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How to Create Effective Online Courses: An Simple Guide

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Sofia Sienna
How to Create Effective Online Courses: An Simple Guide

The online course is the most popular way of learning and earning these days. High Professionals such as life coaches, professional teachers, motivational speakers, etc are highly skilled in their perspective areas. They are now creating online courses to earn and share their knowledge with their audience.

 

Also, online courses are one of the best options among the best side hustles to earn good money to sell your expert knowledge through various online course platforms by creating their own course.

 

Readers that it is difficult to find high-quality information on how to create an online course. There is a lot of information out there about how to sell online courses and about the various online course creation tools and online course platforms that are available.

 

Before you jump into course creation, you have good reason to believe there is market demand and a target audience for the online course you plan to create. If that’s not true, you will benefit from taking steps like validating your market to make sure you’d actually have students enroll before jumping into online course creation.


You can create your own website and host it on a reliable web hosting platform to provide a better experience to your user.

Best Online Course Providers Platforms

If you are wondering what the best platforms are for course creation and selling online courses, here’s our quick list.


  • Thinkific
  • Kajabi
  • LearnDash
  • Udemy
  • Talent LMS

 

Arguably the most established and most widely used is ADDIE, which stands for Analysis Design Development Implementation Evaluation

 

It’s hard to argue with the basic logic of ADDIE but we need to follow the ADDIE process to create an online course outline, which can be laid out as follows:

 

Analyze: Determine the major positive outcome you seek to help your learners achieve while being very clear about who your learners are and why the learning outcome is important of them.

 

Design: Map out what the learner will need to do to achieve the major positive outcomes and the methods you will use to facilitate learning.

 

DIE (Develop, Implement, Evaluate): Develop the minimum viable version of your target learning experience as your course material and test it with target learners—this is the market testing phase. Gather feedback and revise the course experience. If necessary, test it again with target learners.


Breaking Down Your Major Positive Outcome

 

The power of getting your focus statement right up front really can’t be overstated. It will – as the name implies – help ensure that you truly focus your efforts and develop the right course content, for the right people, and for the right reasons. Only with your focus statement right can you start to identify the right structure for your course.

 

Breaking down your positive outcomes and course structure is essential for successful online course creation.

 

To arrive at your structure, you need to break your major positive outcome down into its essential sub-elements. If that is starting to sound a bit like a chemistry lesson, that’s because it kind of is. Think of your major positive outcome as a molecule that is made up of multiple atoms.

Design

As you may have noticed, we have already taken a significant step toward design by breaking the major positive outcomes into sub-elements in the previous phase. 

 

(Instructional design purists may quibble that the sub-element breakdown really belongs in the Design phase. Let them quibble. I think it is an important part of Analysis, and most of the purists never sell online courses anyway.)

 

Breaking down your online course design – a core part of how to build an online course

 

At this point, you will want to:




  • review each of your action/behavior areas and clarify the learning objective(s) represented by each
  • break down each of these areas into the sub-elements that will support achieving the learning objective (just as you broke down your major positive outcome into sub-elements)
  • For each sub-element, identify appropriate media (e.g., text, recorded, discussion board) and instructional activities

 

Identify appropriate media and instructional activities

We’re now getting into the area that hangs many would-be course creators up when trying to create an online course. Many are convinced that online courses need to have a lot of video in them, and for a variety of reasons, they just don’t feel comfortable shooting a lot of videos. 

 

Or, they have heard that successful online courses have to be highly interactive and assume that means they have to have video-game level programming.

 

The fact is, there are nearly always multiple instructional methodologies – combinations of media (text, video, audio, etc.) and activities – that can be used to achieve a learning objective when it comes to online school. And there is not always clearly a “best” methodology. 

 

Now, I’ve stuck with pretty common media and activity combinations above, but there are, of course many, many possibilities, and I encourage you to explore them as part of making your online courses more effective and making them stand out in the course marketplace.

 

You’ll find a wealth of games, activities, and other resources on this website. Again, these were mostly developed for the classroom, but can be translated to online school easily in many cases.

 

You need to provide easy access to your course materials and for this, you can integrate a QR code for quick access by scanning an online QR code.

Piloting Your Course

Once you have your basic design and online course content together, you don’t just head into full-blown course creation to start selling it immediately.

Marketing Online Courses

You can use different marketing channels such as social media, digital marketing platforms, landing page creations, and affiliate marketing to promote your online course. You need to use in game advertising strategy to promote your online course in effective ways.

 

Apart from this, you can make personalized video emails to send these emails to your target audience to promote your course in a more effective way.

Platforms and Tools for Creating Online Courses

You may really want to consider specialized online course authoring software to help make sure your courses do not get held hostage by your delivery platforms and that you have as much flexibility as possible for selling to businesses.

Course Creation Final Thoughts

We live in a time when the opportunity for online course creators is huge. That doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon. In fact, the opportunity is likely to grow significantly in the coming years.

 

That said, the days when you could just throw a few narrated PowerPoint slides online and call them a course is long gone. Competition has increased and learner expectations have increased as well. 

 

The good news, though, is that most course creators will not take the time and make the relatively small effort described here to boost the quality of their online courses.

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Sofia Sienna
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