Great content that is relevant and is of high quality is the foundation of a successful online course. It can enhance your tutoring brand, generate good sales, and encourage your target audience to buy more of your courses. Moreover, learners look for helpful, engaging, and convenient course content. But, if you have created online courses before, you might already know that creating great content is the trickiest part of designing a course.
So hands up if you are looking for steps to creating an online course with impactful content.
In this blog, let’s discuss the eight steps to create excellent content that flows, which your learners will appreciate.
- Consider the teaching goals of the course
Firstly, think about your teaching goals – What would you like your students to accomplish from enrolling to your course? A useful way to demonstrate the goals is to understand the learning outcomes. If you can develop focused learning objectives of your content, it can act as a guide to your content.
For example, if you are creating a training course for a corporation, it teaches employees about specific topics related to their job. Whereas a coaching course will help them accomplish specific goals with your professional assistance.
Make it clear to your learners what they will learn, how they will learn, and why it will be useful for them before starting the course. Then, create a course description to define the objectives and let your prospective learners decide if the course is right for their needs.
- Develop topics and narrow them down further
Begin with all topics you are planning to include in your course and create subtopics that are connected to each other. Don’t give in to the urge of adding everything you know in the course. Just add what’s necessary so that the content will be crisp and to the point. Too much content will deter your learners and make it more complicated for them to grasp the concepts. Bite-size lessons work the best.
- Craft an intuitive learning path
Creating an online course is not just about the content. The way it is structured is also important. Make sure you group the content that comes under similar topics. Begin with simpler content modules and then gradually increase the difficulty level until your learners are ready to test their new knowledge or skills. This way, learners will build their knowledge at a good pace that makes them confident and rewarded for their efforts.
For example, the first module must aim to equip learners with the basics of the course. Integrate definitions and explanations along with a few simple examples in the form of interactive images or infographics. As the module progresses, create content that’s more focused on practice (like quizzes with automated feedback) so that learners get the opportunity to gauge their own learning.
- Plan your content
Once you finalize the layout of your content, it’s time to decide how each lesson will be taught. For example, you can teach using text, audio, video animations, infographics, and more. As each student has a different learning style, following a content approach that involves a combination of different methods works the best.
Some students are visual learners, whereas some prefer audio, and others prefer a combination of all. Present concepts, knowledge, and skills through different types of content, including written notes, video content, graphic content, and activities like group discussions and assignments. If you use course management software that helps to create courses using learning materials in different formats, it makes the job simpler. One such software recommendation would be Pinlearn, an all-in-one tutoring software to set up and run your course management platform.
- Give active learning a try
Not all online courses are created equal. However, there are courses out there that lack an exciting element that compels learners to complete the course successfully. To make your courses interesting to your learners, try balancing the proportion of passive and active content to make your learners an active part of their own learning process.
Passive content refers to the content that simply needs to be consumed, like listening to a podcast, reading a note, watching a video lesson, etc. On the other hand, active content refers to the content that engages learners in brainstorming a concept, problem-solving, and doing hands-on practice to test their skills.
You can also use discussion forums and group assignments that facilitate learners brainstorming and solving problems together. You can also offer opportunities for learners to solve problems on their own and conduct a one-on-session to analyze their work.
- Keep it short, simple, and crisp
When it comes to online course content, less is more. Learners prefer short and crisp content over long lecture-type content. However, creating short content can often be trickier than creating more of it. This is because less content must be more concise, focused, and include carefully selected information.
One of the key stages of creating short and simple content is to decide what to leave out. The only content that needs to be integrated into your online course is the one that helps in achieving the learning outcomes you have set.
- Focus on quality
No one wants to go through poorly created content, be it text or multimedia content. Learners enrolling in an online course are no different. Besides, poor content with errors or lack of quality can distract the learning process, resulting in an unpleasant learning experience.
Whether it’s writing notes, recording a podcast, creating an infographic, or filming a video for your online course, make quality a priority. For written content, make sure you proofread it multiple times. And for recorded podcasts and videos, make sure there are no background noises and other distractions.
- Keep up the originality
Today, we live in a world of content curation, and it can be tempting to simply collect content that is related to your subject and call it a course. While content curation has its own pluses, you have to be original to create a truly successful online course. Make sure most of your content is uniquely crafted by subject experts. Prepare notes and film videos that your learners won’t be able to find anywhere else.
Conclusion
Creating a content course can often be the most challenging task. But, ensuring the quality of the content can skyrocket the success of your courses, and of course, its profitability as well. Use these simple and easy tips to mix different content types, and watch your online course’s launch to success.