Course Lab – Episode 116
Teaching Accent Confidence: Creating an Impactful Course (Donna Durbin)
Abe Crystal: Nothing is off limit, right? Like this is a very tangible and embodied skill, right? It is not just about providing some information. Like you have to do this. You have to practice with your body in front of a mirror, like listen to your voice, like you have to do all these embodied things. But she’s still able to teach people effectively to do this online.
Ari Iny: Hello and welcome to Course Lab, the show that teaches creators like you how to make better online courses. I’m Ari Iny, the director of growth at Mirasee, and I’m here with my co host Abe Crystal, the co founder of Ruzuku.
Abe: Hey there, Ari.
Ari: In each episode of Course Lab, we showcase a course and creator who’s doing something really interesting, either with the architecture of their course or the business model behind it, or both. Today, we welcome Donna Durbin. She’s the founder and owner of Clear English coach. In 2016, Donna left academia to start Clear English Coach, helping non native speakers communicate with confidence and clarity. Her courses, like ABCs of an American Accent, combine lessons, feedback and coaching to break language barriers and reduce accent bias. Donna’s mission, transform voices to unlock opportunities and build authentic connections. Welcome, Donna. I’m really looking forward to our conversation.
Donna Durbin: Thank you, Ari. I’m glad to be here.
Ari: The question that I always kick these interviews off with is could you give us a 30,000 foot view of yourself and how you came to the world of online courses?
Donna: It has been a long journey. I was going to say I started as an artist. I would have a career as a professional artist, an exhibiting artist, and learning is an important thing for me. So always trying to learn new processes and new information. That career actually showed me how important it was to be visible, to promote yourself. I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was 25, so I’ve been working for myself since I was 25 and working with other artists. I learned that the motto was if it doesn’t matter how good you are if nobody knows you exist. So as the world became digital, I’ve always supplemented my art profession with teaching. And so I’ve always been working in the academic world as an adjunct and a teacher.
So at one point in my life I went through and had foreign exchange students living with me. They were here to learn English. I wasn’t teaching English as a second language at that time, but it was to help me financially because I was going through a divorce. So life transitions happen and you just kind of go with the flow and try to figure out the next thing to do that. Actually, though I was teaching textiles at The Art Institute. And so I knew how to write Curriculum and textiles, I joke with people, is like a foreign language. It has vocabulary and comprehension. And so it’s not different than a foreign language because it’s all new to most people about the fibers and the yarn and the weaving and the textiles and the dye processes. And that’s what my passion was before.
So moving into learning to do slide presentations and then to learn to have a website, when that was the time came to do that, evolved into, let’s say you’re getting the 30,000 foot view, right? So I did that for many years and doing the artwork. In 2008, I decided to sell everything, put everything in my storage unit, all my artwork, and moved to Thailand for two years and traveled around Southeast Asia. And I was learning to speak Thai. And Thai is a tonal language similar to Chinese, but it’s five tones. Chinese is four tones. And I did not know what a tonal language meant, but it meant that depending on the like intonation, if you don’t say it the right way, it like ma, ma, ma, ma, ma.
That’s like five different words. Tiger, horse, shirt, you know, different things. So it was really a very interesting thing to learn to do that. And I wanted to go to the market on Silver Street, and I could not say the word for silver because it sounded to me like nun, like ng at the beginning of the word. And I thought, this is what happens to my ESL students. At that time, I had been teaching English as a second language at University of Houston and was teaching general grammar, reading, writing, speaking. But we didn’t have anything based on pronunciation. And I thought, this is what happens to my foreign students.
They know the grammar, they know the words, they know the vocabulary. But when they say it, Americans go, huh? What? Because we don’t understand them. And typically, it’s because most Americans don’t speak a second language. We haven’t really had to recognize all of the work and practice that it takes to function in another country. So my experience of traveling in Southeast Asia gave me a chance to experience what my students have to do to adapt to coming to another country. Fortunately for us, English is the major global business language, so we don’t have to learn a second language. And many times I think we take for granted the opportunities that that brings and the ease that that has to because we are an English speaker. So coming back from Thailand, I started teaching again at University of Houston and then decided to start focusing just on pronunciation.
