How to offer a correspondence course

Hi Gordon,

Great post! I was particularly interested in your info about Robert Coller and ICS.... It makes me wonder,

Why do correspondence courses appeal to people?

I don't really know the answer (I guess you'd need to do a survey, or find one which has already been done), but here are a couple of guesses.

My guess is that probably one of its appeals over a regular sit-in-the-classroom type of course is that it is SELF-PACED. So you can do it whenever you have the time, as fast or as slow as you like. But that's not it.

My guess for the second appeal is that, unlike with other info-products, you can get FEEDBACK by doing the assignments etc., which you then send in to be graded. This leads to the following observation.

I think these two things, that they are self-paced, and that you can get feedback, puts them somewhere in-between a standard info-product and a standard sit-in-the-classroom type of course in terms of their benefits. (And thus in a class by themselves.)

What do you think?

As I said earlier, these are just guesses, so if anyone knows more about this area I'd be very interested in the feedback.... But what do you need to offer such a course?

It seems to me that what you need to offer a correspondence course are an info-product (divided into several lessons), plus some assignments and the facilities to grade those assignments and send them back (so the student can get feedback on their work). Is that it, or is there more to it?

(I've never done a correspondence course, maybe I should enrol in one just to find out!)

- Dien Rice