Its also included a very short mention in the weekly email newsletter that the blog is powered with STEEM so they can now earn while they learn.

Step one: Never say this again. Ever. If the word "earn" is never used again in regards to anything on the steem blockchain, there may be a chance.

It's instructive to note how early this happens in your discussion of ways to motivate people to get involved with the Steemit blogging interface. It's worth noting that this seems to be the only way most people find to pitch the platform.

And then they proceed to look surprised that people show up, expect to make at least a small stacks of cash, discover that doing so is not worth the effort they have to put in (both for consumers/curators and creators), and so they go off to other places which satisfy the other things that they have need for when it comes to social media platforms.

These things have a straight line association. They have a direct correlation. If we want people to behave in a different way, to behave in a different manner, we have to set their expectations differently and better.

To that end, no more talking about earning on the steem blockchain. Ever. At all. Never again the burning times.

So let's look at what your desired end state is.

My objective is to get my users to sign up for a STEEM account, partake in the learning activities on the blog posts so they can be rewarded with upvotes. STEEM they earn can then be used against the price of my premium content.

How do you expect that to work?

That should be a rhetorical question, but it's not. Given that we both know what the average return in terms of steem value is on comments on the platform (and what you're talking about is having them interact with your blog posts, mutually up voting each other, but largely not having comments of interests outside of your students), this is unrealistic. Unless you are promising some multiplier of value for their steem, there's no way that they can mobilize enough SP as new users to have value collectively – and their comments are not going to be interesting to anyone who is not involved in the class, so there's no reasonable expectation of already highly vested curator/consumers from outside the extremely limited community of your students to bring SP-empowered votes in from outside.

Ultimately, then, they won't be able to earn enough steem to make a meaningful dent in the cost of your premium content. Again, unless you count steem value as an abstract point system and offer to provide them more value against your premium content than the actual currency value of STEEM.

You could do that, but I'm not sure that it does much to help your students. You could just as easily and more simply charge less in terms of relative value when the currency of choices STEEM than other choices, which would provide them a real motivation to acquire STEEM by whatever mechanism to get your premium content for cheaper.

Still, it's a terrible idea to try and sell this platform based on the idea that interaction can earn any kind of value. Not just because it's untrue at this point in the bear market, though that's a pretty good reason, but because it sets the wrong motivation and expectation for any new user.

Consider, if you will, this line from your FAQ:

If your vote has any value, you will get up to 25% back in curation rewards.

"If your vote has any value…"

To me, this epitomizes the problem with trying to sell the Steemit social media platform in the context of the STEEM cryptocurrency. It says all the terrible things that nobody wants to be involved with.

Of course my vote has value, it's an expression of my interests. Of course my vote has value, it signals that I want to reward somebody. Of course my vote has value, it is part and parcel of the things that I believe and want.

"If your vote has any value" says, up front and to your face that your vote has no value unless certain preconditions are met – and one of those preconditions is that you give someone real money for your opinion, your vote, your thoughts, to have value.

Combined with the idea that you can instantly buy an account for $3.50 (which only gets you a 15 SP delegation for 90 days, something that a new user without experience in the platform won't even understand what means – but which we know means that after 90 days they probably won't have enough RC to even vote) or wait around for a couple of weeks, maybe, to get in for free?

Look, I'm going to give your students the credit of being interested in economics and business intelligence and fiscal analytics enough to say, "don't you think they could work out that this is a terrible deal for them?"

So we have to go back and look at, reconsider, seriously address what it is you want to achieve and why. Your students have no good, legitimate reason to need or even want an account on the steem blockchain. It will cost them money and time, which is money, to maintain it as any kind of value proposition. You are offering them the opportunity to give money to a third-party in order to have the opportunity to give you money. And it doesn't really benefit you for any of that to happen. You could spend that cognitive friction pitching them more of your premium content, something they know and understand how to value for themselves.

So it's on you to figure out what you really want from and for your students, and whether it is legitimately in their best interest and useful to them to sell them on this platform. You have to come up with the value added proposition from their perspective, and I don't think any of us can do that for you in a reasonable way.