12 Step-by-Step Points to Write Your First Online Course (Part I)
How To Create An Ecourse 1. Decide on a topic 2. Create solid learning outcomes. 3. Organize your content. 4. Decide on delivery media for your lessons. 5. Create the ecourse content. 6. Get your course on your preferred platform. 7. Determine the right price for your ecourse. 8. Launch and market your course.
The idea of writing all the content out for your course might be intimidating or overwhelming, so maybe instead you just want to continue adding bullets and sub-bullet points to your outline to get more specific with your information.
Organize your content. For the flow of your ecourse to go smoothly, it’s highly recommended that you organize your content in a logical manner. Start with a simple bullet list for your subtopics. Then, flesh out these subtopics by writing down points and questions that belong under those subtopics that you want to discuss.
12 Step-by-Step Points to Write Your First Online Course (Part I) 1 1. Choose a Topic. Your first step in creating an online course is to choose a topic to teach. This should ideally be: 2 2. Pick a Platform to Deliver. 3 3. Write Your Course. 4 4. Edit for Readability. 5 5. Add Extras. More items
The following are tips for writing a course description:The course description should be no longer than 100 words.Write from a student-centered perspective.Use present tense and active voice.Use clear and simple sentence structure and language.Use gender neutral language.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...•
To design an effective course, you need to:Consider timing and logistics.Recognize who your students are.Identify the situational constraints.Articulate your learning objectives.Identify potential assessments.Identify appropriate instructional strategies.Plan your course content and schedule.
An ecourse, also called an online course, is any course taught online instead of in-person. Many ecourses are pre-recorded, but can also include many other components that create an engaging learning experience outside of a traditional classroom environment: Live online sessions. Discussion boards.
Go to Manage Learning Content.Select Courses.Click on a specific course in the Course Overview.You will now be in the Course Curriculum area of the Course Builder.On the left-hand side, click Add Lesson.Select PDF.Name the Lesson Title as desired.More items...
How to Write a Course DescriptionBe student-centered, rather than teacher-centered or course-centered.Use brief, outcomes-based, descriptive phrases that begin with an imperative or active verb (e.g., design, create, plan, analyze)Be clear, concise, and easy to understand (< 80 words)More items...
Course Description Guidelines should be no longer than 125 words. should begin most sentences with a verb. should be student-centered and explain how the reader would benefit from the course. should be written in the present tense and active voice.
The course outline is defined for purposes of Middle States Accreditation as the official, approved document that outlines what students are expected to learn in a course and what they can expect in the way of instructional methods, activities, assignments and grading methods.
Any informational material that is required for participation or understanding content such as assigned readings, video recordings, exams, and any other material needed for learning. Copyright © 2022 UC Regents; all rights reserved.
E-learning is “utilizing electronic technologies to access educational curriculum outside of a traditional classroom,” according to North Carolina's eLearning education initiative. E-learning courses or programs are generally based online.
E-Learning is learning utilizing electronic technologies to access educational curriculum outside of a traditional classroom. In most cases, it refers to a course, program or degree delivered completely online. Discover the world's research. 700k+ research projects Join for free.
According to the oxford dictionary, compound adjectives should be hyphenated. In more simple terms, compound adjectives are words that use an adjective (electronic) and a noun (learning). So, technically, e-learning is the correct spelling.
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...•
To get you started, here are 7 proven ways to make money selling courses online.Charge up front. ... Offer the course for free, then charge for certification. ... Charge a subscription. ... Use a tiered payment system. ... Pre-sell your course. ... Sell your online course for free—then funnel it into a product or service.More items...•
A mistake that instructors sometimes make is pricing their ecourses based on their competitors. What they do is check out the competition, take stock of the prices, and then either undercut their prices, average out the prices and charge that amount, or charge more than the most expensive ecourse.
Examples of online course marketplaces include Udemy, Lynda, and SkillShare. Third-party hosted platforms are platforms that allow you to create, manage, and market your ecourses in a single place on a site that’s hosted outside of your website.
