Beginner’s Guide To Creating An Online Course

Congratulations to you for deciding to create an eLearning course for many curious and enthusiastic learners across the globe.

Online courses are a great way to channel your knowledge in a certain field to the people wishing to learn more about it. Moreover, these courses can become a great source of income once people start liking your content. If you are just starting with creating online courses, you are probably stuck, because you don’t know where to start. Let us make things easier for you. Follow the steps below to create a great online course. 

Decide a specific topic 

To start with let’s decide a topic for your course. So for your first course, we suggest you go for a topic that you are most interested in and also most familiar with. You should have a good amount of knowledge about the topic. You can even research a little more to enhance your knowledge about the subject matter. 

It is important for you to enjoy the whole process of creating a course, so choose a topic that you will love teaching. You can tackle difficult and unfamiliar topics later when you get better at creating courses. Start off with something in your comfort zone. 

While deciding on the topic try to make it unique. Check out other courses that cover the same topic and see if there is a hole that you can fill. An aspect that no one has covered yet. This will give you an upper hand because your offering will be different from the rest. If you are not able to, it’s still fine, there are other ways of making your course unique. We will discuss those throughout this post.

Understand your audience

Once you have a topic the next thing you need to do is conduct extensive research on your audience. Since you are at the beginner level proper research might be difficult, but not impossible. You can have a word with your audience. For example, if you are creating a course for kids of a certain age then you can get in touch with them and try to understand what they might be expecting from a course like yours. If possible get insights on things like the preferred format of the course, graphics, do they need additional offline notes, etc. You can even take this to discussion forums like Quora or Reddit and get some useful insight from your target audience. 

Determine the objective of your online course

Your course should always have a direction. Your audience should know what the course is aiming at so that they complete the course in order to reach the ultimate goal. Decide what you want to do with your course. For example, you are making a drawing course and the topic you have chosen is graphite sketching. Your objective can be to teach all the basics of graphite sketching or advanced techniques. Your objective could also be to teach only how to create a form using light and dark shades. The more specific you are with your objective the better. An aimless course is never worth creating or attending. So set a specific goal and make sure that goal is communicated to your audience in your descriptions or the preview videos. 

Outline and storyboarding 

Mindmap the whole course. Never ever should you start shooting or creating slides without a concrete plan. Make a very detailed outline. It should have the list of modules into which your course is divided, the objective of each module, the additional documents you will be supplying, any quizzes in between the modules, and basically everything that you want to do with the course. 

Once your outline is complete it is time to make a storyboard. A storyboard is a step you can skip but if you do it, it will make the whole process of creating the course more streamlined and organized. A storyboard is great for creating videos, it gives you an idea about how your course is going to look.

Authoring 

It’s time to start creating your course and for this, you will need an authoring tool. What’s that? An authoring tool helps you create a professional-looking course without having the knowledge of editing and programming. For example, Articulate 360 is an authoring tool that offers a lot of templates that you can simply customize according to your need and create an outstanding course with ease. You might also like their pre-built courses and lessons. There are many authoring tools in the market, choose the one that is beginner friendly and also within your budget. 

Get feedback and share the course 

Once you have created your course you can share it with some of your friends or the people you interviewed for understanding your audience. Get their feedback. Ask them what you can improve. People may not be able to tell you what you can improve immediately. In this case, you can provide them with some choices. 

Make improvements based on your feedback and share the course. You can choose a learning management system that is efficient and within your budget to share your course. Also when choosing the LMS make sure it is an LMS preferred by most people in your niche and it should also have good analytical features. 

Bottom line

Creating a course should be fun. Shed any burden you might have. There are many tools available today that can help you out in creating a course. However, knowing where to start and how to proceed is important. Following these steps will prove to be a great start for your amazing journey of sharing knowledge with the world.