Online Course Creation Guide

You can’t start development your course if you don’t know the purpose and the reason why you are doing it. The first step is to define your goals, why do you need a course, what is making you think about a new course, which skills or knowledge you need your users to develop or achieve. The goals would give you the roadmap to create the strategies and the perfect content for your users and expectations.

Now that you have set your goals, you need to think about your audience. They are going to be the ones that are actually going to take the course. Either if you are planning to create training programs, or courses to acquire specific skills, you have to know your public. For online courses, broad topics are not good at all. You have to target a specific niche, that way your course can be relevant and attention-grabbing.

• Try to ask your stakeholders directly what are their expectations and learning goals.
• Identify their common needs, struggles or expectations.
• Build and design a course that answers or solves their struggles.

You already have your users’ goals, expectations, and struggles. You need to know how your Online Course can solve those needs. It’s time to take action and start researching your topic.

• Think about your course or topic as a roadmap for your learners to achieve their learning goals.
• Research and select a topic that helps your students or employees achieve the level of knowledge of skills required to keep improving as professionals.

Understanding how the training/course will be delivered is key to define the format and activities that you want to implement.

• Define the main objectives of your course, identify the number of modules or lessons (and hours) and determine the goals of each of them (you can ask yourself, what are the students going to learn from the course and from each lesson?).
• Is it going to be a physical class? then a ppt and some videos will suffice but if we are talking about online, the opportunity is huge. Other than just creating content, create gamified quizzes and course progression path as well.
• Any subject course needs a Subject Matter Expert (SME) to head the content section. It is essential that you have an SME for every content piece that gets created.
• Select the format and the level of interactivity of your course. Don’t forget that we live in a digital era where students don’t want to spend a lot of hours taking a course, so try to use their time and effort in the correct way to keep them engaged and motivated.
• If you’re planning to run your courses in a Learning Management System, make sure you all courses are SCORM, Tincan or AICC compliant , this way they can be used in any LMS without a problem.
• Use interactive videos , gamification strategies, augmented reality, video conferencing tools, like Webex LMS integration , social learning, and other learning strategies that really add dynamism to the course.
• Make sure your course is mobile responsive, so your users can access it anytime, anywhere.

In my opinion, this is the hardest step in your online course creation process. You would definitely need a group of experts or an eLearning development company that helps you develop your course based on your requirements and goals. As mentioned before, you have to make sure that your developers have a clear view of your modules, activities, and level of interactivity so you don’t miss anything. The success of this stage would depend on the level of planning that you have on the

This stage is where you start building your site or eCommerce chart to take live your eLearning course. Here is where you decide to use an Open Source LMS, On-premise LMS or a Cloud-based LMS to host your courses and create a custom course that really fits your learning requirements. Use dynamic and creative designs, corporate colors and images to create your brand and make it more remarkable. You have to understand that this step can take some time, but it is essential if you want to succeed. It can be tested, analyzed to make sure it works as planned.

Setting the price on your course would depend on many factors. First of all, you have to estimate the amount of money that you spent on the planning, development, and implementation. Also, keep in mind the level of expertise and level of interactivity. The eLearning market is also saturated and you can find a lot of competitors selling similar courses. Make sure you also offer competitive pricing so you would have better possibilities to sell your courses and get more and more students/users.

You have to establish how you are going to promote your self and your courses in the market. You have to build your course brand and also inspire confidence. Ask yourself, How do I want to be recognized? They don’t know you, either your experience and what you are trying to teach or sell them. You have to be sure that they understand your message, your product, and your services.

In every process or plan, it is almost mandatory to evaluate and analyze the impact, effectiveness, and success of your eLearning course. This is the stage that would tell you if all your efforts are worth it. All the stages of the eLearning process are evaluable and will throw different and important data to measure the quality, impact, teachability, and success of your course. Of course, the most remarkable evaluation that your content can get is the customer satisfaction and knowing that the users will start from scratch to get specific skills and improve their abilities after they accomplish the learning program.