How to Run Your Own Online Training Courses
Full Answer
In this article, you'll find an overview of the 10 major stages of online course creation:Pick the perfect course topic.Ensure your course idea has high market demand.Create Magnetic and Compelling Learning Outcomes.Select and Gather your Course Content.Structure Your Modules and Course Plan.More items...•
How to create an online course for freeThinkific: Software to create an online course for free. ... Canva: Free and low-cost design tool. ... Beaver Builder: affordable WordPress page builder. ... Camtasia: Cheap software for editing online course videos, with a free trial. ... Vimeo: Free video hosting.More items...•
How to create an online courseChoose the right subject matter.Test your idea.Research the topic extensively.Write a course outline.Create the course content.Bring your course online.Sell your online course.Market your content.More items...•
Tips for Taking Online ClassesTreat an online course like a “real” course. ... Hold yourself accountable. ... Practice time management. ... Create a regular study space and stay organized. ... Eliminate distractions. ... Figure Out How You Learn Best. ... Actively participate. ... Leverage your network.
It can cost anywhere from $200 to $10,000 to create an online course. The main source of expenses is the labor involved, followed by the equipment and software. If you are creating the online course yourself and not paying someone else to do it, this means that other than your time there are very few expenses involved.
Steps to building an eLearning websiteValidate your idea. To properly validate your idea you have to look at the numbers. ... Define your niche. Think about the courses you will offer. ... Choose a business model. ... Implement must-have features. ... Choose the development approach. ... Engage good educators.
Are Online Courses Profitable? Yes, they are. Online courses offer one of the best business models to digital entrepreneurs. The demand is rising and people are more than willing to pay for them, and they are one of the top ways to make money online.
Tips for Introducing Yourself in an Online CourseYour name and preferred pronouns. Your name will be visible on your post, but if there's something you prefer to be called, let others know.The degree you're pursuing. Why did you choose this degree and/or concentration? What are your long-term goals?
How to Create an Awesome Online Course in 2022Identify the Opportunity.Validate Your Course.Outline Your Course.Create Your Online Course.Find Your First Batch of Students.Launch Your Online Course.Build Your Community.Sell Your Online Course.More items...•
How to motivate students in the online learning environmentMake Your Class Interactive. The simplest way to check if your class is actually listening, is to ask them questions. ... Add Quizzes & Challenges to Your Online Lessons. Everyone loves a pop quiz… ... Encourage Collaboration. ... Give Your Students A Say.
Create a schedule and manage your time wisely. Keep a semester and a weekly calendar. ... Stay organized and be thorough. Have a designated study space that is free of distractions so you can focus on your work. ... Remain engaged throughout the whole course. ... Take care of yourself. ... Know where to turn for help.
Flexibility and convenience are two of the great benefits of online learning, however students have to have discipline enough to make time to study, complete coursework, and participate in discussions and groups. Learners need to plan to commit 6 – 9 hours per week per three-credit class.
How to Host Online Classes and LecturesYouTube Live. ... Google Meet. ... When it comes to video conferencing and webinar software, Zoom is very well-known. ... ClickMeeting is another option for online teaching.
You can seamlessly offer a free trial with your subscription pricing options. Now students can get a sneak peek of your course for a limited time before being billed. On your check out page, students will see your designated free trial period—we leave that part up to you.
There are many online course platforms that you can use to build and sell courses. This includes Teachable, Thinkific, Kajabi, Udemy, etc. You can use any of them alongside your WordPress website. Depending on your needs, these platforms may offer an easier online course creation solution.
Let's take a look at how you can create an online course for free using WordPress in seven simple steps:Download and Install the LearnPress Plugin.Create a New Course.Configure the Course Settings.Add the Lessons to Your Course.Create Quizzes.Link the Lessons and Quizzes to the Course.More items...•
One way to build an e-course directly using a Learning Management System (LMS) like LearnWorlds, Moodle or Blackboard. With these platforms, you ca...
A challenge course format usually requires you to release the content in intervals. You can create a welcome section with information about the cha...
A private course in LearnWorlds is not accessible to anyone either for free or paid. They are hidden courses that the admin has to give access to....
Millennials are used to highly engaging content, making their attention span shorter and more challenging to educators to teach. To make an engagin...
How to create video courses? Before creating a video course, you need to plan and prepare an outline. Think of the setup, the shooting place, and t...
LearnWorlds is the best modern course platform to create ecourses. It is an all-in-one tool for elearning businesses and solo creators alike. With...
A profitable online course needs research and deliberation. Be sure that you first start building an audience before creating an online course. Ask...
