Online courses are on the rise, and for a good reason. People love learning. This being said, some courses fall flat, leaving students disappointed, resulting in scathing reviews. In contrast, other courses are wildly successful, resulting in a genuine spread of useful information around the world. The following will break down the steps you can take to create a high-quality online course.
Learn Your Craft
Whatever information you are considering creating a course around, you need to understand it in-depth. No matter how much of an expert you feel like you are, take a little bit of time to do more research. You will need to be able to answer any student questions that come up and apply this information to new scenarios you had not considered before. Long gone are the days when anyone could throw up a course, and people would buy — the market is becoming saturated, and people want to take courses from experts. If you wouldn’t describe yourself as an expert, you need to keep learning. If the information your course presents is incomplete, outdated, or, far worse, incorrect, the reviews will reflect this, and people will stop buying.
Learn About Education
In addition to making sure you are as knowledgeable as possible regarding your subject, you need to have a basic understanding of educational psychology. Educational researchers have consistently found that presenting information is not the same thing as genuinely teaching. You need to understand how people learn and how you can assist them with the process. If you chose to learn about education through books and academic articles, you need to make sure that they were published recently, in the last five years or so. If you are planning on learning about education through regular online content that has not been peer-reviewed, you need to reconsider as pop-information is not the same thing as research and evidence.
If you don’t understand this, you likely need to learn how easy it is for false information to spread online and learn about evaluating sources. After this is done, go back to the beginning of this article and start over, researching your craft using verifiable information
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Learn About Course Platforms
Many people leave this part of the process to the end; however, we recommend doing this early on. If you know which platform will be hosting your course, you can spend a little bit of time getting to know the platform and the available features. This will help you later on when you are designing your course.
Keep in mind that you will want to take advantage of as many features as possible, as people learn things in different ways. The more methods of learning available to your students, the more likely it will be that your students can find the course material in a format that they can easily digest. In addition to the features available, there are practical things you should be learning about course platforms. This teachable review emphasizes that you should also learn about how easy the platform is to use. If you don’t have much experience with website development and coding, you might want a platform that is easier to use. In contrast, if you want more freedom in your design and are comfortable with coding, you might want to go a more advanced route.
Cultivate Your Course
Compile all the information you wish to teach and break it down into digestible subtopics (modules). Then design the structure of your course. Make sure you put the modules in good order (you don’t want students to need to understand module five to grasp module three). With each piece of information, you have to offer, spend some time thinking about the best possible way to deliver this content to your students. Think about the videos, readings, activities, audio content, visuals, and discussions that would best help your students learn. When you have your course laid out before you, you can start filming, recording, and editing all the components. As with all of the above steps, learning is an important part of the teaching process.
If there are aspects of the cultivation you don’t thoroughly understand, you need to do some research. For example, if you don’t know much about videography and good lighting and high-quality sound recording, you need to take some time to learn about these things before you start filming class lectures.
With the above steps taken, you are well on your way to creating a high-quality online course. When your course is complete, be sure to offer it for free to a handful of beta-students who are genuinely interested in the topic. After each lesson, have them give you feedback and adjust the course accordingly.
