Teaching online classes is how I’ve made the majority of my income since 2017. And it is a great joy of my career to have had such amazing, invested, weird, inspirational students.
In this episode, I’m going to share my approach to creating an online class by walking us through how I teach my class A Quilt Is Something Human.
I hope that this inspires you to become the teacher that you are meant to be.
Grab a pen & paper, then tune in to learn about—
How to decide what to teach
Reasons to teach online
Pricing your online class
5 reasons the world needs your online class
Some of my favorite tech for selling online classes
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“Don’t overly think about the tech and make it overcomplicated. There are so many ways to make it simple, easy, and fun. And to have it bring you closer to your practice.”
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Transcript
Introduction to the podcast and topic of online classes
[0:00] Hello, and welcome to Common Shapes, a podcast about practices, systems, and rituals for a creative life.
And today, it's a podcast about online classes.
It's about teaching as a hope practice, coming into closer contact with your own creative spirit.
I'm Marlee Grace, and I teach online courses about quilting, creativity, business, and I want to teach you today on the podcast about making an online class.
It is the majority of my income since 2017, is teaching the people in the digital realm And it is a great joy of my career.
Teaching is Joyful Because of Amazing Students
[1:07] To have such amazing, invested, excited, weird, awesome, inspirational students.
So a big part of teaching for me is not just the joy that it brings me in my own life, but it is getting to be in contact and inspired by my amazing students.
So I'm gonna sort of walk us through today how I teach quilt class, which is called A Quilt is Something Human, and I hope that it inspires you no matter what your art practice or creative practice or hobby is, that you can teach other people how to do it.
Building and Launching Your Online Course with Marlee Grace
[1:58] I'm sharing all of this today because no matter when it is that you're listening to this, I hope that you feel inspired to become the teacher you are meant to be. But I'm also sharing it because in July, I am teaching my class, Teaching As a Practice, a class about visioning, building and launching your own online course. So it could be a course about the art that you do, or it could be a course about something that you teach people to do that's like your job, sort of like I teach a class about how to make an online class, right? So it's really fun. It's $425. That's the investment. There are two and three part payment plans, as well as scholarships.
[2:53] For any marginalized students who are looking for financial accessibility. So I really hope that you take the class if you've been feeling like you want to add this offering into your ecosystem.
So I'm going to jump in to just keep talking about online classes and everything I love about them.
And if you're wanting to dig deeper, I'd love it if you came to class, you can head to marleegrace.space to learn more about class and sign up!
Deciding What to Teach Based on Passion and Excitement
[3:37] For me, deciding what to teach is looking around at what's lighting me up, what is making me excited, what do I love doing, and what do I want to share with other people?
So in a lot of traditional online course-building worlds, I feel like you sort of hear the suggestion of like, what are people's pain points?
And I don't know if I love that language, And so what I try to think about is what do the people around me want to unlock within themselves, right?
And so then I try to look for something that maybe can combine a few different things.
And so I'm gonna walk us through quilt class because I think it's such a great example of like.
[4:28] It's about making a blanket, but it's really about so much more.
So I want you to get out a pen and paper. And if you haven't already, grabbing the Creative Ideation Portal, my three-day guide for visioning your projects is a great place to put an online class idea through the portal, right?
So each day brings you through these different exercises and journaling prompts that get you really clear on the idea what your next steps are in putting it into the world.
And so if you want a free resource that's just like, how do I figure out what my online class is, what it's about, where does it go?
[5:09] The Creative Ideation Portal is perfect for that. So head to marleygrace.space slash common shapes to grab that. And in the meantime, grab a pen and paper and start thinking about all the things you could teach.
Just make a list, right?
It could be as specific and art-focused as you want or as sort of like vague and poetic, right?
So a class that I'm sure some of you have taken that I taught a few different times was called Everything is a Sunset.
And...
[5:42] That class was about creative practice and ending projects and starting projects, but the name itself isn't obvious per se, right? I love naming classes really obvious things, like I have Newsletter Class.
I lovingly call Quilt Class, Quilt Class, because it's a class about making a quilt, but its full title is A Quilt is Something Human, which is the name of an essay in the Foxfire book.
And so you can write down all of the different things you would want to teach.
And if titles start coming to you, that's great.
So let's say you are a ceramicist, right? And you wanna teach a class about pinch pots.
[6:33] Pinch pots are the object that you will teach people how to make.
[6:40] But when you're creating a syllabus, you get to weave in all of the different things you're interested in, right?
So when I teach quilt class, something I teach about and talk about is finding your own personal quilt ancestry.
