How to Create an Online Course

Online video courses are the best way for students and employees to learn material, but where do you start?

Here are some quick and easy steps that you can take to create a successful online course:

● Understand Your Audience

The first step in creating a successful online course is to understand your audience. You’ll need to identify the what, why and who of your target audience. Without adequately understanding your target audience, you risk failing to appeal to the group you wish to educate.

Whether you’re creating an online course to train your employees, or to teach your students, it is pivotal to understand and respect the audience. This is vitally important, as you need to ‘speak their language’ to truly make the content resonate.

● Validate Your Ideas

Everyone has ideas, but what makes your course idea a great one?

Two key ingredients: time and research.

You’ll need to spend time validating the idea of the course, and determining whether there’s an existing demand for the course in your chosen market. This may be time consuming, however, once the research is done, you are equipped with more knowledge and resources on the course you are designing.

Additionally, you don’t want to spend hundreds of hours creating the perfect course, only to find that there isn’t any demand for it, so it’s best to validate your idea beforehand.

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This doesn’t apply to you if you’re a business owner looking to create an online course to train your employees to complete the onboarding process. Some things are mandatory after all, why not make them great?

● Create an Outline of the Course Materials

When you’re ready to create the course, you’ll need to create an outline of materials to teach in an efficient manner. At this stage, you’ll need to determine the information you need to share with your students. The easiest way to create an outline of the course contents is to repurpose your existing content.

For instance, if you’re trying to train your employees, you can take a look into the existing materials and organise them properly. This can dramatically speed up the course creation process.

After you’ve created the outline of your course, you can get started with the course creation process. Whether you decide to make the course video only, or a combination of video, audio and written materials, be sure to organise the course materials according to your course outline. Following the creation, test the course with colleagues to ensure that you’re heading in the right direction.

● Find Your First Learners

If you’re just starting out, it’s absolutely necessary to find a first batch of learners for your online course. This first batch of students can give you crucial feedback to edit the course’s content to know what works and what doesn’t. Following the initial feedback, you can move forward with the editing process.

● Launch Your Online Course

After you’ve successfully created your online course, it’s time to launch it. Any successful course depends on a strong marketing plan. Prepare your promotional content well ahead of the launch day, so you are prepared for the short, medium and long term success of your course. The adoption and acceleration will depend on the initial launch phase and it’s extremely important to adopt the right marketing approach, if your course requires it.

Furthermore, to ensure the longevity and relevance of your course, strategise a marketing plan with sustain, and if necessary, update the course with relevant feedback from students and colleagues.

Although creating an online course isn’t quick and easy, online courses are here to stay. If you’re looking to create a quality online course but don’t know where to start, feel free to contact us.

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We specialise in producing online courses for both businesses and educators, if you’d like to connect and discuss video production for courses, get it touch today https://calendly.com/matt--

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