The Future of Online Education in an Artificial Intelligence World With Bud Kraus

In “The Future of Online Education in an Artificial Intelligence World,” Bud Kraus examines how the field of digital learning is changing as a result of artificial intelligence. Bud Kraus, who has worked as a WordPress specialist and educator for decades, emphasizes AI as a potent tool that may improve student engagement, automate repetitive activities, and customize instruction rather than as a substitute for instructors.

Kraus emphasizes the necessity for educators to embrace lifelong learning and responsibly incorporate AI as educational institutions come under increasing demand to modernize in order to maintain online education’s effectiveness, accessibility, and human-centeredness.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Bud Kraus. He has a podcast [email protected]. You can also find him [email protected]. I met Bud recently at a conference. He’s a course creator. He’s a WordPress professional, he’s a teacher. We’re gonna mine as many tips, tricks, and strategies as we can out of bud.

First bud, welcome to the show. Hey, Chris, what a pleasure to be here. Now I have a question for you, which I should have asked before. [00:01:00] Yeah. I know you’re recording this, but video two. Video two and we’re live streaming right now While we’re recording. Oh no. All right. Turn this off. No. Just kidding. All right.

Bud Kraus: And I should have asked before, but what the heck now I know. Alright so thank you for having me on too. This is really nice. 

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. Absolutely. Take us into your past like you were a teacher and I think one of the things, particularly in the LMS space, sometimes entrepreneurs get excited about information products, building courses, selling courses, and a lot of people pull it off with no teaching background.

But teaching and instructional design is like a fundamental skill. Tell us your history as a teacher, some pro teaching tips, and then how you’ve used that when you’ve created courses in your life. 

Bud Kraus: Boy, that’s such a great question, and I think that’s one of the fundamental things about before you ever start doing a course, if you can get some [00:02:00] real live in class, that’s a rare thing these days.

I know in class teaching experience, I think you’re gonna be. Better off in the sense that when you teach a course, at least my experiences, it’s so important to be prepared that you have a beginning and a middle and an end for the entire course and for each lesson. And that you do this a number of times, meaning semesters or years teaching the same material, tweaking it as you go forward.

So that. There is a method to your, the way you do things and that you understand it and that you’ve tried it out on people and you’ve gauged a reaction as to whether or not they’re learning. And once you have all that kind of experience, then I think it’s a good time to do an online course. Now that’s.

That’s not how the real world works. I understand that. But that’s how my journey went with online teaching, which is I did things live in class first, and [00:03:00] by doing it, then you really become an expert and authority on the subject. It makes it so much easier to create the content for the course.

It really is because basically you already have it and then it’s just a matter of putting it together in however you do this, which I’m sure we’ll talk about. But so I was, I felt very fortunate that I went that way. It wasn’t planned, but lucky that it did. 

Chris Badgett: We call that the experts curse, where you got this knowledge, but you need to figure out how to teach it or coach a student and get feedback and improve stuff over time.

What was the subject matter you would teach on? 

Bud Kraus: The only things I really ever taught was H-T-M-L-C-S-S and WordPress. I never, I taught a little bit of Dreamweaver, but if you can remember what that is, I’m sure you might, but I, I taught a little bit of that, but for the most part it was just good old fashioned coding back in the 2000 OTTs, because that’s really the way people made websites.

[00:04:00] And most of my, I was teaching in New York City, most of the students were coming from graphic arts background, so I had to deal with. A group of people who were not believing what the web, what the nature of the medium was, which is not, it’s a text-based medium and it’s really not a graphic medium.

I know there’s pictures and I get it, all that stuff, but at the end of the day, when you’re looking at the source code, you’re not looking at pictures, you’re looking at text. So I had to convince a lot of people, Hey, this is really the way to do it. Don’t just insert a flash video here. Let’s do it. Let’s play to the strengths of the medium.

I know that, people don’t always, at least in those days, they didn’t really like that. But, I had to convince them. A lot of ’em really were not believers. I was talking about resizing and this and that and, and not pixel. I, not setting things by pixels. And it took a little bit of doing to tell people, no, this is the way to do it.

And it, ’cause they just weren’t believers. They didn’t [00:05:00] see, they didn’t understand the medium. And it took a long time for people to. Understand the nature of responsive design is really what I’m getting at. But anyway, that’s neither here nor there. I guess 

Chris Badgett: on the other side of teaching is learning and I’ve been around WordPress, I think about 17 years.

It’s been a long time and the, it’s changed a lot. And I’m not a developer. I can’t write ht ML and CSS like you can. 

Bud Kraus: I felt 

Chris Badgett: like when I found WordPress, I was like, oh, this is something for me. I know you can customize it with code, but 

Bud Kraus: Right. 

Chris Badgett: I could build websites without knowing a line of code and I just fell in love with it.

How do you think WordPress is different now in terms of if you’re, if you were teaching somebody how to use it, what would your approach be? 

Bud Kraus: That’s a great question. I certainly could go on for a long time, so I’ll try to truncate my my answer here. I think overall, since I’ve been teaching WordPress since let’s say 2012, [00:06:00] 13, I think it was easier to learn then than it is now.