So each student is encouraged through the four weeks of class to look at.
Is there quilt making in your own bloodline and your ancestors that you know, as well as the places that you come from and that your ancestors come from?
So for me, I like looking at Swedish quilts and German quilts.
As a white teacher, I think this also helps me stay out of cultural appropriation, right?
I can be inspired by and teach about and think about quilts from other places and cultures that are different than my own, but I'm also gonna be wanting to connect to my own ancestry and my own history of quilts.
So that could also be looking at Michigan quilts, looking at queer quilts, right?
Quilts that are from where I'm from, spiritually, emotionally, and factually.
So that's woven into quilt class.
But again, the class is about how to make a blanket. But by including the encouragement of personal research.
[8:09] For our own histories, that is also part of my commitment to dismantling white supremacy and systems of oppression, right?
I'm not saving the world telling people to understand what their own quilt history is, but it invites each student, no matter what their identity is, to get closer to where they come from.
And then those students are all sharing with each other and teaching with each other throughout the course.
So we're all learning about all these different ways of being in the world and making quilts in the world and the history of quilts, right?
As a group, we're sort of becoming a little research lab of where quilts come from.
So that's an example of, you might think of a class that is.
[9:03] About how to make the thing that you make in your job, but you can weave in your values and the things that excite you and the way that you want to shift consciousness in a way that makes sense to go with the teaching of the thing, right?
I sort of sometimes see myself as sort of like doing the Trojan horse method where I'm like, we're gonna make blankets But then I'm actually like, we're actually going to radically unblock our creative selves, right?
So another thing that I'm really committed to in everything that I do is being anti-perfectionist, right? Like just deeply, deeply committed to undoing perfectionism. And so teaching improvisational quilt making gives me the opportunity to share everything I know about embracing imperfection.
[10:09] Right? So the way that I teach no rules, no rulers, no patterns.
We snip, we rip, we improvise, we cut things, We rearrange them, we start over.
[10:22] There's no mistakes in quilting in the way that I teach quilting, right? So what that means is that, I can start thinking about the themes that are going to go with my class. So start with thinking about what do you want to teach and then start looking at the themes that you want to include and see if they can go with the thing you're wanting to teach. And my guess is that they can.
Like, that's where someone might not originally think, oh, a quilt class, we're gonna talk about, undoing perfectionism, dismantling systems of oppression, and redistributing wealth, right?
Using Quilt Class to Teach about Dismantling Systems of Oppression
[11:02] But you can. You don't have to just teach the thing. You get to teach all the different things that come with it.
So in week three of quilt class, we talk about what to do with your quilts.
So we look at the history of social movements, political movements that have included raffling off quilts, donating quilts as part of making change in the world, redistributing resources and money and blankets, and how that brings awareness to different movements that we believe in.
Many quilt class alumni have hosted their own quilt raffles and use the practice of quilting to shine a light on what matters to them.
[11:48] So, again, I use quilt class to really teach about all the different things that I believe in for my life and my own practice of business, of doing business in a different way as an artist, right? Doing business as an artist, how I spend my money, how I use my money, how I use my resources and time. I can teach about all of those things in Quilt Class.
[12:16] So however you're doing business, doing your life, showing up to your practices, remember that those can be a part of the class that you teach, even if you're teaching how to make a pinch pot, how to make a weaving, how to make candles, right? They can seem like these simple things, but I imagine that the art of dipping the beeswax candles in the hot wax over and over is its own meditative experience that you can share with us about, right? It could be a watercolor class that is about slowing down. It could be a sewing class that is about joy and expression or grief. Melissa Word is an amazing artist and dancer, quilter, who literally weaves in quilting with talking about grief in the classes that she teaches.
So again, make a list of what you could teach and the themes that you want to weave in, and then start to play with how they all mix together when you're deciding what you want to teach.
Teaching as a Way to Increase Your Earnings
[13:29] I want to be honest that teaching is a way to make money, right?
I don't want to shy away from that.
That's part of why I want to encourage you to teach. It's something to add in to your business and creative ecosystem that will increase your earning.
So I often tell people to take my class because while it might feel like an investment, it is one that I feel confident will return to you.
Teaching online offers the opportunity for people all over the world to exchange money with you for your expertise.
And I say expertise, and that does not mean you need to be an expert.
[14:14] And I'm gonna keep using quilt class as the example that I am certainly not an expert quilter, but I am an artist, and I am a person who's been quilting for a decade.
I'm dedicated to imperfection and thinking about quilting. I love making blankets, right?
