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Creating an Online Course
Once you’ve gathered all the information to include in your online course, it’s time to structure it in a meaningful way.
One of the best ways to avoid writer’s block and to keep yourself on track is to create an outline for your online course.
In this post, we will go over all the steps you need to take to successfully create a course outline for an engaging, valuable and sellable online course.
It’s tempting to skip creating a course outline and jump straight into the developmental stage of content for your online course.
However, there are quite a few pitfalls to this approach such as:
Not only is creating a course outline beneficial for you but it will also benefit your students since they will consume information in a structured and meaningful way.
There may be a lot of sub-topics to cover within your online course. Creating an outline allows you to organize these sub-topics to create a flow that is engaging.
Furthermore, it also plays a role in helping you remember to add any critical information related to a certain sub-topic.
You’ll find that if you outline your course first, then actually writing content for your course will be much faster and more efficient.
Lastly, you can even use your course outline to market the different aspects of your course in your ad campaigns.
Your outline provides a clear picture of what you will provide in your course, so it’s a great source of course content to include within your marketing campaigns.
Before you actually start taking steps to make the course outline, you have to define your course’s goals and objectives first.
Think of objectives (or learning outcomes) as what your students will be able to do by the time they are at the end of the course.
Some other questions you can ask when developing your online course’s learning outcomes are:
It’s important to note that your learning outcomes are not something that you’re making just for yourself. They are something that will be included at the start of your online course.
Learning outcomes are important for students as well as they will give them a clear idea of what to expect from your online course.
Be sure to use student-centered writing when defining your learning outcomes. This can look like:
Once you have your learning outcomes, developing your course outline as well as actual content for your course will be a piece of cake.
When creating a course outline, it’s important to establish a hierarchy through which you’re going to structure your course.
Great course creators do this by using modules, lessons and topics.
You can consider modules to be chapters, these modules contain lessons and these lessons are further broken down into topics.
An example of this could be:
Course creation isn’t always this straightforward and sometimes, your course’s topic might not be big enough to warrant the use of topics.
In that case, you can also make an outline using just modules and lessons.
The great benefit of using this system is that for each new idea that you’re presenting within your course, you will have created a familiar system that is easy for your students to follow.
Furthermore, we talk constantly about providing content to your students in easily digestible chunks. This system lets you do exactly that.
The main reason for breaking down your course into modules, lessons and topics is to make your content more digestible.
However, if your course outline consists of 20 modules, each of which has 30 to 40 lessons, it’s going to overwhelm your students regardless.
You’re going to need to limit the number of modules, lessons and topics you’re going to provide to your students.
We recommend that you should not go above six modules for any given online course.
If you go for a higher number of modules, your course can definitely look overwhelming to your students.
You can then use those six (or fewer) modules and break them down into smaller lessons and even topics.
When it comes to lessons, we recommend that you should have anywhere between 4 to 12 lessons within each module.
The number of lessons you have within each module will determine just how deep you want to dig into each module and its content.
If you’re unsure of how detailed and comprehensive a certain module should be, you should refer back to your learning outcomes.
If you’re just starting out as an online course creator, we recommend that you keep your online courses limited to just modules and lessons.
If you feel that your course content is complex and needs a third level, then you can start adding topics within each lesson.
Once you have defined your modules and lessons (and topics if you’re utilizing them), you’ll have the “skeletal” structure of your outline.
At this step, you should look at the order of each module and lesson and see if anything needs reordering.
Some questions to ask yourself are:
All of these questions will help you determine what the proper flow of your course will be and whether or not your outline is structured to support that flow.
Once you have correctly determined the order of your modules, lessons and topics, you can move onto outlining your lessons.
Outlining lessons may seem tedious at first but it can actually save you a lot of time down the road when you’re writing content for it.
If you’re planning to do a live lecture via Skype or Zoom, these lesson outlines can be enough for you to just review before you give your lecture.
On the other hand, if you’re going to write a script for each lesson, then this outline can help out a lot when you’re writing it.
In order to effectively outline each lesson, you’ll have to think about:
Avoid adding too many historical facts or sources into your lessons.