So it’s been a journey of loving other cultures because of their textiles originally in my artwork, traveling and learning to speak, I have practiced or tried to learn about six different languages. When I traveled to Japan, I learned Japanese. When I traveled to Indonesia, I learned Bahasa, Indonesian. French was my first foreign language. I had a chance to study in Quebec, Canada in my junior in high school, Spanish, Italian. So it’s been an opportunity to visit other cultures and learn the language to better connect. So to me, that’s really kind of the journey that’s brought me back to now, working with people all around the world. My students came to visit me from other places before I had a chance to visit them. And so it’s been the global connection. We live in a very small world, basically. So communication is key.
Ari: Absolutely. Very cool and fascinating journey that you’ve been on. So you’ve had all these experiences. You taught at the University of Houston, went on your travels, had this experience, understood the importance of pronunciation, came back, started focusing on that. When was it at that point that you were teaching mainly in person? Were at that point, did you shift to online? How did that work?
Donna: Oh, well, when I came back to the University of Houston, I didn’t want to really teach full time, but they hired me as a tutor basically. And so I started focusing on just pronunciation. And within a few weeks I had these students, especially the Vietnamese student I remember was the first one that made the biggest difference. I have them doing mouth and tongue exercises because the trick is really that their muscles have developed for their own language, not for English. And in English, we use the tip of our tongue and we use a lot more facial movement and lip movement to speak. We also open our mouths more. So I gave her these exercises to do and she came back in two weeks and it was like transformation. She was like a whole different person.
And I said, what are you doing? And she says, I’m doing the exercises you told me to do and I’m doing them every day. And she said, nobody has ever taught me this before. Nobody has ever told me how to improve the way I speak. I know the grammar, the reading, the writing, I comprehend it. But it’s my trouble, because when I speak. So the main thing that most Asians or especially the Vietnamese, is they don’t put the last consonant sound on a word because in their language it’s a vowel based language and they don’t have these ending consonant sounds. But if you leave off those ending consonant sounds, we don’t understand you. That, that, that sounds like that, that, that, that, that.
It’s like, okay, I’m trying to, but I can’t understand you. So after that, she kept bringing all of her friends back. And so it grew from a few people a week to like 48 people a week. And at that time, the University of Houston called me into the office and said, you don’t have the credentials to be teaching this. You don’t have the English degree. I have a master’s in fine art, so I can teach in a higher level education. But I didn’t. And I just thought, now that’s interesting. I’m helping all of these students and you’re telling me they keep coming, the teachers keep sending them to me, they keep telling me, oh, my gosh, I don’t know what you’re doing, but it’s working. And so I thought, you know, I’ve been independent before. I’ve been in business for myself.
So I just started. I offered it through leisure. Learning was a learning platform that they had here in Houston. It was all in person. We did it all in person at that time, because that was 2010 to 2015, I guess. And I put together a website because they had a little booklet they put out all over the city. And I thought, oh, my gosh, I need some visibility. If somebody’s going to be doing this and they’re doing the free advertising, I need a website. So I got on Weebly and set up a website and then I put together a little profile and I had a curriculum written and so started offering it through that. And that is what got me into recognizing that there was a real need in Houston. Houston is one of the most international cities in the country, and so there’s a strong need for it.
At that time, there was not a lot of online courses, but I was teaching in person. But I realized my students did not practice in between our sessions. So I thought, I’m going to start doing some videos so that they can practice. So then I learned how to set up a YouTube channel and started putting things on YouTube. So it’s been a learning process for me the whole thing is, at first it was quite a steep learning process, but I had the curriculum written. I was taking these courses to learn how to do things online because I recognized that that was an opening, there was a new process opening. And so it has been an adventure for me and the creative process for me at the same time. So to me, rather than doing the artwork so much, this teaching became the passion.
Ari: Very cool. And so what I’m curious about is what prompted that shift? I understand, you know, you saw the opportunity. What was the opportunity that you saw with moving to online? Because, you know, often when we’re talking to people who had a course that was mainly in person or something that they taught mainly in person, the thing that caused them to move online was the pandemic. You moved before that?
Donna: I was already kind of pivoting before the pandemic. So I was ready when the pandemic hit to go fully online because I was working with some clients that would contact me that couldn’t necessarily make it to my course. So when Zoom came out, that was another platform that I realized I can see this student and they can have recordings to practice with. So it was like being open to learning the digital, being online and what that meant. And I have to say I’ve always been curious. So learning new technology has been interesting for me. The speed of the changes is much faster now than it even used to be. But there are a lot of people my age that have not adapted to being online or feeling comfortable with being on digital.