And it's actually many people who are expert quilters or are amazing at using rulers and patterns take my quilt class because they want to undo some of what they've learned about precision.
So I say, come to my quilt class, where we're scrappy and we mess up and we do things differently.
So don't wait to be an expert to teach and embrace that it could increase your income and be a place to make more money.
Redistributing Profits to Correlating Organizations or Funds
[15:02] You can choose somewhere to redistribute part of the profits of your class to an organization or a person, or a mutual aid fund, that correlates with the thing that you're teaching.
Making Money by Offering Online Classes
[15:21] Right, so there's all these different ways to use the online class as an offering of service, both teaching itself and the redistribution of time, resources, and energy.
You get to make money. May you make money. May your online class make you money so that you can support yourself and your art practice and those around you.
Understanding How to Price Online Classes
[15:47] Pricing our online classes takes its own skill to understand how much time we're taking to teach, the scalability of it.
Do you wanna teach to a set number of people? Do you wanna teach to many people?
Right, I cap my quilting class because I want it to be an intimate setting.
I have pushed back on many mentors and people who have thought of ideas to scale quilt class, and I just don't have an interest in doing it.
It's not how I want that part of my ecosystem to feel or be.
I want it to be 40 people or less. I want us to get to know each other.
I want us to create intimacy.
When I'm teaching a class like the Architecture of Book Writing, Those are bigger groups.
I'm willing and able to scale those and have them be more lecture series classes that are less about intimacy and more about really knowledge sharing and sharing the skill so that people can go forth to create their own intimate spaces or their own scalable spaces.
[16:56] So an online class, you'll need your idea, your themes, the willingness and openness to make money.
Tools Needed to Create and Launch an Online Class
[17:05] You will need a digital space, right?
So thinking about those tools, do you wanna do it live? Do you wanna do it recorded?
[17:15] And there's a lot of different ways to figure out which one's right for you.
That's definitely what we'll be digging into in class.
And in class, we'll also be deeply looking at all of the ways to make a creative syllabus, a creative sales page, and sort of the ins and outs of really how to build out your class and launch a beautiful class. But if you have an idea, that's enough to start. And if you don't have an idea, pop it into the Creative Ideation Portal, get those prompts going, or ask a friend. Ask a friend and say, what am I good at?
That. What part of my job do you wish you could understand how to do? There are parts of your work that you have perfected. And again, we say perfected and we say expertise knowing that we're not experts or that we don't strive for perfection. Something I often say to my students is shoot for a B+, and you will make an A+. Our B+, as perfectionists, is actually probably going to be really good and really exciting.
Why the world needs your online class
[18:30] Whether it's an online class or something else, you know, I say the world needs your online class, but I really feel like what I'm saying is the world needs your work, which is what this podcast is all about. But I want to share the five reasons the world really does need your online class. And if you're like, Mar, I don't want to teach, talk about something else. You can apply this to.
[18:55] Any offering that you're thinking about sharing with the world. This could be your book.
This could be your next show in an art gallery, whatever it is.
But the five reasons the world needs your online class is it roots you into your own practice, right?
So when I was thinking about what do I wanna teach, in 2020, what I wanted to do was I wanted to quilt more.
I wanted to be more invested in my own quilting practice. And so I thought, I'm gonna teach other people to quilt online.
When I teach dance, I dance more. When I teach quilting, I quilt more.
Number two is you will learn so much from your students. So again, a lot of times people who come to quilt class have just experienced a death or a big transition or they quit their job the day before, right?
I see these sort of patterns of my students and it feels really like God chose me to hold that container, not just for them, but so that I could see the examples of how we walk through grief and joy and birth and death, and how we don't do it alone.
So you will learn so much from your students.
[20:13] Number three, as I mentioned, it's a way to increase your income, which increases abundance in your community.
Because making money isn't bad. It's actually really cool.
Right. This is something I am constantly relearning, especially as my income has increased from online teaching.
I've had to accept this is good. This is beautiful for me and the generations that have come before me who don't own a house, who haven't surpassed a certain number in income, right? Who do still struggle and debt, and don't have all of their needs met, right? I get to rewrite that script and so can you.
[20:58] Number four, creating a course that generates income is an invitation to generate more generosity. You could find yourself having more time, money, joy, and freedom from teaching online, or hosting a weekend retreat, sharing your knowledge, again, whatever it is that you want to apply all of this to. This may open up your emotional capacity to be there for your friends and family, take on a new hobby in your free time, set up reoccurring donations or or redistributions to organizations that support a more equitable world, the possibilities are endless and you will see them open up.
