we do with our online students, in a scale from 0 to 5 in terms of platform satisfaction, we had 5 as an answer from all the students.

This is no longer the future, it is the present. 

We really hope that this post helped you to find some answers.

Let us know bellow on the comments if you liked it and even if you have any question.

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