In this episode of 5 Business Rules, Monika and I share 5 tips to keep in mind when approaching an online course. Spend 4 minutes watching the video or read on for the tips.
Map out your ideas for the course
Any online course you develop should have a focus. You’ll need to sort through your ideas for the course to determine what information will be relevant to your students. Do a brain dump, writing down your ideas for the course, then go about narrowing your focus into more of a syllabus.
Recording your thoughts on paper could produce ideas all over the place, so you may need help narrowing things down. Fortunately, mind-mapping applications like MindMeister formalize the whole brainstorming process, making it easier to organize your ideas.
Focus on helping students get results
Keeping in mind that your job is to help students learn, it’s important you deliver the results your students are expecting. For example, if students are expecting to learn how to send better emails, your responsibility is to teach them how to improve their emails.
People want to know what they’re going to get when registering for your course, so make sure you focus on giving your students a positive learning experience.
Create several different courses
Instead of creating one course that covers a broad range of topics, you should create multiple courses that cover very specific topics. Not only will this give you an opportunity to do more selling, but it could also make it easier to map out your ideas.
Make sure your course is consumable
When designing an online course you want to keep things short and sweet, because people tend to have short attention spans. Keeping this in mind, you should:
- Break content up into modules that last no more than 10 minutes.
- Tell one story to demonstrate a point, not multiple stories.
Provide resources to your students
It’s important when taking your course that students remember what they’ve learned, so provide your students with resources that review the course’s major points. What types of documents may be good resources?
- Summaries
- Worksheets
- Checklists
Hopefully by giving your students materials they can refer back to, they’ll be less likely to forget the value your course provides.
If you have any questions feel free to reach out anytime and we’d be glad to assist!