Why every course needs a ladder of accomplishment (and how to create one)

Pride from reaching the top of the ladder of accomplishment. Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Hello,

Welcome to this week’s edition of Course Builder’s Corner.

In this issue, we’ll discuss a way to get more people to complete your courses - the ladder of accomplishment. I even discuss some scientific evidence for the principle, too.

After reading, let me know what you think by email or posting comment.

Rodney

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Why every course needs a ladder of accomplishment (and how to create one)

There is a half billion dollars buried in a landfill but it's illegal to go looking for it.

James Howell, mined 8,000 bitcoin in 2009, back then the total value of the entire haul was worth very little. But in 2013, he accidentally threw out the hard drive containing the key to access those digital coins, then worth $1.5 million.  Four months later he realized his mistake. By then, the hard drive was buried four feet deep in an area the size of a football field.

So he could dig for the hard drive, right?

Wrong. It's against the city's ordinances to excavate the area due to the negative environmental impact.

Since then Howell has done everything he could to get his hard drive back. He's recruited investors to pay for the search, hired engineers to devise a plan to retrieve the drive without harming the environment, deployed AI to create an algorithm to discover the drive. All to no avail. The city has still not allowed him to dig.

Howell, has spent 10 years working towards his goal because the monetary rewards are so great.

Your students goals for learning don't typically translate into huge financial returns. So it's hard to stay as motivated as Howell is to find his half a billion dollar hard drive.  That's why we need to use tested motivational strategies that are far less costly. One of them is the ladder of accomplishment.

What is the ladder of accomplishment?

It is a clear path from Point A to Point Z that shows students how to succeed in your field. It is the marking of stages of achievement with names that show progress. Martial arts is the clearest example.  You start at white belt, then move to yellow belt, then orange, then blue, then purple ... and eventually land at black belt.  Each stage has a name that helps you feel a sense of completion.

Why is the ladder of accomplishment important?

Most people think in black and white terms. You are either good or not good. No in between. Your course is unlikely to give students perfect mastery.  So they will finish somewhere between novice and expert. 

Without a name for the stages they will keep feeling like where they are is not enough.

But if given stages, like belts in martial arts, they can feel they've climbed a few rungs and can be secure at their current rung. They know what they've done but also what lies ahead. They can claim a level of expertise without feeling like an imposter.

Instead of a ladder, most courses are flat. Just one action after another and the student doesn’t feel progress. Do this. Do that. But not enough sense of rising to a higher level.

Still feeling too much like a beginner.

One popular writing course has participants write daily using templates. The goal was to complete each day's writing. But there were no levels that made you feel you advanced through stages. 

You either finished or you did not.

At least that's how many students felt.  This may be why few continued writing after the program ended. Most didn't feel that they moved from Point A to Point Z.  They had no way to gauge their progress.

How do you create the ladder of accomplishment in your course?

You first define the end of the ladder.  Then you define its beginning. And finally, you do your best to fill in the steps in between.

For example in the coaching courses I created, the students go through three stages.

Stage 1: Self work

Stage 2: Buddy work

Stage 3: Outsider work

In Stage 1, Self Work, they coach themselves using the structured process we teach.

It’s easier for them to practice asking themselves a few questions and answering them than to ask them of another. There’s little pressure to perform. They can slow down, take their time and relax.

Stage 2 raises the bar by having them work with someone inside the course.

That’s harder but not too hard since the other person knows the coaching process. The buddy is like an experienced client at that point. They can even help the coach if he or she is stuck. 

Finally, at Stage 3, they coach an outsider. They are working without a net.

But by this point they've had success coaching a buddy and have gotten feedback on how to improve. Almost every student has a successful first coaching experience at this stage.  They’ve climbed the ladder of success provided by our course.

Here's scientific proof that this idea works

A study on students who struggled with subtraction, supports this idea. Researchers wanted to test the difference between setting a "distal goal" which is long term vs. "proximal goals" which are short term.  The students were in second grade (7-8 years old) so long term was a week and short term was a day.

The children were given a 25-question math test and two thirds of them got every answer wrong. The researchers then gave them a packet of materials to teach them math. They were to complete it in one week.  One group of students were asked to set a goal for how many pages they would complete by the end of the week (distal goal). The other group was asked to set a goal for how many pages to complete each day (proximal goal).

At the end of the study, researchers tested the students again. Those who set the proximal goals got 81 percent of the problems correct. Those with the distal goal only solved 45 percent of the problems.

And even more striking, when given free time, those who set the proximal goals were more likely to spend their time entertaining themselves with more subtraction problems. 

So setting and achieving smaller targets over time builds skill and motivation.

This is why it's so important to create stages for your students to pass through.  Those short-term targets ensure they get motivated, get skilled and stick with your program long term.

But what if there is no obvious ladder of accomplishment in my course (or field)?

This is true in most fields. Very few bother to generate a ladder of accomplishment like they have in martial arts.

It has to be created.

In fact, many martial arts started with only two belts - white and black.  The levels in between were created to help people stay motivated to reach black belt.  When you create levels, you'll be doing what these martial arts innovators did many years ago.

The three step ladder, we created in my coaching course was far from obvious at first. We always had students work with each other as an obvious way to practice. We added self work as we saw how much it improved student's coaching and outsider work to give them a real world moment (see my article on the Real World Moment.)

Later, I realized that this made a neat three-stage approach to learning, so I framed it as such for the students.

It may take come creativity to find such stages in your work but it's well worth the effort.

Summary

• The ladder of accomplishment is an outline of stages of accomplishment you define for your course.

• It allows students to have a genuine feeling of accomplishment as they pass through stages.

• To create the ladder, define it's beginning and end first. Then define the steps in between.

• The ladder of accomplishment may not be obvious but with some creativity you can find it.

The ladder of accomplishment gives your students a feeling of accomplishment in their in-between stages of learning.

It's a real point of pride for them. It gives shape and form to the long-term goal of mastery which may take months or years. And if they stop only part-way through, we still want them to notice how far they came. The game of learning isn't as black and white as whether or not we've found a billion-dollar hard drive. 

The intermediate stages have value. Let's help people recognize this fact.

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How to get to the next stage of course creation

When it comes to creating a course, Stage 1 (white belt) is when you have the aspiration to become a course creator. Stage 2, (yellow belt) is when you have your winning course idea.

You can gain your yellow belt by reading my article “How to Create a Winning Course Idea." You'll discover three steps to creating a course idea that's a win for you and your customers. (Of course, you get your black belt after you've created your course. 😉)