To me, it was being able to have a way that they could practice. So doing the videos we did the Zoom, then I could post it on YouTube. And then when I discovered Ruzuku, it was basically the fact that I knew I wanted something where I could have that interaction. That was the part that was important for me, not just having an evergreen course that I didn’t have any interaction with, but it was being able to do like a hybrid course so that I could provide direct coaching as well as giving them the support to have a self study course. So that kind of evolved into that.
Ari: So tell us a little bit more about the structure currently of the course. And it seems to me like this is a topic that people do need feedback. So it’s not just them watching off of recording. So what is your process to support people in getting better with their pronunciation and everything that they’re working on?
Donna: Well, I think, you know, having myself trying to learn other languages and practicing. This was before computers or iPhones or duolingo or any of that stuff. You had to learn it by just listening and watching and taking notes and practicing the phrases over and over again. So anytime I’ve traveled, that’s what I have done. It’s a slow process, but it’s more not so much academic as it is connection and communication, whether it’s just good morning and how are you today and ordering tea. So it was a whole new process. So the idea of shifting it so that I could have that interaction with somebody. The course material, basically I took my curriculum and started breaking it down into small bite sized pieces.
One of the longest lessons I have is maybe 15 minutes and that’s the mouth and tongue exercises. The first course I did was my master course which was articulation, intonation and vowels. And that course then started to be broken out into just intonation and then just vowels as a short course, like a four week hour live coaching. So they have their self study lessons which they have to do recording. So my search for a platform that would allow my students to do a recording and upload a recording and then so that I could give them feedback on it was a really crucial part of it. And until I learned how to use that, a lot of the platforms didn’t provide that. And it’s different than just using Duolingo. Now we’ve got AI and AI is better at that.
But I have used some of the AI platforms and I find that they still don’t correct you on intonation, which is the melody of English, which is a little more complicated than just the correct lip placement. But now it’s a combination. They can purchase the course, just the course by itself and get the feedback from me, which is a written feedback or audio feedback depending. They can do the course and have group coaching. So I do a certain day of the week, three or four times of the year, I do a group coaching and the group may be anywhere from two to eight people. It’s not a huge group. I’m really not interested in having hundreds of people. I’m very selective about the clients that I work with and I interview each one of them before they ever even usually sign up for the course. I don’t have something where they just pay their money and sign up.
Ari: Why is that?
Donna: Because to me it’s building a relationship and a trust value to really help somebody, support them in a way that’s more personal for me, more satisfying for me. And also I don’t want people just spending money just for the heck of it. I do a coaching hour on the first Monday of every month. It’s free for the first time and $10 a month subscription. So I have a subscription course now. And that’s just kind of an introduction of being able to sample what it’s like to have a coaching session with me, with other people. Sometimes there’s two people sometimes there’s 10. I’ve had people from Nepal, I’ve had people from India, people from Canada.
So now when you’re online, I’ve got a global audience. It’s not just local, although a lot of my clients find me because of the local, like Google my business, I have a visibility there and my YouTube has given me visibility. But as far as doing a lot of marketing, I think it’s my Mailchimp newsletters. I collect emails from my clients that sign up on Calendly. That was one of the other tools that really became valuable as an appointment setter. So you didn’t have to go back and forth and back and forth trying to find a time that was going to work for people. So it’s interesting how learning to use these digital tools to make my business more automated and more effective has been one of the learning curves that I’ve had to work on.
But now it’s a hybrid. So in one course, like the ABC’s course, they can buy the course by itself. They can buy the course or add the live coaching, group coaching later, or add private coaching. So they can select of those. Because now ab we instead of having just one pricing on our course, we can have three. So I quickly adapted my courses to do that.
Ari: So as you said, I mean, something that I find interesting is the international audience element of what you teach. I mean, it’s not for local people, although some of the people are locals in that they came to study in the US or they came to work in the US and so I’m curious about how you’ve gone about doing your marketing and have you branched out for. I mean, I hear that you do have people outside of the U.S. how have you been attracting them? So how have they been finding you and what have you been doing to find those people?
Donna: It’s very interesting. I have let it grow organically. Usually it is. I’ve got business cards and I will pass my business cards out when people, I will go to chambers of commerce, I will go to networking groups and talk to people about what I do. For the most part, people don’t realize that there is an option to refine or elevate their spoken English. They think of that as only being grammar, reading, writing. And that’s one of the reasons I left University of Houston in 2016 is because the academic programs. We had students from 40 countries and they all told me, nobody’s ever taught us this, nobody’s ever really focused on this.
