Step by step process of creating an online course

Gather and structure your knowledge

Now that you are determined to fuel your passion for teaching or create a side hustle, now you have to start your research and systematize all your knowledge you have.

You have to create your content for beginners, intermediate and advanced students so that students at every level can benefit from it.

There always be some students who are quick to learn and some will just need a little bit more time to understand. Include examples, puzzles, or queries to make the course more engaging and to help the students.

Just putting valuable knowledge is not going to make your course successful. What you need to do is create in a way that makes sense to students.

The content should make sense to be logically connected. Consider yourself as a student and write the content in that way, think about all the questions that your students might be having while ready each subject.

Do your research, you can check some popular and successful courses on how they have put the content, what materials they added to make it interesting.

There are many online courses available also online, some from those who are doing it for a long time.

Structure your course outline

After your research and gathering all your information regarding the subject of your course, the next step is to plan the outline of your course. 

Fist write all the ideas that you have for the topic subtopics and other content in one place.

Then start to structure the content with a logical flow from one topic to another.

Course outline template

Introduction

Main topic 1

• Subtopic 1
• Subtopic 2
• Subtopic 3
• Quiz/questions

Main topic 2

• Subtopic 1
• Subtopic 2
• Subtopic 3
• Quiz/questions

Main topic 3

• Subtopic 1
• Subtopic 2
• Subtopic 3
• Quiz/questions

Bonus

Course Quiz

This is just a template for how to structure and plan your content you can include or remove as you want. 

The goal is to make the course as much interesting and engaging as it can be.

But don’t worry it will always be an ongoing process don’t get stuck to make the content perfect, you can always improve it with time as you discover new things.

Plan the goals and objectives

Goals and objectives are like milestones for students to check what they learned or understood.

How to present the goals of your course?

In this course, you are going to learn…

The main theme of this course is…

Online course software or Platform

There are multiple online websites or platforms available to set up your course.

Websites like Udemy, Skillshare, Coursera are existing e-learning platforms. 

You can create your own online course using software like Teachable, LearnWorlds, Google Open Online

Both options have their own advantages and disadvantages. The existing platforms like Udemy already have a database of hundreds of thousands of students but there are many courses already available there.

By building online courses using software, you have to find students on your own but you have the flexibility to stand separate and unique from the crowd. 

Create your online course community

Creating an online course can only be successful when you allow your students to interact with you or with one another. 

You can create a private Facebook group and conduct a weekly Live session where students can ask questions and get answers either from you or from other students.

Test your strategy and improve

Building an online course is never a one time process, you have to continually improve your content and marketing strategy.

Take feedback from the students to know how can you improve your content more.

Learn from research what your competitors are doing. 

Implement different marketing strategies in your business and keep testing what works for you and whatnot.

It’s okay that your course is not perfect at first but what is not okay is that you are not consistent in providing great value to your students and improving your strategy with time.