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Planning and preparing a new e-course
I have been planning my new course now for the last two weeks and the thought occurred to me that some of you may also be planning a new or even a first course and are wondering where do you start? My first course, is a very long course. Over 7 hours of video on Excel. If you know anything about Excel, you will know that there are so many function and formula and I tried to fit as many into one course as possible. A comprehensive course. I didn’t do much planning, I wrote examples, and then recorded these examples with a screen capture software. I was then left with all of these videos, and no flow or structure, which I then had to go back and prepare. This meant that I was left with gaps to cover the flow and material that required editing. My approach now is rather different, my approach is structured in the following way:
Select a course subject
Obviously there is no point in writing a course on a subject you know nothing about. You must have expertise to create a good course, and having a passions for the subject will give you a natural desire to share what you love and know
Research
Research, and research again. Read books, blogs and articles on the topic, watch videos on YouTube and when you have done researching, Ask. Ask for advice, ask peers what they would like to learn, if you have existing student, ask them what they would like to in a course. Finally research some more. Look at other online educators that cover the same subject, look at the topics they cover, the duration of the course, the delivery of the course and the price!
Select course topic
You are now ready to select a course topic. If you are an expert and have a passion for Marketing, your subject will obviously be Marketing. But you don’t want to overload your student or skim on the information you have given, so you will need to narrow this down and select a topic. My subject is Excel and the course I am currently planning is Building Dashboards. If marketing was my area, I might select SEO as my topic, or How to market your online course!
Other decisions
Having selected a topic, you need to make some commercial decisions. Is this course an Intro level course on the topic and should you give it away free? An intro level course will be rather short and should leave the student hungry to learn more. Or, is the course a more comprehensive course, longer and very detailed? This will help you decide your price point. It would be a good idea to now decide on the learning objective and outcomes for your course. Maybe even a mind map.
Course delivery
Before you write your e-course, you should decide how this course should be delivered, or presented. As I am teaching Excel, there is no point in me producing videos of me giving a lecture on Excel, without showing what I am actually doing in Excel. However, teaching marketing, adding videos of me, presenting a talk or lecture could work well. Could you use animation type videos for case studies? Power Point, talking heads, screen capture? When considering this, think about the leaner, and how you can re-inforce the learning by adding tests, notes, additional reading material and so forth.
Writing your e-course
When you begin to write the course, first write headings to ensure the material will flow. If your course is not structured well, the learners will be unhappy and drop-out rates will be substantially higher. So, ensure that your course has a structure and a logical flow. Once I have my headings, I tend to write a student manual, which is available for download in the course. Teaching Excel requires workbooks for the students to practice along with, so I write each section of the course by noting step by step how I prepared the solved workbook, taking screen captures for the manual as I go along. From this, I then write my script, if needed. As a first timer I would highly recommend writing a script. With the passion you have, you can probably talk for hours on the topic, but you need to keep focused on the learning objectives. Writing a script will help with this.
My first course, 7 hours, is way too long, and although I took a backwards approach, by not establishing the structure at the start, the course has been successful in terms of numbers. I did not get the price point I wanted, however I did get a niche market, as I directed my sales to Accountants in Ireland that required CPD, and gained CPD accreditation for the course. For this reason, I produced a second course of the same length for the same market when Excel 2013 was launched, but with my established brand in this market, I achieved a better price point for this course.
I am now producing much shorter Excel courses and I find that the completion rate on these courses is higher that on the long courses. Cover one area of your subject well, leave the learner impressed with you and your content, and leave them with excitement about learning other topics on your subject. You will then be ready to plan your next e-course.
NLN, P. (2015) Planning and Preparing an E Course. The Excel Club. [Blog-site]. Retrieved from https://www.becominganonlinetrainer.wordpress.com/my-courses/
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