Are you interested in creating online courses to help others learn? If so, look no further! In this blog post, we’re going to break down six simple tips and tricks that will have you designing and launching effective online courses in no time.
Whether you simply want to brush up on your digital learning skills or are brand new to the field, these helpful strategies can provide the guidance you need for successful course creation. Ready to get started? Let’s jump into our best advice for crafting great online courses!
Have an Effective Course Plan
Much like considering the length of time for each lesson and the entire course, you need to ensure that you have an effective course plan. The good news is that there are online course creation platforms that you can use, which have pre-made templates to follow.
Whether you use these platforms or not, you should definitely consider using microlearning, which breaks up the course into lessons that are almost like bite-sized pieces that are easy to digest. More than this, you need to research and see what the leading brands in the field of online courses, like EdWize here, are doing right.
Your course plan needs to have a logical flow, starting with the building blocks and working up to being fully versed in the topic, so you should ask yourself three questions. What do your students already know? What do they need to learn? And what is the best approach to ensure they learn it?
Understand Your Audience
The second step to creating great online courses is understanding your audience. Who are the people that will be interested in the content that you are creating? What field are they working in? What are the skills that they are looking to gain?
These are very important questions to ask since they will determine who your audience is. Without knowing who your audience is, you won’t be able to create course content that provides them with the skills that they are looking for. More importantly, without knowing your audience, you won’t be able to create attractive outcomes or mark your course.
Make it Interactive
The next tip on this list, if you want to create a great online course or great educational content for online courses, would be to make it active. If there’s one thing that students detest more than anything else, it is boring coursework.
One thing that you should definitely avoid is having 90% of your coursework be text-based. You should include voiceovers to summarize the most important information for the students that don’t learn from reading. You should also include images to make it more engaging, as well as quizzes, questions, or anything that lets the students test what they have just learned.
Consider the Length of Time
The next thing you will need to do to make a great online course would be to consider the length of time each lesson runs and the overall time it will take to complete the course. Not everyone has hours upon hours to learn and study, which means that you will also need to cater to the people already working full-time jobs. More importantly, no one wants to do an online course for a small certificate if it will take longer than a month or two, and at most, 6.
Create Attractive Outcomes
Finally, the last tip on this list for anyone looking to create great online courses would be to create attractive outcomes. In the world of learning, if you are not familiar with it yet, outcomes are basically what the students will be gaining after they have finished your course. At the end of the day, even though the information from courses that are the same as yours will be the same, the way you “advertise” the outcome will be what hooks the students.
Before writing out the outcomes, you should consider a few questions. What are the students going to be gaining from the course? What skills will they be learning? How long will it take to do the course? What benefits does this course provide them in their daily life as well as their professional life? Of course, this begins with understanding your audience, so ensure that you do that first.