Your Online Course Is Failing Before You Hit Record — Here’s Why — with Rebecca Cuevas

Interview Insights

Top Takeaways

• Effective online courses are designed, not recorded. The most common mistake is jumping straight to video without understanding that design — knowing the learner transformation you’re aiming for — must come long before choosing any media.

• Stop serving the whole cow. Trying to compress a lifetime of expertise into one course overwhelms learners and buries the transformation. Focus on one specific outcome your learner will achieve.

• Launch with a minimum viable learning design: use the Course Design Formula to draft a pilot quickly, then “add people and stir.” Real learner feedback from a live cohort will improve your course faster than any amount of pre-launch polishing.

Show Notes

• Rebecca’s two grandfathers — one a cigar-smoking industrialist who turned around failing companies, the other a journalist who founded a television show — and what they shared: the drive to forge their own path and a deep love of thorough preparation. [01:33]
• From education coordinator for two Southern California public utilities to online course designer: how 15 years of building in-person programs from scratch set the stage for Rebecca’s pivot to online learning and founding Learn and Get Smarter in 2015. [04:40]
• The unlikely breakthrough — designing a Turkish grammar course with zero subject-matter knowledge forced Rebecca to rely entirely on learning design research, and that is when the Course Design Formula was born. [09:00]
• Three mistakes people still make with online courses: (1) serving the whole cow — cramming everything they know into one course; (2) no focus on the learner’s transformation; (3) jumping straight to video without a design process. [10:32]
• “It doesn’t have to be high production value — it has to be high design value.” Just as you can’t remake Star Wars with a single video camera, you can’t design transformational learning by just hitting record. [12:35]
• Client success story: helping “Dora,” a social-sciences innovator, turn a complex personal methodology into a teachable program now recognized as a signature methodology nationwide. [13:38]
• Lightning round — teenage anthem: “I Can See Clearly Now” by Johnny Nash (1972); best $100 purchase: Bondi Shams, a solar water filtration device that provides 125 people with clean water for 25 years. [16:00]
• The ADDIE model (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation) and why the minimum viable learning design approach — build a quick pilot, add real learners, stir, and iterate — gets better results faster than perfecting in isolation. [17:51]
• How Rebecca measures true effectiveness: she listens for her students’ students to come back with five-star stories and life-changing letters — the ripple effect that proves the design worked. [19:12]

Expert Bio

Rebecca Cuevas, Founder and CEO of Learn and Get Smarter, Inc., holds a BA with honors from Harvard and has two Masters Degrees in Education. She has over 30 years’ experience working with learners of all ages from toddlers to senior citizens. She has designed, developed, and delivered original learning programs in settings ranging from classrooms to workshops to self-paced online instruction and Masterminds.
In her award-winning book, Course Design Formula: How to Teach Anything to Anyone Online, Rebecca shares her proprietary research-based method of online learning design. She has used the formula to help hundreds of creative experts and entrepreneurs develop anything from a single online course to a whole academy or online learning business.
Her mission is to help outside-the-box thinkers who are the quiet founders of movements fulfil their mission by teaching impactfully, online.

Contact Info and Social Media for Rebecca Cuevas

• Primary website

• Travels from: Riverside, CA

• Connect on: LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram @mother_rebecca

Resources Mentioned During the Interview

Below are key people, places, books, quotes, websites and other resources that we discussed, so you can explore further.

• Learn and Get Smarter — Rebecca’s online learning business and community for course creators who want to teach impactfully online
• Robert F. Mager — educational theorist whose research-based principles of instructional design underpin the Course Design Formula; author of landmark works on performance-based learning objectives
• ADDIE model — the foundational instructional design framework: Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation; the iterative process Rebecca uses with every client
• Bondh e Shams — solar water filtration device mentioned in the lightning round; $100 provides 125 people with clean water for 25 years
• “I Can See Clearly Now” — 1972 reggae-influenced song by Johnny Nash; Rebecca’s teenage anthem that became an emblem of her adult life

Authored by Rebecca Cuevas