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Top Tips for Creating Online Courses

Tips for Creating Online Courses

In the current era, training no longer has barriers, and knowledge becomes practically global. By using new technologies and especially the Internet, knowledge can be shared from one end of the world to the other in just a matter of seconds.

This reality has directly impacted education, where professors and universities now have a new tool to disseminate information: online courses.

Using different platforms and resources, you can create complete lessons or explanations for certain topics and even interactive modalities in which teachers and students explore a certain topic together. The possibilities are endless when designing courses in which to transmit information.

However, it is not enough to create these tools; it is necessary that students access them for transmission of knowledge to take place. And to achieve this, it is important to pay attention to the very creation of the courses, so that they manage to attract the attention of your target audience.

Would you like to create an online course? Do you dare to design a series of lessons to share what you know with the world? If so, you must take into account these eleven tips for your creation to be effective:

1. Choose the ideal platform for you

In some cases, the universities for which the professor works have specific platforms for disseminating online courses. If this is so, you only have to deal with the creation of contents and generic aspects.

But if this is not the case and you must take care of everything, or if you will not associate the course with the university and only bear your name, you must know the options that technology offers you. Platforms like Udemy or Moodle are the most recognized and used for this purpose. When it comes to the Internet, we almost always have more than one option to do something. And this is the case for creating and distributing online courses because there are various platforms and ways to distribute our content.

Another very good option is to upload the courses to YouTube. This might not sound very attractive if you are looking to make extra revenue, being that YouTube is free. But with patience and good content, you can start making money with YouTube monetization.

2. Pick Concrete themes and Determine what you can do

When we are beginning to consider ​​creating online courses, the first thing we should do is decide what we are going to teach. And for this, it is important, to be honest about our capabilities and limitations. Instead of betting on an extensive and poorly defined theme, look for a specific theme and a name for the course that does not have doubts about the information it will be disseminating.

Determining what we know how to do, and the level of knowledge we have in a certain area will allow us to set limits and take well-structured courses with good content.

3. Plan the contents

Before starting to write the specific contents that you will transmit, you must carry out planning that allows you to preview the contents and their interaction.

Create concept maps that allow you to manage the content you are going to transmit, and thus you can evaluate what you should add and what you could remove.

4. Attractive content

Once you plan what you will include and it is time to start writing the specific contents that you are going to teach, you must do your best to make them attractive, dynamic, and easy to understand.

We have likely tried to follow a tutorial, but we feel very lost in the process, and we even become discouraged by thinking that it is simply something very difficult to learn. But then we follow another that explains in detail, and we understand.

Therefore, it is important not to assume that people know certain things or show things without explaining where they come from. If it is necessary to assume that people know something, then make a list of the prior knowledge necessary to complete the course.

5. Allow participation

Students choose online courses because they want something unique from the traditional model where they are just listeners. If you design a course that replicates this outdated model, you will not have the success you are looking for.

The important thing is that you allow spaces for participation, debates, exchanges of opinions among the course members, and even create ways for them to comment on what they think of the course.

6. Set goals for your students

We often fail to achieve our goals, because we don’t know what those goals are; the same goes for your online course.

Your student will hardly be able to achieve the objectives proposed by your course if the expected results are not clear from the beginning.

Set clear and achievable goals and encourage your student to follow your lessons step by step to achieve the result you expect with success!

7. Multimedia content

Using images, videos, and graphics will make your course more attractive and allow students to stay focused on what you teach and are interested in following the course. If you only pass on theoretical knowledge, you will lose both their attention and their interest.

8. Simple access

Access to the course should be as simple as possible, it cannot have several stages or be too confusing, or you will lose potential users’ interest. To provide simplicity and clarity to any course, the most recommended is to place a content index that allows direct access to each of the topics it mentions.

9. Take care of the format

If you expect your students to download documents and read them, you cannot use formats that generate accessibility problems or require specific software to be used. The best thing will be to bet on the classics: HTML and PDF.

10. Teach with real projects

Another very common feeling when following a tutorial or course is to feel that you are understanding. Still, you are only learning the theory, and you are afraid of not knowing how to apply the knowledge in real life at the end of classes.

Teaching through real projects that give people the confidence to apply what they have learned can give them great satisfaction and give you a better reputation as an instructor.

It is also important to note that some courses focus on a single large project. The intention of this is not bad, but people could feel lost following a single project during a long course. Therefore, it is better to carry out smaller but exciting projects that require the knowledge learned.

11. Keep practicing and learning

Just because you’ve been teaching doesn’t mean you don’t need to learn new things or improve what you already know how to do well. There is always something to learn, and the area you learn would constantly be evolving.

Some very successful instructors at Udemy continue to teach things that many people want to learn. But what makes them different is that they have the knowledge and practice to teach this effectively.

Bonus tip

It is important to note here that if you are not a teacher at an institution and you are looking to create an online course, the trick is that you only create the course after you have sold it. You don’t produce a course into the blue, which then may be nobody buys, but first attract the participants for it. Because if no one buys your course, all the work was for nothing. By establishing a connection with individual customers, groups, and eBook buyers, you should already know exactly what your dream customers are interested in and what they want to buy from you! Use different advertising messages together with a rough outline of the course to sell it.