Yeah. It’s just become more complex. I know it’s not supposed to be, the idea was make. Complex things simple, and I think they made complex things complex. It just seemed a lot easier to stick a word processor into a CMS, which is what WordPress was in those days. And. Let the user, the creators, decide how to extend and modify their experience.

Now it’s, no, we’ll basically give you the experience and you’ll just have to adjust. And that with the block editor, and I understand the philosophy behind all the stuff. So like I said, I can go on for hours talking about this, but as a practical matter, as somebody who’s taught all this through the years, it’s harder for people to learn WordPress today in general than it is.

10 years ago. It just is. And I regret saying that because I don’t think that was the intent, [00:07:00] but as somebody who has seen in the field how this works I think it’s just true. It’s actually harder for me sometimes to work with word WordPress and I forget how things are supposed to work or how they work or they don’t work or, yeah.

There, I know this is the year of. Taking thing, no more major releases. And I’m hoping that there’ll be a lot of that polishing, they keep talking about fixing things that need to be fixed before moving on. So hopefully, this will be the pause that refreshes kind of year.

’cause we need it. 

Chris Badgett: You’re also a writer. I think writing is a super skill like. It. Communication and writing is everywhere. It’s not just writing books or blogs. Everything’s writing from emails to figuring out a plan, to making a video, it’s all writing. Tell us about your, write your journey as a writer.

Bud Kraus: As you say that, I’m thinking like, yeah, but, and here’s the, what the Yeah. But’s gonna [00:08:00] be. I think, up until recently, I would say writing is the number one skill of today in this era of in the age, in the digital age. But now I’m not so sure anymore because of ai and it’s still important.

But boy, I use AI all the time for different things, and I’m starting to wonder, where is my future now? I’m not 25 years old, so I don’t have to think about it. A long runway here, but I do write, I write for web hosts like Kinta and hosting, and I’ve written for GoDaddy and others, and we’ll continue to write until they say, we don’t need you anymore.

However, I learned recently, they still seem to think they need me, which is really nice. Which, because right now I still think the human touch of writing, you can still read the difference. Okay. I can pretty much tell AI from human and I love it as an assistant. I think as an assistant [00:09:00] it’s tremendous giving me ideas, fixing this better that answering questions, but I can’t.

YI, I just don’t want, we’re gonna come to a day where, you’re just gonna you gonna write a blog post. I guess we’re already there. You write a blog post, write a blog post about Bud Kraus and done, I, I don’t know what’s what is the value of that?

We, are we gonna lose that too, on the other hand? Who, where is all this ai? Where are they learning all this stuff from people who re, who write. So it’s a, I teach chat, GPT it teaches me. It’s like that we’re in that phase right now. And I am discovering all kinds of different ais, not just chat GPT, I’ve used cursor ai.

I am using this video animation AI now. These tools are great, but I fear that they are going to replace us. I’m sorry, I just do [00:10:00] you know, what do you think? Can I ask questions on the show? Is that okay? Yes, 

Chris Badgett: you can. This is what happens when you interview another podcaster. They come back around, which is great.

Great. Yeah, I’m definitely with you on where’s the source material, as a person who’s been podcasting for a long time, I. There’s 500 hours of transcripts of this podcast alone that wow. An AI could just Sure. Probably already has scanned and put into the language model.

I think at least for the medium term writing is still important for communicating to the ai. And I think about the difference between writing a. Prompt that says something like, Hey, make me an online course about x versus going into detail like, Hey, this is my avatar.

This is what I already know already want to teach. What are the gaps? And then having an iterative back and forth. You still need to be able to communicate, but I [00:11:00] think it, it does create it does give me concern, but it also, I find myself as a writer. Not being lazy, but there’s like a pool of laziness in the sense of even when prompting, like not correcting spelling errors and just 

Bud Kraus: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: The desire or the tendency or the inclination for shortcuts is there. Yes. And I think that’s dangerous territory. And like you said, polish, even if AI is helping, like the human polish on top really makes it awesome. But where we’re gonna be in six years? I don’t know. No, I that I’m not even so sure.

Bud Kraus: I really can’t tell you in in two years. It’s just I, it’s such a it is, I think to me, and, it is the biggest shift, change, whatever, however you wanna describe it important. Revolution. I don’t know. In my life. And the funny thing is I’ve lived long enough. You could have said television, radio, [00:12:00] no cell telephones.

No. I’m not that old. But all these technologies which come faster and faster, and they’re more and more important. We felt like the web was like, oh my God. What could ever be more important than this? Wrong. What’s gonna be more important than a, I don’t know.

This sort of seems like the end of the road here, but No, I don’t know. I think, there’ll be human teleportation one day. Okay. That’s big, if that’s possible. Everybody’s, so I’ve heard it’s impossible possible. I think it’s possible, but we don’t know how to do it now, obviously, but, so wouldn’t that be a groundbreaking thing?

Yeah, I think so. So you don’t, techno, we don’t reach the end with technology. We’re just, there is no end, but this certainly is like any, and the stakes here get bigger and bigger. Like the web that’s really good. It, but it also could be dangerous.

Look at AI really good, but boy, could this thing be dangerous? It seems yeah. You, as these technologies get more pervasive, important, predominant in our lives. [00:13:00] You can easily see that we the good is really good and the bad is God only knows, I mean with ai, cancer, this, that, and then who knows with the bad.