There is no one way to write a new course. All you need is patience, imagination, and a credible eLearning platform to help you put it together. Mo...
It depends on how much material you have that is ready-made. If all you have are PDFs and videos stored and want to upload content, create some qui...
Again, depending on whether you have created the media you will use, the course creation may cost from zero (except the learning platform charges)...
If all you have are PDFs and videos stored and want to upload content, create some quizzes, a certificate, and a landing page, then a week is more than enough to create an online course if you work two hours a day on it.
There is no one way to write a new course. All you need is patience, imagination, and a credible eLearning platform to help you put it together. Most of all, if you love the field of your expertise, everything will come into place. In this article, you will learn everything you need to know about how to create a successful online course.
Demonstration courses consist of a series of videos where an instructor demonstrates specific skills to students online. Workshop courses usually fall in arts & crafts, painting, sewing, fitness, content creation, anything that shows the instructor demonstrating something new that students try to imitate through observation.
Mini-courses are short to consume summaries (teasers) of a full-sized course. Like presell and orientation courses, they serve as teasers that make students enroll in a course. However, in contrast to the other two categories, Mini-courses provide real educational value: A full summary of what will be taught in the full-sized course .
The whole elearning market is expected to exceed $300 Billion by 2025, and that includes both individuals and corporations spending more and more into online learning. There has never been a better time to join the growing industry of eLearning. If playback doesn't begin shortly, try restarting your device.
Besides, you already have the people interested in following you. You can easily record and sell online speeches and workshops; you have already been doing. Turn your training into a profitable online course!
Pre-selling your course proves that there is demand and helps you build up a list of potential customers who would then buy at launch.
FAQs are a staple for online course sales pages because they work. Having them neutralizes fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
Show what’s included in your course by covering what each section offers and how learners will benefit from them. And that’s the key. Identifying benefits derived from learning outcomes will help prospects quickly appreciate the value of your course. Use bullets with benefits for each part of your course. Also, include images of your course content to give prospects an idea of what they are getting.
Identifying benefits derived from learning outcomes will help prospects quickly appreciate the value of your course. Use bullets with benefits for each part of your course. Also, include images of your course content to give prospects an idea of what they are getting.
The great news about most platforms is that they offer insights on audiences. For example, on Facebook, you can tell where your audience is located, what interests they have, and more. Leverage this information to create strong ads that attract prospects.
Affiliate programs aren't difficult to set up either. If your course is on a platform like Udemy, Teachable, or Kajabi, you have automatic access to an affiliate suite of tools These tools may include an affiliate dashboard for tracking sales, traffic, and payouts.
The topic for your online course should be either a subject that you’re already knowledgeable about or are willing to invest in learning thoroughly. Either way, you need to be passionate about the subject.
Now is the time to develop the curriculum for your online course. On a piece of paper, write down a list of the different lessons you plan on teaching online. Within each lesson, break it down to the main topics you want to cover. Go in a logical order and try to make your ideas evolve naturally from one to the other , to ensure a smooth and frictionless learning process.
Having competition means that people find the topic relevant and helpful for them. It’s also a good idea to create content that can comfortably fit into an existing, tried-and-tested space.
If you already have professional experience with your course topic, it’s likely that you’ve put together content about it in the past. Have you ever written a blog post or created a webinar about the subject? Maybe you host a podcast or run a YouTube channel for your business in which you’ve discussed similar themes? If so, go back to these materials. Repurposing existing content into your online course will help get you started and save a lot of valuable time.
Ask a group of friends, as well as your existing audience, what they think of the subject you had in mind. Test it out by sharing polls or online forms for your audience to fill out. You can make a short tutorial first, and monitor its performance. Then, follow up on the tutorial on social media or via email marketing campaigns, asking your audience if this type of material is something they’re interested in seeing more of.
In order to test your idea, use a landing page builder to create a page for your upcoming online course. Although you haven’t created the course just yet, you already know what it’s going to be about. Include a concise description of the course explaining what people can expect to learn and add eye-catching imagery to further reflect the concept. Check out these fully customizable landing page templates to use as a starting point.
Competitor prices: Start by doing a quick audit to determine the average course price on your topic. While the prices can fluctuate depending on how much of an expert the course instructor is, try to get a sense of what the going market rate is for reference.
An easy way to make online courses more engaging is to stimulate the student visually. This means pictures and videos. The simplest method of using picture and videos in an online course would be constructing your online class more like a PowerPoint presentation:
One of the most important components of creating an online course is setting a learning goal for the course . However, there’s more to it. Every online course consists of various sections, and each individual section also needs to have a clear learning goal.
