I've been thinking about creating an online course.

Why? Two things:

there's demand for a cheaper option than 1-2-1, face-to-face coaching with me; it's a fact, in-person coaching is more expensive than off-the-shelf learning.

Because I'm selling my time, and I only have a finite amount of it. Get it while stocks last!

It puts a limit to how much I can offer, how much work I can do and how many clients I can take on.

Which means unless I put my prices up, there's also a limit to how much money I can earn. (you were all thinking it , right? 'What's in it for him??')

Also I don't like managing people, so I don't want to grow my practice . Hiring people, managing people = more stress.

What's good about online courses, for the learner?

They're super-flexible: you learn at your own pace. Any time it suits you. No schedule to stick to.

Courses are cheaper: it's MUCH cheaper for you than meeting me for real.

What's not so good?

No feedback, no coaching: you can make the sounds out loud. How do you know you're getting it right?

When you book a course with me, you're paying for my ear.

Anyone on the internet can show you what to do, and pronounce the sounds for you. But coaching means you have an expert to listen to you and guide you.

Relevance: my ear tells me what I think you need. The courses I see online tend to be HUGE - hours and hours of videos about every conceivable aspect of speaking (I'll come to that in a second).

All that content! So you have to sift through it to find the stuff that's relevant to you.

Ok, so if you have time, there's nothing wrong with exploring and experimenting with new ideas and techniques. But this way, it does require you the learner to do a lot of work

Most of my clients aren't actually interested in learning for the sake of learning - no judgement, that's totally fine.

Clients usually have a problem they want to solve

No - my clients usually have a problem they want to solve.

And rather than spend vast amounts of time looking for the right tip or fix, they want to speak to an experienced professional who can listen to them and offer a solution that will work.

How do you stay motivated? Your course is competing with all the other apps on your phone for your attention.

Maybe £40 is too cheap? Will you really stick at it? if it's just a £40 online course?

It might very well get forgotten about. Clients who see me in person have invested a significant amount of money in improving their skills, so they tend to commit to it and do the work, in order to see a return on that investment.

So of course there are pros and cons to any format you choose in order to work on accent reduction, public speaking, or your general speaking skills. For the reasons I've discussed here, it's in your and my interests for me to create some online courses based on the coaching I've been doing for the last 13 years.

How should those courses look, feel, and most importantly, sound?

Obviously I've been doing my research into what's out there in the online course market. On Udemy, the hugely successful online course platform, you've got plenty of options for English pronunciation, and reams and reams of options when it comes to public speaking / effective communication / presentation skills...

What does one have to do to be a bestseller? I was intrigued by the number 1 bestselling instructor for presentation skills, Chris Haroun.

I checked out some of his videos.

There are a lot of them. I mean, hours and hours of video tutorials.

His bestseller, The Complete Presentation and Public Speaking/Speech Course (snappy title) has over 16 hours of video, in bitesize chunks, and hundreds of downloadable workbooks and resources.

Good value for 60 USD, right?

I watched some of the preview videos... and he's a charming presenter... and there's a lot to like.

And a lot that made me think 'I'm glad I didn't pay hundreds of pounds for this'.

Interestingly, on another site I found a quote from Chris Haroun where he says,

So I did. And a lot of them chimed with my own thoughts: intrusive visual aids, too much details, not enough focus...

one that came up a lot was 'too much on what to say and how to create visuals in PowerPoint, etc, and not enough on how to deliver a speech well’.

This one is interesting for me, because my approach to this work is not to focus much on WHAT you say - you're the expert on what you want to say, not me - and instead to focus on HOW you say it.

Anyway, I'm going to take Chris Haroun's advice, and starting devising my online course based on avoiding everything his one-star reviews hated... and maybe being inspired by / shamelessly ripping off some of the things that earned him his many many five-star reviews.

Some things I know right now, though, are going to be features of any online course I make:

• not too long! Not too repetitive. You can rewind and play again if you need to;

• the look and feel will be as much like a 1-2-1 session with me as possible: no cheesy backdrops, no floating graphics and visual aids, NO background muzak! It's like all those awful corporate promos you watch, with every moment drenched in 'inspirational' Coldplay-style instrumentals...

Help me create the course YOU want

I want to hear from you !

Have you ever taken an online course in accent reduction, or effective communication? What was good and/or bad about it? (If you took one before having a course with me, it obviously wasn't as effective as you hoped!)

Or maybe you're reading this because you're interested in taking a course with me, but you think an online course might be better, as it would be cheaper and more flexible? After all, I'm pretty flexible with my online live coaching, but for example I don't take bookings for a 10-min session at 23:52 on a weeknight haha!

If either is true, please do message me via the contact form on my site, or via LinkedIn, and let me know what you'd like an online course from Anthony Shuster Speech & Accent to be.

And if you can't wait for the end product, you can always book a FREE 1-hour taster session with me and get started the old-fashioned way🙂

Many thanks for reading - watch this space for online courses, coming soon