So I don’t even wanna think about it. Anyway, where were we? So can we, let’s talk about creating courses. That’s, ’cause we were talking a little bit before and I wanna talk about that. 

Chris Badgett: Is that okay? And just dovetailing into ai. Yeah. One of our company values at Lifter LMS is learner results first.

So like we build software for people, building sites and stuff, but we always think about the student and their experience. It’s like our primary concern and related to ai yeah. How do people learn? Like I myself find myself using Google less and going to AI to learn something. Particularly if it’s something custom.

I think a great example is instead of going to a recipe blog like, Hey, I [00:14:00] wanna make cur curry chicken tonight. And I can go to the AI and be like. I have this much chicken, these are the vegetables I have, make me an awesome recipe. And it’s so custom and customized. I think that the AI tutor is gonna be helpful, but I have hope that the human in the loop will always add value.

But our job description might change as course creators or becoming more like coaches, but what are your thoughts? 

Bud Kraus: Here’s the 

Chris Badgett: thing, 

Bud Kraus: and I’m thinking as you’re bringing this up, which is. I like to learn new stuff too. Would I take an online course to learn JavaScript or would I just have, she GBT, teach me whatever I wanna know about JavaScript?

The answer is probably the latter. Now, do I need to know JavaScript like a programmer? No. But can I like, just like parachute into part of JavaScript, learn that and pull it out and use it? Yes. So I think that course creation and the kind of things that you do, [00:15:00] that’s. I could see that’s a real problem.

If I was creating a course today, you know what the answer is, I wouldn’t probably be creating a course today. Now that’s pr. Now I say this because number one. Everything I could create has been done 10,000 times already. So why do I need to make something that’s been done? The last course I made was on using the Gutenberg block editor.

This was about 20, 21 or so, maybe 2020, I don’t know. And I went around to everybody in WordPress. What do you think of this idea? I went around to course creator. Oh, that’s a great idea. We need it. Blah, blah, blah. Nobody needed it. Nobody needed it. It wasn’t, yeah, I didn’t market it very well, but nobody really needed it because they could already Google stuff and they already, before ai, and it was just, and there was, there were also fundamental flaws to what I was doing that really doomed this thing.

But as far as creating a course today. I think when I write an article on, let’s say an in-depth look at theme JSO, I think that’s a way, [00:16:00] that’s a form of teaching. So that’s the way I teach today, is I write like a long article for let’s say Kinta, and you’re reaching God knows how many people and hopefully they, they think it’s valuable to their customers.

And that’s teaching. It’s different. And you’re probably teaching and you’re definitely teaching. The ais, that’s a really good point you brought up. Made me think are we writing for humans or are we writing to teach or enter, the LMS, the LM ls, right?

Learning, is it large? What is it? LLMs large language models. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah are we teaching that or are we teaching humans or we’re doing both, or what? So it’s really a time of such change in the world of education, which is, the broader sense of what we’re talking about. And I just don’t know, i, I, there’s, like I said, for the example I gave is perfect for just a little piece of something, but how about becoming an expert in [00:17:00] something? Would that work? When you have a course, you have guidance, you have somebody who’s thought through the beginning, the middle, and an end. If you’re just using chat GPT. It’s a hit and miss.

If you’re trying to learn something big for. I’ll give you a, for example. If you were learning CSS, where would you start? I don’t know. And I give that as an example ’cause in 1998 or nine when I was just first learning it, I dive, I didn’t know where to start, and I dived into the deep end of the pool and I got confused.

I got turned off. Of course, the browsers weren’t supporting CSS very well, and I just didn’t look at CSS for another two or three years because. It because I started out at the wrong place. A course online that’s well thought out will guide a user in a way that, a student, in a way that I don’t think AI can do it now and give you the whole picture of what it is that you need to know.

So there’s still value, yes, in courses [00:18:00] when I, just thinking out loud here, but as time goes on, I think it’s gonna be tougher and tougher for course creators. It just is. I’ve said to my wife, I don’t even know if I need to have a tea. What’s gonna happen to education? Are we gonna need teachers anymore?

When you can just learn a lot of stuff by just learning how to use the learning, how to work with prompts. That’s like ridiculous, again, good and bad. 

Chris Badgett: I’m 

Bud Kraus: optimistic. It’s extreme. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: I’m optimistic. Because at least in the past, disruptive technology usually opens up new opportunity, but an evolution is required, and this is a very confusing one.

I remember when I fell in love with WordPress, just this idea that I could build a website. I’m not a developer, and I could anybody anywhere in the world with the internet connection could see it. 

Bud Kraus: Yeah. I fell in 

Chris Badgett: love with that idea, but I didn’t at the time know. Oh you can extend this platform and turn it into web applications and all the stuff that happened after that.

We can’t always see where we’re going, [00:19:00] but I’m optimistic that new opportunities will be there, but we have to evolve. And the other thing you mentioned, you talked about parachuting in to JavaScript or whatever, right? There’s a framework I, a friend of mine said there’s just in case education and then just in time and.