Which means you need to get your knowledge together.
One way to keep your students engaged is to provide an early return on their investment. If a student feels they’ve learned something just from the first module alone, they’re a lot more likely to stick around. Nothing gets someone down faster than them feeling stupid or unproductive, which is very easy to do in a learning environment. Give them feedback, and an ongoing sense of accomplishment, and they’ll stick around.
The target audience is the group of people to whom you are writing your course.
Ideally, you should have demonstrable expertise on the subject you are teaching. That could be either by education or practical knowledge on the subject. Having real qualifications to show to your students makes a big difference in establishing trustworthiness for yourself.
It’s crucial that you decide on a specific course subject in the beginning phase of creating your online course. Be as specific as possible.
Identify the pain points that they’re struggling with. Find out where they’re getting stuck finding a solution to the problem your online course helps resolve. This will help you clearly define whether your online course idea will benefit them. Ask for examples of courses and training material that they love.
Building an online course requires you to make a shift from the more creative thinking and planning of content creation to technical know-how and patient work integrating systems in your tech stack and troubleshooting issues.
Finding the right LMS theme for your online course website means that you need to be clear on what kind of layout you want, how many menus you’ll be using, whether you’re hosting videos or just written content, etc.
On the negative side, running a beta release on a hosted platform means you’ll likely have to start from scratch again with a migration to an alternative LMS solution when you start to experience limitations in your growth and the flexibility needed to deliver a great user experience.
That’s why many online course builders and membership site owners recommend a limited release ( often called a “beta” release) before you do an official launch of your online course to potential course participants, especially if this is your first course.
On the plus side, a hosted platform will let you have the course up and running quickly so you can minimize the investment spent in setting it all up.
You could even lose revenue if you’re not able to deliver access or sell online courses during this downtime. Another important consideration when choosing a hosted solution to sell online courses is that you’ll most likely have to build and host your main website somewhere else.
You can host your own online courses by hiring a website designer to build a customized ecommerce website. Another option is to use a course management system -- such as those offered by Udemy, Odijoo and Litmos -- to host your courses. These platforms eliminate the need for website design or secure payment collection. Instead, these systems collect the course fees for you and send you a payment, taking a small fee to pay for their services.
Promote each course by focusing on what students learn. Describe real benefits of taking the course. Explain, for example, how completing the course will enable people to improve their lives or businesses. Post information about your class on social media sites, your blog and on any pertinent forums in which you participate. Ask other bloggers to mention your class. If you maintain an email list of prospective buyers, invite them to take the course.
While the concept and reasoning behind building an online course is simple, the process often isn't. It's more than just uploading a video: it requires you to build out a course curriculum, develop assignments (if you want), design the course pages, promote the course, and more.
For this piece, we only considered platforms for building and selling an online course, which means we did not consider learning management systems (LMS). While the terms are often used interchangeably, LMS software is generally used either in a school setting or to help companies train their customers and employees. The platforms covered below, on the other hand, are designed for businesses and individual creators to earn money by selling their courses.
Instead of favoring final outcomes, Skillshare encourages students to share their progress, garner feedback, and tweak their work accordingly—which is perfect for the creative topics you'll be teaching.
Free or premium, Skillshare classes have three major moving parts: video lessons, a project, and community discussion. Each class includes 20-60 minutes of video, broken down into 2-5-minute lessons. The practical project then ensures hands-on experience. For instance, a social media class project might require students to promote their Instagram account, or a writing class might require students to draft a pitch. Finally, the community portion of a class allows students to post their work.
Why launch your first course on Udemy? Because the platform offers loads of support for creating and marketing a course. For example, if you're not sure if your video lessons are up to snuff, you can submit a sample for review and get feedback on video and audio, along with suggestions for equipment. And for tutorials on planning a course, filming your first video, and related topics, Udemy offers the Teach Hub with tips and tricks.
There are two parts to creating a course on Thinkific: course material and landing page. To get started, choose from the following templates: pre-sell, mini-course, flagship course, membership resource library, and webinar replay. Unlike other course builders, where you start with a blank slate, Thinkific templates provide helpful cues and tips to build a valuable course. Apart from video lessons, the templates are pre-populated with sample quizzes, downloads, surveys, and instructor messages, at regular intervals throughout the course. Add or remove content as you see fit, or follow the template as is.
To create a paid course on Udemy, you first have to apply to become a premium instructor. Once approved, you'll see a series of easy-to-follow steps to help you create your first course. As you plan course content, keep in mind that all courses need at least 30 minutes of video and five lectures.
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