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The online course industry has been growing steady over the past several years. Content creators are launching free and paid online courses to provide value and education for almost every subject imaginable.
Alyssa and I have worked with online entrepreneurs, bloggers, and best-selling authors to help them create engaging courses for their audiences. With our film expertise and experience in writing copy, we’ve been able to help walk clients through the process of building, filming and launching their own online course.
On today’s test drive, I’m going to talk about how to successfully launch an online course.
A few things we talk about on this episode:
- Who should create online courses?
- Common mistakes people make during their first online course launch
- How to be successful in making online courses
Links mentioned on this episode:
Thanks for Listening!
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Good overview. In my experience, people have the most trouble limiting themselves to a manageable amount on information. If you’re a blacksmith, you tend to think students MUST know how metal is mined, all the names of the exotic tools, and 25 different sources to purchase different kinds of coal. Once you start BUILDING the course, you find out it’s going to have 300 episodes, eight hours each. A key rule of courseware development: NOBODY PAYS YOU MONEY FOR STUFF YOU WRITE AND THEN CUT OUT AT THE END.
Start with a simple outline or “needs assessment”. What does a beginning blacksmith really need to know? Can you offer links and appendices that they can look to for more information? What are the key topics you will teach — and how will you assess learning? (Can range from “Did you like it?” to “100 multiple-choice questions show your work.”)
Completely agree, someone talking for 10 min to a camera is not learning (or effective learning). There needs to be some type of assessment, instructional design, chunking of information, reinforcement and adult learning principles built in. The eLearning industry went through this years back when the focus was only on multimedia and there was no change in behavior. If you have any great examples of Teachable courses that take these things into consideration I would love to hear about them.
We have our RV Entrepreneur School with text, audio, and video lessons across four different courses along with homework assignments and prompts. You can see the whole school here: therventrepreneur.teachable.com
These are some pretty good ones. I like that they are including guides, polls, and info-graphics. Often times “sneaky” training is much better than something you call a “course”. https://blog.elucidat.com/elearning-examples-2017/