Sort of, there’s an argument. The traditional education is a lot of just in case here’s the library of stuff for you to put in your head. And then there’s just in time, which AI is really good at is Hey, I need to know how to fix this plumbing problem right now. Or it’s like right now, right in the moment.

Bud Kraus: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: But also believe there is a benefit to. What some would call liberal arts education with, where you’re like studying broad topics that like, don’t, they might not help you get a job per se, but they’re helping shape your mind. And this goes back to the laziness thing I was talking about.

If we, if everything just becomes just in time [00:20:00] prompts stuff and ai, like what does that do to brain for brain development? I. Yeah, if the AI is smarter than us and we get super general, super intelligence and all that stuff, how are we humans gonna feel? And we should still probably develop our minds, 

Bud Kraus: that’s the scary part of the, of our, it’s one of the scary parts of the future of this is that we just don’t know. Nobody knows. I don’t care who you talk to. They don’t know nobody. How could you know? Some people seem to know, I. Probably have a better insight than I do, that’s for sure.

But with certainty, I know it’s very hard to rethink in a profound, fundamental, complete way. I. The nature of, let’s say, learning and education going forward? It’s, we have, what’s really cool to me is that, your brain can only hold so much data, right? So most of the data we now use and hold is external.

It’s outside of us. [00:21:00] It’s like the thin client concept, right? It really is. Do you remember that term thin client where you know you didn’t need a hard drive basically? I don’t hard drive in there. Can you explain thin client? Thin client. Really. I think the first time I heard of the term was I, micro Sun Microsystems was using it in like the 1990s.

Okay. And I couldn’t quite figure out what, maybe that was a skinny person or something, but thin client, it refers to the fact that this was really early thinking is that all the data would be online or in the cloud, or however you wanna put it. And not stored in your local computer. Okay. And your local computer is, thin would be just a very small, hard drive.

And essentially that’s what we have today. So your brain is like the thin client because you can’t store that much in there relative to what is out there. And knowing that means. I’m conscious of that, so why do I have to learn this stuff? Why do I have [00:22:00] to learn like almost anything now?

I could write what’s really cool or maybe not, is that I can get an assignment and I do. I take on writing assignments and I look at this and go, I don’t know how to do, I don’t know how to use multi, I don’t know how to use W-P-C-L-I for multi-site. And then I start getting into it and I say, oh yeah, you do here.

Ask check GPT how this works. So I have enough of a foundation, a vocabulary to build to the next step. But what happens if I don’t have any foundation? I don’t know the answers to those questions. If somebody just threw me in and said I don’t know, react, okay, here, do something with react.

I don’t know if I could navigate my way through that with ai. I should try that to see I. Can you, can I come up with something useful in a, with a, some kind of programming language that I do not know anything about? I. Huh, I probably could, which is like, why do we need developers?

And developers aren’t losing, he, Hey, a really smart guy. Now I give this credit to Marcus [00:23:00] Burnett, but he’s not a really smart guy. So then Marcus and I are very good friends. But said to me, Marcus said quite a while ago, he said, it’s. It’s not, it’s like you’re not gonna lose your job to ai, but you are gonna lose your job to the person who knows how to use ai.

Yeah. And then, and Marcus didn’t say that. He said a smart person. I always, and that’s true. I find that right now, if you’re a dev develop, if you’re almost anything in some kind of information world like we are, if you know how to use ai, you’re about to become obsolete right now. If you’re not already.

Me going into AI is just a natural evolution, and it’s funny, people my age, they come up to me and they say, Hey bud, you know anything about this AI stuff? What do you think it’s gonna last? Or what? So I just roll my eyes and go, huh, okay. But that’s, I know, but retired people and stuff like that, they don’t need to know.

They don’t want to know any of this stuff. I’m just the opposite. I just wanna know [00:24:00] all can me. ’cause I’ve always been into science fiction and technology and I’m not going anywhere anyway. Oh, can I get back to something I was thinking of about, yeah. When we started in the beginning about creating courses and stuff, at least having the experience of teaching and writing, because the first courses I ever created were.

There were no videos. Okay. It was all text and you had to write out everything. So it was like making a simple website, and I had to create the entire. Every chapter built on the next chapter and got harder and heard all that kind of stuff. Then there was a project and, but you weren’t there to explain it, so you had to write everything out, which was really an interesting experience and very time consuming.

My first course that I taught online was called, I believe it was called Intro to HTML. It was, there was no CMS, it was all whatever I could make by hand. And students would upload their files. They would upload their files in a system that I reviewed the files manually. I would look at the code and say it’s good or not good or whatever, and I got paid.

Now that was a tho that course was marketed through adult education systems around mostly New Jersey, New York, Connecticut. ’cause they didn’t have anything else and they wanted to offer this stuff. To their, adult education program. So that was, that lasted a little while. It wasn’t gonna last forever, but the time it took to create that, today it’s just a lot faster to create stuff because we have lifter LMS and stuff like that.

So we have a lot of choices now, but before, I’m just, my word of advice to anybody who’s thinking of it. Creating a course is to plan all this stuff out in advance. Don’t start the course first. Come up with your title. Come up with your chapter heading, subheads everything. Just do a huge outline [00:26:00]and then start filling in and know we’re gonna start here and end up over here.