The best lessons are the ones that give students actionable steps on how to solve a problem and then, immediately move forward.
One important thing you want to avoid while creating your online course is being “that” teacher.
You know the one. The one that immediately puts you to sleep with too much theory and information without any actionable steps or problem-solving.
It’s borderline-essential that a successful course is interactive and provides actionable steps on how to solve certain problems.
Thus, when you’re creating your course outline, it’s important to include two things within your lessons:
Learning resources can be a number of things such as extra readings, video tutorials, infographics or any other educational topic that you can find online related to your lesson.
Learning resources are a great way to supplement the information that you were on the fence about adding to your online course.
You want to keep your online course’s content concise and bite-sized. That can come at the cost of excluding certain information that could help your students out. You can add this information in the form of learning resources and links.
At the outline creation stage, you can add the links to these resources within the relevant lessons. In this way, you won’t forget to include them when you’re actually writing content for the course.
We’ve mentioned throughout this post about how your online course should be “interactive” but how exactly can you achieve that?
Well, including learning activities at the end of every lesson or module can be the perfect way of doing so.
Not only will it make your courses more engaging but it will also allow your students to test out their newly learned skills and promote knowledge retention.
It’s usually a good idea to include such an activity before you move onto a new batch of chapters that deal with different information.
It’s important to note that when you outline your course, you don’t need to create the entire activity at that point.
Just mention what it will be within the relevant lesson and then, you can compose it completely when you’re actually creating content for the online course.
We’ve mentioned throughout this post about how your online course should be “interactive” but how exactly can you achieve that?
Well, including learning activities at the end of every lesson or module can be the perfect way of doing so.
Not only will it make your courses more engaging but it will also allow your students to test out their newly learned skills and promote knowledge retention.
It’s usually a good idea to include such an activity before you move onto a new batch of chapters that deal with different information.
It’s important to note that when you outline your course, you don’t need to create the entire activity at that point.
Just mention what it will be within the relevant lesson and then, you can compose it completely when you’re actually creating content for the online course.
Microsoft Word is one of the most widely-used processors out there and you can easily utilize it to start outlining your course.
You can use their headings to signify modules and then have tables to represent each lesson and its respective content.
Here’s a quick example of how you can use tables to create outlines for your online courses:
You can probably judge just by this screenshot how much creating an outline will help you in writing meaningful content for your online course.
Microsoft Word is very easy to use and chances are that you’ve already been using it up to this point thanks to how popular it is.
Hence, it’s definitely a tool worth considering when developing outlines for online courses.
We also did a detailed review of Microsoft Word and how it can help you out as an online course creator that you can check out.
Google Docs works in almost the exact same way as Microsoft Word does.
Chances are that if you’ve used Microsoft Word, you’ll have no trouble picking up Google Docs as it has almost the same functions and even uses the same keystrokes/shortcuts.
While Microsoft Word may have more features than Google Docs, Google Docs’s features are still adequate enough for you to make outlines for online courses.
You can use Google Docs (as well as Microsoft Word) to create a table of contents once you’re done making the outline for your course as well.
The great thing about Google Docs is that it’s completely free and anyone with Google Chrome and a Gmail account can use it.
For more information, you can check out our comparison post between Google Docs and Microsoft Word to see which one’s better for online course creators.
Libre Office (formerly known as Open Office) is another great tool that emulates Microsoft Word but unlike Microsoft Word, is completely free.
While its interface is a bit overwhelming compared to Google Docs and Microsoft Word, it still provides the same amount of functionality that you can use to create outlines for your online courses.
You can check out our comprehensive review of LibreOffice to determine whether it’s right for you as an online course creator or not.
In the end, we just have to say that information gathering can be quite intimidating, so it’s important to not get overwhelmed and take things step-by-step.
Classify information that’s relevant and irrelevant using your course objectives, utilize different tools at your disposal to effectively gather unexplored content and finally, take the time to analyze and determine whether the information you’ve gathered is credible or not.
If you take all of these steps, you’re sure to have an abundance of knowledge and information to include within your online course.
Let us know how you gather information to make content for your online courses in the comments below.
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