It can actually be an improvement because being on video allows you to intersperse visual elements, such as images and written content, with your presence and personality. With video, you can experiment with being on-screen or off-screen. Being on-screen allows your students to connect and engage with you.
Student experience#N#Given the learning outcomes you’ve set and the delivery medium you’ve chosen, think about how to give your students the best possible experience they can have. That means considering how your students will best learn your lessons as well as how best to keep their attention.
When you’re comfortable that you’ve made that ecourse the best it can be, then you can create a slightly more complicated ecourse, say 4 to 6 hours long, costing $500 or less.
There are three main delivery media for your ecourse lessons, namely video, audio, and written/textual content. Let’s take a closer look at each one so you can decide which one (s) are right for you and your ecourse.
The price of your ecourse impacts how well you’re going to sell the ecourse, the type of audience it will attract, the amount of instruction and quality of support you can give your students, and the amount of profit you can earn from it.
Whether it’s for an ecourse or not, the best subject matter will be something:
So your ecourse content is excellent and all but you can’t keep people hooked.
The quality of the website that hosts your e-course is just as important as the quality of your e-course itself.
Online classes have continuously grown in popularity in recent years. Did you know that the industry is even expected to triple in not even 5 years?
Elearning is here to stay. Yes, creating an ecourse is a good way to bring in money (if you do it right). But it’s also the best way to bring out your lesson to the world.
In a world of busy professionals, people need to understand why your eLearning course will help them get from point A to point B. This means you need to inform your audience what skills they will learn, how they will learn them, and why these skills are worth learning.
While deciding how to write an eLearning course you should investigate your target audience. Knowing your audience is one of the cardinal rules of writing an effective eLearning course. The more you know about your audience, the easier it becomes to shape your message in a way that resonates most with them.
Attention span is a finite resource and your audience is running out of it. You probably already know about the famous study from Microsoft about humans having an attention span of fewer than 8 seconds.
Most eLearning courses jump from one theme to another – almost as if they’ve been stitched together haphazardly from two distinct pieces of ideas. They have shared very few cohesive themes and almost no connecting information.
No matter how technical or complex your course, when you are asking yourself how to write an eLearning course it is very important to make it readable and user-friendly. After all, comprehension is key for anyone hoping to write an eLearning course.
Good writing is about making your sentences more reader-centered and concise. In the same vein, your eLearning course should engage the reader instead of boring them out of their minds. If your text feels drawn-out and monotonous, it will turn your readers away.
Try to brainstorm ideas for fun and clever titles that are eye-catching and memorable. The title should provide a structure for your course. It is worth pointing out that most people who write an eLearning course tend to skim the content in search of information. Titles are a great way of giving students a heads up about what’s coming up.
A good place to start is to think about needs. First, consider the needs of the people who’ve asked you to create the eLearning course. This should be done to make sure that a course is actually necessary to achieve their goal. Sometimes it’s best not to create a course at all.
The first thing beginners usually mix up is content and platform. A platform is also called Learning Management System (LMS), Learning Experience Platform (LXP) and other names.
Ok, we have now covered what an LMS (platform) is and how to select it if you need to, and, to be honest, in 9 cases out of 10, your organization already will have an LMS (platform), be it Moodle or any other, so you can manage users, and see their progress.
So, the question was how to develop e-learning more affordably, faster and allow non-technical developers to participate in the process? Welcome to the world of authoring tools.
Before we go further I wanted to clarify one more thing regarding e-learning content – Responsive courses. What the heck is that? Well, it’s quite easy actually. Historically, I mean 10-15 years ago, when we were developing e-learning content for usage on computers only, everything was very simple.
Returning to our discussion on how to build e-learning, building from scratch sounded fun, if you are a techie, using authoring tools, much easier, but still quite a lot of effort.
Once you know how your eLearning course will be produced and where it will be hosted, it’s time to start working on content.
Wistia basically creates a white label media player for you which allows you to host your videos, customize your player overlay and upload custom thumbnail images to your videos. The result is something that appears a bit more modern and high-quality than the YouTube player.
They can get a bad rap because some people are sleaze-balls and make crappy things in life. But the same thing can be said about terrible websites, spammy e-books, and blogs with 47 email capture popups.