What is the goal? What do you want people to be doing during the course? After the course? What’s the takeaway? What are your expectations of a teacher? For what the students should know, not just what their expectations are, what do you expect them to know? And then you can build a course around that.

So 

Chris Badgett: whatever I think about writing, let’s say writing a book or a blog post or something, right? Yeah. I like to use the framework writing is three parts and ideally equal parts of research, writing and editing. So course creation is the same, slow down, don’t just tell the AI to make me a course about x.

Bud Kraus: Right. 

Chris Badgett: Do a ton of research. You’ve been doing it your life, if it’s your subject matter expertise, but Right. Dig a deep, see what else is out there. And then creating it, polishing it. And then editing is also, I. Come back and improve it. I’m sure you improved your HT ML course over time, right?

Yes and no. 

Bud Kraus: And the reason why I say yes [00:27:00] and no is because it didn’t change all that much. Like a tag is a tag and attributes and values, they’re pretty much, after a while, they got pretty well settled out. With this HTML, then we had X-H-T-M-L, back, H TM L. It wasn’t terribly changing. But here’s what’s different now than back in the day, is that we have different ways now to communicate that we really didn’t have.

In 2001, 2, 3, 5, 10, whatever. You’ve got video. You’ve got better ways to do screenshots and animation and AI animation. And God, you could do avatars, you could do all kinds of engaging things. Now that I just, I couldn’t do, I would’ve thought about it, but, I didn’t know Camtasia then.

I didn’t know. So there’s so many different tools that we have to communicate. To make and I, and it’s it’s now here, here’s the other thing too. If you’re creating a course, you know what I just said might be just totally bewildering, right? What? I have to learn all this stuff. Number one, no, you [00:28:00] don’t learn only what you need to know, but trying to learn something that’s gonna have broad application.

So you don’t wanna spend a lot of time learning something that you’re just gonna use a small bit of time that will only do a very small little thing for you. Okay, that doesn’t make any sense. So I always look at something like, Hey, once I master this thing, like I know Camtasia pretty well. What else can I use it for?

If I need to do blah, blah, blah, whatever. It’s, oh, I could use Camtasia for that. So you’re building, so don’t try to think of I need to learn everything ’cause you don’t, but choose wisely and stick with industry tools like Camtasia, snag it, stuff that people are using.

Don’t try to do like one of these little knockoff things that aren’t really as popular. They’re popular for a reason ’cause they’re really good. Yeah, you don’t, like you don’t have to learn Final Cut Pro and Premier and Camtasia just Camtasia really is as far as screen capture video goes, it’s probably, what do you think?

The gold [00:29:00] standard here? 

Chris Badgett: Probably. Yeah. Camtasia, the script is coming up with its AI tools. Yeah. I’m a screen flow guy with a Mac oh, yeah. 

Bud Kraus: There you go. Screen flow. Yeah. I don’t know it, but it’s certainly well known. Yeah, but the thing is like if you are new, you want to, explore these tools and then settle on one and get a license or whatever. I’m doing that right now with this animated AI stuff, which is I look at a whole bunch and I go, that’s the one I wanna use. And it’s not is it, are other people using it? But it doesn’t, I don’t know.

It’s just that you don’t have, don’t worry. You don’t have to master everything. It’s just not, it’s not important. What you do have to master is a really good outline of your course. I think that is so important, and that either you. Here’s another thing, and Chris how many, how does your system work?

Do you have anything built in for feedback? That is, is it easy for students to [00:30:00] tell the course creator, Hey, this was good, or I didn’t understand this, or like a whole feedback loop. Is that built in by any chance? 

Chris Badgett: We do. We have a lot of ways We do that with like a. Like a private coaching thing where there can be a private conversation we have.

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Okay. Comments and forums and, okay. We also do a lot of education showing people how to [00:32:00] use form plugins and things to create feedback loops. We have assignments and quizzes that have remarks and things like that. But yeah, feedback is, I think, such an important part of learning and that’s something that humans.

Can do, AI can give feedback, you can have an AI tutor or whatever. But that real, I think that’s the sign of a true master teacher is like realizing that not all students are exactly the same. They have challenges. You gotta adapt.

Bud Kraus: Yeah. And the other thing is it’s great to get feedback that says, Hey bud, this course is really great.

All right. Everybody loved everybody. Testimonial. That’s a testimony. That’s right. But it’s the ones that dropped out after the first lesson or second lesson. What happened? Maybe it may it may have nothing to do with you. I, my father died. This, that, whatever. But if it is something that, Hey, I got stuck, I didn’t understand.

Okay. Was it just, did we market it incorrectly? A lot of times, people say, oh, [00:33:00] I didn’t know you were gonna do the, that’s very important in the marketing is that it’s clear what it is that the person is going to learn. Because I’ve seen where either I took a course or somebody took a course from me and said this is not what I was expecting.

Yeah, the marketing is really not just imp not just in terms of getting the information out, but in being very accurate as to what it is, that you’re selling and you are selling, so how do you think I could ask you a million questions? How, if I’m a course creator, I was a course creator, what is the, what’s a good way, do you do anything, does your system have anything built into concerns like social media and marketing, or is that just something that’s totally outside out of the bounds of what you’re, what you offer? 

Chris Badgett: We have like viral loops built in where somebody could share like a certificate to social media.

