You are busy. You might be a SME (subject matter expert) or an entrepreneur. You might be an educator or an employee at a startup company. No matter what your position is, you are an expert in your field. You want your knowledge and ideas shared with the world. Online courses and eLearning are all the rage in the interwebs right now.
How do you get started writing an online course?
The process of creating an online course is different for every situation. Here is a basic breakdown of the steps:
1. Determine your goal or objective. Your plan must be more than sharing your ideas with the world. What problem are you solving? How are your ideas helping your ideal customer? This stage might involve market research, user feedback or a more in-depth analysis of the need behind creating an online course.
2. Outline your ideas, thoughts, knowledge about the topic. Get it all out! This tends to be the most exciting part for a subject matter expert. This phase may take the form of articles, a notebook of scratched ideas, audio files or videos.
3. Gather some resources that common or well respected in your field. Website, books, peer-reviewed journals, etc. Have a list of these available on a Word doc, Google doc, or wherever makes sense for you.
4. Don't go it alone. Now that your ideas are down on paper (digital paper, perhaps), it is time to hire someone who can take your ideas and make them ready for learners. There are professionals out there (like me!) who design courses and trainings for a living. As an expert in how people learn, I take your content and make it learnable. Your designer will take the information from steps 1-3 and craft a plan of action. This stage usually included storyboards, scripts and media drafts.
5. Be prepared for some phone calls and emails to get information clarified. As the subject matter expert, you know your content best. You will also be part of the process of authorizing the proposed course designs. Once you have approved the course plan, we begin development. Sometimes I do that, sometimes others on my team complete this stage. Each developer is an expert at a certain software set.
6. Don't go anywhere! You are involved in the process of development. The developer will share their progress with you as we go along. You will want to check it out carefully to see if any changes should be made. You are also part of the testing process. We will have a prototype and alpha testing version for you to go through. Revisions are typically made during these stages.
7. Your course is ready for beta testing with your customers! During this stage, clients often offer the course for a reduced rate and collect survey information to see how students are reacting the the format structure, modalities, media, text, graphics, etc of the course.
8. We make any final changes you need based on student feedback and then produce the final version of the course.
Working through these steps with your course designer cannot guarantee market success put it puts you LIGHT YEARS ahead of the competition.
What are you waiting for? Contact eLearning Elevated today. We would love to help make your course succeed!
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