They can edit the PDFs digitally, or they can print out the resources and fill them out that way. This is also the point where I start to think about things like on-boarding. On-boarding simply refers to the process of getting new users (students) integrated into your existing system (course.)
The result is something that appears a bit more modern and high-quality than the YouTube player. Wistia is a paid service, however, so if you’re planning to keep your e-course at a lower price point or if you’re trying to keep costs low, the free YouTube hosting route is certainly a viable option.
If you’re not comfortable in front of a camera or recording your voice, you can always try a written-only course. You could put your course content in daily emails, slide presentations or a series of PDFs. While you may lose a little of that personal connection with your students, the time and money investment are certainly much lower than going the audio/video route, so if you’re on a tight budget, written-only is a good place to start.
E-courses are NOT a get rich quick scheme. They take a lot of work to put together, and there are no revenue guarantees. HOWEVER, if you enjoy teaching and sharing your gifts with others on a one-to-many scale, e-courses could be an excellent way for you to create real revenue doing something you love.
Forbes reports that the average Udemy instructor makes about $7,000 per course , but the range is wide. Some might make $60 a year and others in the six figures.
1. Choose a Topic. Your first step in creating an online course is to choose a topic to teach. This should ideally be: 1a. A Topic You Understand Well. If you are going to teach others, you need to understand the topic inside and out.
Some things to keep in mind as you're writing the course. The person taking the course doesn't know what you know. He or she is a beginner, so start at the beginning. Make a glossary of terms and define them. Make sure you also define them in the course the first time you mention them.
Once you've chosen a platform, it will be easier to write your course, because you'll know what format you need to create the course in. For example, if you're planning to offer a video course, then you'll need to write a script to follow and practice recording lessons.
Lori Soard has been working as a freelance writer and editor since 1996. She has a bachelor's in English Education and a PhD in Journalism. Her articles have appeared in newspapers, magazines, online and she's had several books published. Since 1997, she has worked as a web designer and promoter for authors and small businesses. She even worked for a short time ranking websites for a popular search engine and studying in-depth SEO tactics for a number of clients. She enjoys hearing from her readers.
Writing an online course isn't hard, but writing an online course that impacts people is challenging. By paying attention to all the elements that make up an excellent class, you can develop a reputation as a good instructor. Not only will your students love you, but they'll recommend you to others.
Getting the word out about your online course isn't going to be easy or happen quickly. It's a good idea to ask for help. Word of mouth is one of the best and cheapest forms of advertisement.
Gender. On average, the gender make-up for MOOCs is 53% female and 47% male. However, in some subjects such as engineering courses, the ratio can shift heavily, with up to 85% of students being male. Level of education. The majority of online course students are highly educated with a Bachelor’s degree or higher.
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.
The target audience is the group of people to whom you are writing your course.
Remember, teaching is more than just imparting knowledge. Never in human history has so much knowledge been so accessible to anyone with such a low barrier for entry. Just on your phone, you can bring up a wealth of information about Nuclear Physics with just a few keystrokes. Fifty years ago, you’d have to break out an encyclopedia or a book dedicated to the subject, and it’d be just as much work to get another point of view on the same topic.
That being said, you don’t need to create all of the content for your online course before you start selling it. It’s always better to start off with a smaller batch of content, as this will allow you to take in feedback from your students and make improvements accordingly.
To conclude the hyphen debate, the grammatically correct way to write “e-learning” is with a hyphen. However, “elearning”, without a hyphen, is widely used, and I expect to see it increase in popularity, and one day become accepted as grammatically correct.
The first piece to unravel is whether the constructed word (“e” “learning” is a constructed word for electronic learning, similar to email and e-commerce) should or should not have a hyphen. According to the Oxford dictionary, the term is “e-learning – learning conducted via electronic media, typically on the Internet” with a hyphen.
Traditionally, the term “e-mail” should have a hyphen, but today most people write “email”. According to Mary Morel from onlinegrammar.com, “Hyphens are often used when new words are invented out of existing words.