Okay. We do a lot of [00:34:00] education around marketing. So like in, in my view one of the best content marketing things you can do as a course creator is help people for free with a free mini course around some topic that really sets ’em up to be a perfect fit for your paid program or whatever.

Yeah. And 

Bud Kraus: can you do like a, can a course creator do a try before you buy kind of thing? Or not. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, we have a integrated e-commerce system. We also integrate with Woo, but we have our own Stripe and PayPal, but you can do like free trials and set up all kinds of access rules for how long and when and what the payment’s gonna be and stuff like that.

And do you, 

Bud Kraus: Now I wasn’t expecting, I don’t care. This is the way it goes with me. But do you is this available in the WordPress repository and obviously there’s a pro version or it’s just, pay version? 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, we’ve always been big fan. Our company mission is to lift up others through education and to democratize learning in the digital classroom.

[00:35:00] So our 

Bud Kraus: That’s good for you. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Our free core plugin is extremely powerful and 80% of our people are just using the free LMS which helps people get started and get moving and Sure. And it’s very powerful. Every time we do a release of updates, we’re always adding stuff to the core and then focusing on some of our paid add-ons and things.

Now 

Bud Kraus: is there, do you guys have a course. I think you do. Maybe I misunderstood about how to market your course. 

Chris Badgett: Yes. We have lots of courses. So we have we have a quick start course, which is how to like it covers like what you’re saying. Don’t teach ’em everything. Like we show the 5% of okay, this is how you set up the site, this is how the system works and all that.

We did a web, like a, we brought in some guest experts and did a. And did some content ourselves to help people, [00:36:00] show people how to go from zero to 10 enrollments, because when we looked at the data, we realized that if people had at least 10 enrollments, their platform was gonna stick and they were gonna stay around.

So that includes a lot of like marketing help and showing people like what works to get students and stuff like that. Yeah. 

Bud Kraus: Because your success is based on their success in the sense that you want them to renew their licenses. Exactly. So obviously and that’s like the way that this works.

So you want them to be successful. 

Chris Badgett: The, yeah. I think one of the most important questions a course creator can ask is who? Who is this for? ‘Cause we have our subject matter expertise, right? And this goes by many names, like the ideal learner, customer avatar, things like that. 

But that who question if anybody is either struggling or has a modest win or a runaway success, I think that who [00:37:00] question is fundamental.

Absolutely. So learning about that. I wanted to tie that who question into something you said earlier. 

Bud Kraus: Before you do it, let me just stick something 

Chris Badgett: in 

Bud Kraus: and hold on to that for one second. Okay. That is the who question is the fundamental question, and if you teach it in class, you’ll find out who the who is because you’re, you’ll be talking.

Yeah. Like 

Chris Badgett: when you were telling me, my course creator, brain’s going okay, he got graphic designers in, they didn’t understand the web. They’re inserting the flash videos like. I just naturally do it. I like form the avatar that Bo was dealing with, but that’s easy to do in a classroom. 

Bud Kraus: It’s 

Chris Badgett: much harder on the worldwide web.

Bud Kraus: Absolutely. And because, I knew it was graphic artist and then eventually it turned into some more writers and then it turned into people who were working in offices. They needed to manage their websites for their boss. And after a while I knew exactly who the, who was that I was creating.

Of course. And when you’re sitting writing it, you’ll say does Susie so and so under, she can understand what [00:38:00] you’re talking about here. So you know your audience. Yeah. Okay. What were, what I sidetracked you so I’m sorry. 

Chris Badgett: No, you’re good. This is the magic of two podcasters talking to each other.

We the danger you mentioned, I think there’s some hope here in terms of what’s AI gonna do, and what I mean is we’ve been through technological revolutions before and history doesn’t always repeat, but it rhymes. And if you think about the industrial revolution, right? A lot of people left the farm and went to big cities with the emerging, industrial jobs and also the beginning of the white collar kind of knowledge economy worker.

And when somebody comes off the farm and they show up by you over in New York City, what do they say? They say, oh wow, the world’s moving really fast. It’s really busy. I don’t know how these subways and all this public transport.

Yeah. [00:39:00] And it’s like overwhelming. I think that’s where we are with ai. And it’s, it is really busy. Things are changing really fast. But a new economy emerged through industrialization and the rising middle class and the white collar and all that. But here’s the scary part, but also the opportunity, which is junior level job positions are the first things replaced by ai.

So we would often use, let’s say a junior web developer at a software company to get on board, learn the ropes and stuff. But a lot of that stuff’s going to ai. 

Bud Kraus: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So what has to happen, if we go back to the who question, like what’s a high school graduate to do these days? They needed a way to figure out how to leapfrog and like.

You mentioned you like science fiction when Neo plugs into the matrix and gets the download [00:40:00] about combat. Like you, and also what you said earlier, I’m just tying this all together about, oh, I can, I actually do know how to do multi-site from the command line. I just had to get in here and tinker.

And this is a particular learning style. Called kinesthetic where we right now with ai, the people that have a kinesthetic learning style and just kinda learn by doing, they have an unfair advantage to like that. 

Bud Kraus: Good to hear. 

Chris Badgett: It’s just an observation because that’s what people are doing.