Being open to our income increasing is going to open up more pathways to generosity and sharing.
[21:48] And number five is it's fun and it's inspiring. Teaching online is fun.
It's an amazing way to facilitate digital togetherness and connect with others.
I find that it's a place to bring my humor and my jokes. And, you know, again, I pick one thing like quilting, but I get to talk about so many other things.
And I love teaching live because I also get to like talk about what I'm doing that day and what is exciting me in my process, in my practice, in the world, I get to bring my sort of fresh perspective.
And my bonus reason, which I've talked about a few times already, is you don't have to be the best to be the teacher, right?
So I'm so grateful that in the containers of teaching that I create, I really encourage my students to share their own expertise about what we're talking about.
[22:46] I don't wanna be the smartest one in the room. I wanna be one amongst many.
And inviting my students to share their own insights and what they learn each week.
At the beginning of each week, we report from the field of learning and thinking about quilts.
And that's one of my favorite parts of class is just hearing what everyone is up to, in the weeks in between when we meet.
You know, someone might take your class because you aren't the expert, right?
It's less intimidating. I don't wanna take classes from experts or know-it-alls.
That's not usually the kinds of podcasts or classes I'm watching or listening to.
I'm looking for other people who are sort of messy weirdos in the world, and that's usually who comes to my classes, and that's what I like.
So the world needs your online class. It's simply true.
[23:45] And if you are not sure if you are going to be a good teacher, you don't have to start with a three or four or eight week class.
Try just teaching a two hour, even a one hour class about something that excites you.
Also, that's a fun, quick way to make money, right? If you need a little extra cash flow and you want to just try something on, make up a two hour class about something that excites you.
You can use Gumroad, that's a payment processor, and you can make a sales page on Gumroad.
You can make a sales page using Flowdesk. You can make a sales page using Notion.
You can make a sales page using a Google Doc, right? So don't make it overly complicated for yourself.
Something like Gumroad is nice because you can add the homepage to the sales page.
[24:39] So like you can make a sales page, and when someone checks out through Gumroad, you can have it so it automatically sends them the info for the class.
And again, you could make that in a Google Doc if you wanted to.
You can have it so it sends them the Zoom link and anything they need to prepare for class, right?
So don't overly think about the tech and making it super complicated.
You could even just email everyone the day before and say, hey, the Zoom link comes out 24 hours before class, I'll email it to you.
There's so many ways to make it simple and easy and fun and to have it bring you closer to your practice.
I really wanna emphasize that again.
Keep deepening your own studies as a teacher
[25:21] Part of how I stay an artist is I stay a teacher.
[25:26] And I've talked about this a little bit on the show, but I decided to deepen my own studies and take a break from teaching quilt class.
So it will return this fall, but I took a break not knowing what was next.
And what was next is I applied to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln's Quilt Studies Graduate Certificate Program.
So I start that this fall.
I'm really excited to be a student, you know? And it wasn't that I felt unequipped to continue teaching.
I think I have plenty of knowledge to be able to teach something human, but I was just desiring a deeper presence in my own studies.
And so, I applied, I got in, I'm excited to.
[26:17] Be a student and a teacher simultaneously. So if you are a teacher and teaching, I also encourage you to just keep deepening your own studies. And I also love taking classes about flower essences and herbs and marketing. And, you know, it can be about all different sides of my practice and my business. You know, I love taking classes about flower essences and plants because that isn't a part of how I make money.
And so I also love to be a student about things that have nothing to do with my earning potential, but are really separate.
So something to think about as you continue to develop your own online classes, your own big, bright ideas.
So I would love to see you in class in July.
It's gonna be really fun. I would love to support you becoming a teacher of your own, or if you've been teaching online classes for years, it's a great place to think of more creative ways to teach and create a container that is of great benefit to your students, to your current readers and audience and community who is just dying to learn more about what it is you do and what it is you can bring into the world.
[27:38] Thank you so much for listening. Again, if you want to think more about your own online class, grab the Creative Ideation Portal at marleegrace.space slash common shapes.
Thank you to everyone who makes this podcast possible. Thank you to Lucasa Brampfmann-Varissimo for our art.
Thank you to Salt Breaker for our music and to Softer Sound Studio for editing.
And thank you for sharing it with a friend, giving us a five-star rating or writing a review, sharing it on social media or in your own newsletter, it means the world to me when I hear how you are resonating with the episodes and seeing you sharing them.
So thank you so much for being a listener of Common Shapes.
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