How English Like A Native creates a highly engaging, immersive learning environment with Circle
“As much as I wish I could, I can't be there personally for every individual student. So I needed something scalable, but I didn't like the idea of simply having an online course that was just videos: I wanted more touch points. And that's where my Circle community came in: I managed to find a way to integrate an engaged community with my courses.”
Anna Tyrie
Founder, English Like A Native
Overview
Challenge
Solution
Meet Anna Tyrie
Anna is an online educator and entrepreneur who runs not one, not two, but five successful YouTube channels. In 2021, she launched a course community on Circle called English Like A Native, which brings together English language students from all over the world to learn, share, and support one another.
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Members
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The challenge: finding the right platform to create an immersive learning experience
Before launching her community on Circle, Anna was already a prolific content creator with a combined audience of over 1.1 million people from her YouTube and social media channels. In the summer of 2021, she decided to add online courses to her offerings, but the last thing she wanted to do was create static course content. She wanted a lively place where people could come to learn but also connect in meaningful ways.
On top of being a busy entrepreneur and social media whiz, Anna is also a mum. As much as she’d love to engage with every student individually, it’s impossible—especially at scale. So as she began to research her options, she knew she needed to find a platform that would help her integrate courses and community, build out her business, and create the best student experience possible.
The solution: integrating courses and community on Circle’s all-in-one platform
When Anna came across Circle, she knew she had found just the right place to bring the learning experience to life that she had been imagining all along.
To give you an idea of how Anna combines courses and community on Circle, let’s take a look at how her setup works.
When someone purchases one of her courses, they are automatically onboarded into the community. Using Circle’s flexible space types, she creates dedicated spaces for each course and language level, not to mention a variety of other learning activities that go on in her community. Then, to make it even easier to get around, she embeds links throughout the course and website that are connected to the exact spaces they need to access in the community.
Next up, she uses Circle’s powerful customization and engagement features to create the best learning experience possible for her students. Here’s how she goes about it:
1. A welcome experience that sets her students up for success
When Anna began to build her Circle community, she kept two key considerations in mind: using new platforms could be confusing for some, and some students need a little bit more handholding than others, which is perfectly fine. Her goal was to make sure that everybody felt both welcome and confident the second they landed in English Like A Native.
To achieve that, she created a Welcome space with a comprehensive video walk-through to show everyone exactly where to go and what to do. Then she put together a ‘what to do first’ checklist to give them structured guidance and motivate them to complete the onboarding process. She also added a space with a green room where people can jump in whenever they want, and created dedicated spaces for real-time chat.
2. Fun, searchable content students love to engage with
One of the things Anna appreciates most about Circle is that you can make your posts so interesting. She and her team use lots of gifs, videos, and pictures to make their posts as engaging as possible for students. They also include lesson notes, audio, and anything else that will help make learning material fun to read and even easier to absorb.
On a side note, Anna has a truly global audience. That means they can’t always make it when she’s streaming live. So, she saves all her videos in her Video Library so people can catch up on classes or events during a time that’s convenient for them. Paying members also get access to her Knowledge Base, full of additional learning materials for students and answers to some of the most popular questions they receive.
Another Circle feature Anna finds useful is the handy search function. It’s especially helpful in a course community because it helps students find exactly the right educational materials when they need them.
3. Live events that foster both learning and meaningful connections
Creating the Conversation Club space was a game-changer for Anna. It started off as an informal way to enable students to chat and practice their language skills, but quickly turned into something bigger, with a fully programmed schedule.
It also acts as a great entry point into the community, leading to easy upsells and cross-sells. Anna elaborates, “bringing the Conversation Club in has been the best thing I’ve done: it brings them into the community to check the schedule, and then they see all the other things on offer.”
If that weren’t enough, people are also making real-life friends because of the Conversation Club. Anna and her team realized that people were meeting up in person because of their interactions in the community, specifically the Conversation Club, which is a wonderful bonus to their learning experience.
4. A continuous feedback loop that just keeps delivering value
Anna’s a perfectionist. And like any textbook perfectionist, she’s always looking for ways to improve her course community and create even more value for her students. It’s the close contact with her Circle community that allows her to do just that, as she’s able to get tons of customer feedback from posts, real-time chat, and 1-1 messages.
In her words, “that constant request for feedback has served us so well, because some of the best introductions we’ve had have been from students.”
Though when it comes to answering language-specific questions, she has another way of handling them. When someone asks that kind of question by DM, she’ll ask them to post in the Post a Question space, or she’ll post it there herself and answer it. Why? Because it opens up all that value to the whole community, rather than keeping it isolated in a private conversation.
5. Providing educational support that scales
Right from the start, scalability was something incredibly important to Anna. She was determined to create a warm, personalized learning environment, but didn’t want to burn out to do it. And with the support of Circle and her team, she’s managed to do just that, and only spends 1-2 hours a day in the community herself.
First things first, the ability to have moderators and admins helps Anna scale her team and impact. To give you an idea, there’s a task in every lesson that requires students to post their work and invite peer-to-peer review. Anna found that students weren’t feeling confident enough to correct each other’s work, so she requested that a few of her teachers comment with corrections to encourage students to do the same.
Another way that she scales her impact is through the use of tags and mentions. If she’s feeling a little bit overwhelmed and someone posts a question she won’t be able to get to, she enlists the help of her most active community members by tagging them and asking for their thoughts. That way she’s present, students still feel seen, but Anna can get support in answering questions instead of trying to do everything herself.
And lastly, she awards those active students with a medal badge, so that they feel recognized and appreciated for their contributions to the community. After all, one of Anna’s top tips for future community managers is to treasure your customers, especially your most engaged community members. She emphasizes that community builders shouldn’t be afraid to ask them for feedback, and to avoid overcomplicating things, especially when starting out.
She wraps up by saying, “when you really understand who your audience is, how they tick, and what they want, then you can create products that appeal to a mass market.” And that’s exactly what Anna continues to do: growing, improving, and providing tons of value and learning fun to her audience.