They’re just figuring it out. But the point being and this is the challenge. There’s a giant class of education like. Young adults and whatnot that are scared the entry level jobs are being automated. But then I tie it back to history and look at what did the young people do when they came off the farm?

In many ways, they adapted a little, maybe easier and quicker to the city than the [00:41:00] older person who lost the job and then had to go figure out how to hang in the big time. But there’s gotta be something with. In education by helping kids just adapt to the new world and and because there can also be, just like with industrial machines, there can be much greater output, but that’s scary and you gotta learn how to.

Leverage all these machines and technologies and stuff like that. But you 

Bud Kraus: know, as you’re talking, I’m thinking, all of these changes that came about from farm industrial, from agriculture to industrial to information, the pace just gets fast as we know. And these disruptive events, technologies.

Whatever be become faster, closer, and closer together, more disruptive. I thought we just disrupted everything with e-commerce. Now what? I’m shaking my head. I can’t, I, and now I have kids that [00:42:00] are, they should, they, it’s no wonder we are.

As a society, as a world where we are today with a lot of confusion. Yeah. Because it’s just, this is, a long time ago and there was a book called The Third Wave written by a guy named Alvin Toffler. This is 50 years ago or so, and it’s really funny. My wife isn’t really into this kind of stuff, but when I met her, we were both reading that book and that’s not the kind of book she reads.

It’s the kind of book I read and. It was all about where we are today, the inability of human beings to process and understand rapid change. This is what he was talking about 50 years ago. Wow. And 50 years ago or 40 years ago, we didn’t even have fax machines. These things come and go in the blink of an eye.

When fax machines came in, oh, this is great. You know this is, could be here forever. It was here for 10 minutes. When you live as long as I have, things come and go [00:43:00] so fast. Now that, you think okay, digital has to be the end here, right? Yes, but I don’t know.

When I used to have records and albums and CDs and tapes and all that kind of stuff, I don’t have, and I’m moving, I don’t need any of that stuff anymore. Who I used to collect and who. Who knew we were gonna have digital, you don’t need it. You don’t need any of this junk anymore.

So whatever. I think that’s the fundamental. What I’m saying is it’s very hard for people in general and including me, to a adapt to such rapid change and understand your place in the world and how you can be effective. It’s very hard. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I heard something funny on a podcast the other day.

You don’t know much of my background stuff, but I used to run sled dogs in Alaska and I managed a tour business that you could only get to by helicopter on a glacier. Yeah. I was listening to a podcast where somebody was having a [00:44:00] discussion similar to what we’re having about ai and they were talking about what’s the future opportunity.

And they’re basically saying human experiences where people go outdoors and, be in nature and remember what it’s like to be human. I’m like, I just, that’s where I came from. We’re going back there and it’s it’s just interesting though. So but there’s gotta be, the human will still need things, but the needs are gonna change.

We just gotta figure out what that is. And sometimes it’s analog, like getting back to the great outdoors. Other things might be like psychologists to help people deal with, exponential technology and overwhelm and stuff like that. Yeah, but you’re right. It’s interesting because it think you’re correct.

The crux of the issue is the rate of change, not just the change. 

Bud Kraus: Right. 

Chris Badgett: And what is 

Bud Kraus: things is the rate of change, right? 

Chris Badgett: And the human processor up here, you can’t upgrade it. Like [00:45:00] it only, it hasn’t, it doesn’t change like technology changes. So let’s just say it this 

Bud Kraus: way. The shit stays in the queue, 

Chris Badgett: okay?

Yeah. 

Bud Kraus: Can you swear on the show? I just did. Okay. But yeah, but that’s it. It’s just it’s like a, it’s like a printer, it’s just in the queue and it gets backed up and stuff. Just, you just go on overload and that’s where things are. And it’s, I don’t think we as species can.

Comprehend any of this stuff right now. Really. I think we’re all, I’m having trouble just thinking about it maybe it’s just me, but I think we all have, we’re all struggling with this, not just, I know, because I talk to a lot of people and I see that everybody struggling with this Hey, can we talk about my podcast?

Is that okay? Yeah, 

Chris Badgett: let’s 

Bud Kraus: do it. 

Chris Badgett: Talks about Seriously, bud. Oh, okay. 

Bud Kraus: All right. And you’re gonna be on it. ‘Cause you got some good stuff already with the dogs in Alaska and all that. So seriously, bud is a podcast I’ve launched February 29th, 2000 and [00:46:00] I. 1424, I’m sorry, 2024. And every Friday I drop an episode featuring an unexpected conversation with somebody in the WordPress community.

So we don’t talk shop, we don’t talk WordPress, we don’t generally talk about any, it’s really a show about nothing. So we just talk about the guest life, their story, where were they born, what did they d where did they live? What was it like to do so and whatever. And it’s just. It came from when I left Word Camp US 2023.

Were you there? You were probably there, right? 

Chris Badgett: Which one was that? Where were you? Yeah, I was there. I was there. 

Bud Kraus: The freezer bowl. It was really freezing in there. Yeah. Yeah. And the vendors were like, 30, miles away from the Yeah, we know. Anyway when I left that I was thinking, I was in an Uber and I was thinking like, boy, wouldn’t it be great if I could just speak with.

