Gone are the days where you might just ‘promise’ the opportunities in which you’re worth spending–now you’ve got to show. So, there is no better way to show your skills than by bringing together an online tutorial.
By teaching your subject you leave no shadow of a doubt that you know what you’re talking about, are excellent at what you’re doing and are an authority in your profession. As a website and business card, the online course is now as important to the toolbox of any developer, specialist, or opinion leader. One of the fastest and most impactful ways of getting your knowledge to a global marketplace, making a bigger impact, and making more money, is to download that knowledge dormant in your brain and turn it into a lead-generating, cash-making, impact-creating course online.
In this article, you will find an overview of the 10 major stages of the creation of online courses
While this is by no means an exhaustive list of all the items that need to be scheduled, prepared for and performed in order to build a good online course, it gives you the ‘stratospheric outline’ of the big milestones so you know what to expect and what the trip would look like before you start.
Pick the subject of the Ideal Course
The subject of the course needs to be something you enjoy. If you’re not passionate about your topic, it’ll be obvious if you don’t like your topic and make your workout as engaging as a sandwich in cardboard.
Don’t sound like you are going to have to teach a trade at the university level. Talk about the skills, strengths, and life experiences you’ve been through. Cooking your dream meals, interior decor, writing non-fiction, surviving a loved one ‘s death… the list of potential subjects for the course is infinite. In short, if you enjoy the subject, you ‘re good at it and you have the expertise (formal or life) in it, then you’ve got a subject that’s going to work for you.
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Ensure that the proposal for the course has strong business appeal
Hands up who wants to waste weeks of their lives designing an online course, with nobody to buy it at all? None. I didn’t believe it.
When you have chosen the subject for the online course, the next move is to run a variety of market research studies to determine if or not it has a business demand. Many course designers make the mistake of assuming that if there is a lot of competition in their field of the subject, then their idea, of course, does not fly. But in addition, this indicates that there is a high possibility that there will be good consumer demand for that concept of course, and perhaps worth more investigating.
The three main things to be checked for are:
- Were they thinking about it?
- Were people asking questions?
- Is there a gap in what that competition offers?
If the reaction to the three questions above is ‘yes’ and the idea is close but different from what’s currently out there, then you have an idea of course that has a chance of becoming a best-seller.
Render learning outcomes magnetic and convincing
Don’t underestimate the importance of the effects of research. When you don’t do that with your online classes, your image and your bottom line could be severely compromised–let alone making the course design process stressful.
Would you hand over your money to someone you don’t understand for a product, and have no idea what it’s going to do for you? Clearly not.
Just because you know what your course is going to give your students it doesn’t mean they’re going to know. If your students don’t know HOW your course can benefit them, they can definitely not participate in it. Training results simply illustrate what the learner will do, experience, and understand at the conclusion of the lesson, use observable verbs. Which skills would they really demonstrate? What new insight did they gain? What emotions are they shifting away from or to? Clear learning results also ensure that only RIGHT students join your course – which means higher completion and satisfaction rates, and lower requests for a refund.
Pick and compile material for your Course
It is the stage when many course designers are starting to fear to slip down ‘Eternal Procrastination Trap.’
The biggest reason we get stuck here is mostly due to the sheer amount of information we have in our minds or in books, on our hard drives, in our notepads, and so on all around us. At this point, art is not only about what we should include in our course, but what items we can leave out. It is where the work you’ll be doing in the business review process and the learning outcomes come to serve you again now. As you sort through your piles of content, throw away anything that is not directly related to a learning outcome. Second, ensure that every learning result is consistent with content. Only include content that responds to burning questions from your audiences, or fills out gaps that your competitors have not met.
Structure your Course and Modules
That is the stage where you now take a look at all of your material and start organizing the common topics, suggestions, and insights into modules and then arrange the lectures within those modules in the most inclusive and rational way so that they form a fluid series of lessons.
Determine the safest and most efficient methods of implementation for every lesson
It is now time to focus on how best to produce your content. You ought to be mindful of the various other learning values, learning styles, and all the different ways you can implement the training and make sure the training is as enjoyable as possible.
Are you going to have videos, reading content, audio content, activities? Which sort of graphics do you want to have? Were you going to have places in Group learning? You ought to ensure that you have a combination of visual, auditory, and realistic methodologies so that everyone is interested and has the best learning opportunity possible.
Filming, capturing and editing the classes online
This is the Process of Development. Around now, you will have a detailed course schedule, all of your material together and know exactly how each aspect of your online course will be presented.
This is the time for the fun aspect-to get on tape. For example how you execute your teaching depends largely on what the client wants to engage with, and which approach more successfully achieves the learning outcomes.
The most powerful form of distribution at present, however, is film. This could be ‘talking head’ footage when you’re on camera in the picture. You would also be able to get ‘black screen’ talking head videos.
This means that you are recording behind you with a green background-where you have a green screen, during the editing process you can have anything behind you. It could be a picture, cartoons, or even a still image, behind you. I use the green screen to get my PowerPoint presentations in the post-editing process that’s perfect for my classroom style preparation.
Another approach is called screencasting, which is where you film your computer screen–you may opt to add a screenshot of your own form of camera on top of it. You can very quickly learn how to edit the videos yourself. It helps you to easily delete editing and replace your green screen, correct your sound, apply icons, text and pop-ups, and your videos; save them as an mp4 and then upload them to your learning network online.
Create your Online School
The first thing to remember here is that there are three big ways of marketing the courses online.
- Digital marketplaces for course
- Learning Management Systems
- Plugins on your website, or apps.
Your own Academy is a learning management program that you can connect to your website and totally market as your own channel. It makes the production of the learning items online fast and quick to sell.
My choice is Thinkific (I’m running all of my courses on this platform), so if you’re already early in the discovery process, here’s a rundown of all the items you should be searching for in an LMS (Learning Management System).
Having the right price strategies and tapping into a business model focused on greater knowledge
Assure that you have strategized how and where your online course will fit into your business model as a whole.
Each of these will mean that your course needs to be slightly different in design, provide a different volume of value, have different marketing methodologies, and put your followers and students into very different types of funnels. It would also have a huge effect on the price you choose to add to your online course so that it suits the role it is offered within your company properly.
There is no right or wrong price for an online course, or even recommendation quality because it depends so much on what you offer. But as a starting point, my advice is to evaluate and compare your proposal against competing goods in the marketplace –take a look at what your rivals are paying for and selling, and then figure out how good and better yours could be. Once you have improved yours, the quality of mine would be marginally higher instead. Never lower the price because that’s only going to make it look like it has less worth than the rivals.
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Release and Campaign Continuing
If you think the job is done now that you’ve finished your course online, think again now that the real work is off! Too many course designers make the mistake of assuming that they will now have an income stream after their course is developed. To advertise your course and recruit students, you need to launch and continuing marketing campaign.
- Can you run discount deals on early birds?
- Will you have a marketing campaign for content and will sell your courses online?
- Would you want to run ads?
- Have you got a list to market for?
- Can you partner with those influencers?
- Will you want to run an affiliate program?
- How are you going to use these social media?
And the list goes on….
Be sure you have a marketing strategy for your online course for at least 18 months, and note that the second you quit promoting is the second one you quit offering.
Conclusion
So, there you have it-a ‘birds-eye-view’ of the big milestones in the development of online course!
Hopefully, these steps will give you a clear sense of what to expect from your online course design and marketing path.