And I thought there’s a need if nobody’s teaching you this. And I think this is a pretty crucial part. They get up and spend days preparing a presentation. Non native English speakers could understand each other better than the English speakers, but many times they would not be able to communicate clearly what they’re saying. They’ve got the facts, but they’re not spoken clearly enough for people to understand them or not presented in a way. So I don’t really teach public speaking per se, but I do help them learn how to modify their accents so that they are more easily understood by Americans. So I started doing a lot of online learning with the Small Business association or with SCORE or some of these other things that had online courses. Again, always seeking out, trying to find ways of bettering my course or bettering the marketing.
So I started recognizing that there were a lot of free support for that kind of thing. And I would sign up for them and take those courses and pick up one or two little tidbits that would help make it easier that I would investigate. So I thought YouTube would be the best place to start it because it’s free and I can put videos on there and I’m learning how to film myself and make videos. So that was it. Then I had to learn how to use iMovie and QuickTime on my computer. I have a Mac, so I use a Mac. But it was then a learning curve of knowing how to edit the videos, learning how to get a better microphone. At first I was just using the mic on my computer, and when I go back and look at some of those old videos, it’s terrible.
But you’ve just got to start. You just have to start. And I think most people are afraid of that learning process and they want it to be perfect before they put it out there. So when I advise other entrepreneurs, which I have a group of people that I work with and students and younger entrepreneurs, many times it’s more about, you just have to keep putting it out there. You just have to keep showing up and doing it. So a lot of it people have found me from YouTube. I think I have maybe 6,000 subscribers now. But I’ve not really done a lot of promotion.
And that’s been really surprising to me that people find me. So anytime someone calls me, I will ask them, how did you find me? And it’s either I googled you and I pop up or YouTube. For the most part, only one, maybe two, has told me they found me on Instagram because I’m not very active on the other social media channels. I have worked with corporations. I’ve gone in and done training for groups. Usually that either the HR person calls me or I found somebody that has a need that introduced me to someone that has a international employee base.
So that’s my next goal actually is to go be on site perhaps in Portugal or France or Italy or Spain and find companies that I can work with that want to improve their employee base for their communication skills, for their Accent reduction and go live there for a month or two months so I get a chance to have my travel and get a chance to explore a different country and add that back in, as well as providing a service.
Ari: So just to recap, so it sounds like, as you said, you know, it’s visibility, it’s word of mouth, and there is also some active outreach that you’re doing. Visibility is not necessarily just, oh, I put a video on YouTube. It’s Let Me be actually visible out in the world and talk to people so that more and more people know of me and that increases visibility, et cetera.
Donna: And I think the full circle for this is before I had my own art degree, my ex husband was an illustrator. So he was an artist in the graphic arts business. And I used to go around and take a portfolio of about 30 different artists to agencies and to buildings and I mean to people that could use it. I was their AE, I guess, or their account executive. And that was my training before I started doing my art. And what I realized is most artists feel like they just want to stay in the studio and be discovered. And I had to tell them that’s not realistic. You’ve got to be visible.
I used to teach a course called the art of Self promotion for artists. And out of 10 of those artists, maybe two of them would actually do anything with the information. So it’s just like I hear people, oh, well, I’m going to have a website. Well, you got to drive people to the website. You got to let them know it’s there. You’ve got to be willing to talk about it. So I changed it from, it’s not selling, it’s celebrating. You’ve got to celebrate what you do and share it with people or they don’t know. You can’t expect it to just be Online and have people find you. You’ve got to attract people. So you’ve got to do your part. That’s the marketing part. And there’s nothing wrong with that as far as I’m concerned.
Ari: Absolutely.
Abe: What do you think is stopping people from doing that? Or what’s the difference between the two people who took your advice and took action and the eight who didn’t?
Donna: I think you have to be hungry. I think you have to be hungry enough, you have to be ambitious enough, and you have to recognize it’s all up to you. You can’t expect somebody else to do it for you. And it’s hard work. It’s a lot of work. I work more hours for myself than I ever did for a job. Right. At the job I used to know when the weekends were and the holidays were because I. Right. But I discovered myself that I’m willing to take the risk. For some people, there’s a real risk aversion. They don’t want to take the risk to do something different. I think there’s a mentality of people that are willing to be entrepreneurs and step out of their comfort zone to learn and grow and keep growing and changing and make mistakes and keep trying things.