Chris badge it a little longer, ’cause I just waved to him and I just saw for a second I thought, that guy’s kind of [00:47:00] interesting, and, but there’s just no time because you’re like in a, you’re like a pinball. You’re just like bouncing from one person to the next, and you’re having a great time.

But it’s just like I, and so I thought yeah, why don’t you do a podcast and just talk to them about their life story and not like. Something that they’re marketing and developing. Now that stuff gets in there a little bit, but I just try to keep it out because I, because there’s lots of podcasts that talk about product and marketing and community and stuff.

I just wanted to focus on the person that I was talking to, like a real conversation about their life really. That’s what I was looking for. So turns out, I was thinking about it and I said, oh, I don’t think there’s anybody that’s doing anything like this, and turned out there wasn’t anybody that doing exactly this.

Maybe something similar, but not exactly. And I never, I, let’s just say this, I never thought I would be a podcaster. The podcast came looking for me, so it [00:48:00] wasn’t like I was sitting around gee. I should have a podcast. No, it didn’t go that way. And I’m sitting in the car thinking like, I don’t even care if I ever get any sponsors.

I don’t care if anybody listens to it. I just wanna do this. And then after a while I said, yes, I do care if people listen. Yes, I do care if I get sponsors ’cause it takes a lot of time to do this. And even though I love doing it. I wanna get paid to do it too. And and so there I am. So I’ve to, tomorrow will be episode 58 and I use the script, which is something I had to learn.

I didn’t know the script, but a lot of other things I basically already knew because I’d been on podcast before. And the fact though, that I am doing a podcast, go ask Bob WP. Bob Dunn. ’cause for years I would say to him, why would you do a this? I would go up to him all the time and go, pop, why are you doing a podcast?

This is crazy. This is I don’t understand why you, why people do this. And then you know, [00:49:00] now you know, I understand why. And once you start doing it, and if you love doing it, it’s just really hard. It becomes your life, and look at how many show, how many shows have you done? Just crossed 500.

And Rob Karens, I did his 400th show. And, but it turns out there’s a lot of podcasters in the WordPress base. I’m not. Do you have any idea why? 

Chris Badgett: My theory is that WordPress people are above average in terms of creativity content creation. We also work remotely, so like we get a lot out of online media, but also just connecting with humans and we also look beyond.

A company, which is what I love about the angle of your podcast. Who are the humans here? What’s the backstory here? I think that’s a wonderful angle. 

Bud Kraus: Yeah. That’s what I like. I’m addicted to stories, yeah, we 

Chris Badgett: all are. That’s how it makes us human. I have a background in anthropology and storytelling.

Is as human as it gets, right? [00:50:00] Yeah. 

Bud Kraus: And I had no idea about this stuff. If you told me like what happened in 2018, I’ll tell you a real quick story. I took a trip, a train trip on Amtrak around the United States. I circumnavigated the United States on Amtrak, and I stopped a different cities and. And I was never, I never fell alone because I was constantly interviewing people wherever I went.

Now, I didn’t, it was, they were conversations, but I would sit with somebody on a train all night long and talk about their childhood. I. And the stories I heard were on one person to the next were just mindboggling. And I started realizing like, oh my God, these are just regular people. This is nothing like, and they all have these incredible stories.

So I didn’t leave the, that experience thing like, okay, I’ll do a podcast. No, it just stayed in my head. And then eventually it met up with this. 2023 thing and I said, oh, do a podcast. You’re ready to do this. So you’re like [00:51:00] made to do this. And it turned out I, yeah, I was made to do this.

It’s really funny that at a later stage in life you can find something that is your calling, that you just did not know. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, sometimes it finds you right. 

Bud Kraus: Yeah, it, this absolutely found me. ’cause I, like I said, I wasn’t exactly sitting around wondering should I do a podcast? Because if I had done that, I said, no way.

So it’s a big surprise, you know that it is. And you’ll be on the show for sure. I can’t tell you what year, but you’ll be on the show. 

Chris Badgett: Alright. That’s seriously bud. You can find [email protected]. It’s Bud Kraus and also Joy of wp. Any final words? Yeah, any final words for the folks or any other way to connect?

Bud Kraus: Joy WP is the business side of me, although the podcast is it’s business too. Yeah. But Joy WP is the easiest way to [00:52:00] reach me, and I hope you will because always like really cool to, meet people this way. And, the really cool thing about what we do is we actually do meet people online.

We’re all experts at, I can name tons of people that are friends of mine today that I met online first before I ever saw them in, in person. Which is really extraordinary when you think about it. I think it is, 

Chris Badgett: whatever, and that’s just to close it out. And that’s one of those unforeseen things where this disruptive technology actually increased human connectivity in a way, which is 

Bud Kraus: amazing.

Good point, because I tend to think of social media as not social media. It’s not really social, but when you use it to make strong connections and friendships and business connections and whatever, and then you meet them and stuff, that is that’s the ultimate, or reconnecting with people, that’s the, like all this stuff has such big trade offs, good and bad.

So that’s it. 

Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming on the show, bud. We really appreciate it.

Bud Kraus: Chris, thank you so much for even asking me. It was a real, it was a real pleasure.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.