I mean, I’m always tweaking it and trying it. I’ve changed my prices several times. There still is a lot to learn, but I feel like I’ve got a pretty good handle now. I’m grateful because I can now have a course online, provide something that somebody can go back and study and use, and then I can be engaged with them as much or as little as they want.
Ari: And speaking of, if someone wants to engage with you, what’s the best place for people to go for our listeners to go to learn more about you and your programs?
Donna: My website is www.clearenglishcoach.com and on YouTube it’s either Donna Durbin or Clear English Coach. So YouTube and my website is probably the most is easiest and my courses are listed on my website.
Ari: Awesome. Donna, thank you so so much for being here with us. It was a great conversation. I really appreciate it.
Donna: Thank you.
Danny Iny: Now stick around for my favorite part of the show where Abe and Ari will pull out the best takeaways for you to apply to your course.
Abe: All right, Ari, it is time for debrief. Really interesting conversation with Donna and it shows how you can find success in perhaps very unexpected areas.
Ari: Absolutely. Yeah, and I think we talked a little bit about her course design and whatnot and her kind of marketing strategy and all of that. But I think the thing that really jumps out, at least to me from this episode, is just the importance of having, as you mentioned, you know, being hungry and taking action and putting yourself out there and kind of being a course builder and wanting to have an online course is great, and you can, of course, do that. But if you want people to actually take it, you need to take this approach to entrepreneurship as opposed to just being a course builder and take that seriously and do the things that you talked about around putting yourself out there and learning and trying new things and different things to get to a point where you are bringing in and supporting the students that you want to be supporting.
Abe: Yeah. And I loved her point about being hungry. It pointed out the importance of just finding the right people to serve. Right. It can be more stark. The comparison between you can be pushing on a string. Right. In her example, that was trying to serve these students because it seemed like, oh, I can help them. They’re students. They need to learn, et cetera, et cetera. But that’s not the market. Right. Like, they just don’t have the money to invest. And sure, it doesn’t mean you have to ignore them. You could put together some free resources for students, et cetera, and you can nurture them for the future, but that’s not the market. The market is professionals.
Right. It’s people who want to advance their career, or it’s businesses that want their staff to be better English. That’s the market. And so her going through that, that discovery, I think, is really clear example of the process people need to follow. And if you’re at the point where, like, yeah, it feels like you’re trying to sell a course to people who don’t have any money to pay for it, or you’re trying to convince people, you know, to take you up on your offer instead of them asking you for it. Like, it probably means that you need to go through a similar evolution, you know, to what Donna went through. You need to find what is the analogous market for you. It doesn’t literally mean that it’s professionals in a particular niche. Like it was Verdana. But who are the people that really want what you have and have the resources to invest in it?
Ari: Absolutely.
Abe: I think, you know, she also just highlights the point that we’ve made in other episodes in the past, that nothing is off limit. Right. Like, this is a very tangible and embodied skill. Right. It is not just about providing some information. Like, you have to do this. You have to practice with your body in front of the mirror. Like, listen to your voice. Like, you have to do all these embodied things. But she’s still able to teach people effectively to do this online. So just because your niche or the area in which you help people is very in person or has this big embodied component, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t people you can help online.
Ari: Absolutely. It’s just about understanding or thinking through what would be needed and how would it be possible as opposed to, you know, just trying to copy it outright. Whatever you’re doing in person, thinking through. Okay, what could the process be if I were to do it online?
Abe: Anything else you had?
Ari: Nope, I’m good.
Abe: Okay. All right. Donna Durbin is the founder and owner of Clear English Coach. You can find out more about her and her menu of courses over at clearenglishcoach.com. That’s clearenglishcoach. Com, and you’ll find the link to the website and her special free offer called First Monday Accent Reduction Coaching for our listeners in the show notes.
Thanks again for listening to Course Lab. I’m Abe Crystal, co founder and CEO of Ruzuku, here with my co host, Ari Iny. Course Lab is part of the Mirasee FM Podcast network, which also includes such shows as To Lead Is Human and Just Between Coaches. If you want to hear more from Course Lab, you can follow us on YouTube or wherever you listen to your favorite podcast podcast. And of course, if you enjoy the show, please do leave us a review. It really does make a difference. Thank you and we’ll see you next time. All right, Ari, who do we have coming on the show next time?
Ari: Next time we have Nancy Shanteau. She has a group coaching course, Wise Adulting, and our mission is to certify 10,000 cooperative communication trainers by 2031. I’m very much looking forward to learning what all that means.
Abe: I know. That sounds very intriguing.