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Creating an Online Course
So, you’ve finished compiling all the content you’ve written as well as recorded over the past few weeks or months for your online course.
Before publishing it online and starting marketing efforts, it’s important that you take a step back and refine it thoroughly at least once.
In this post, we’ll go over everything you need to check and refine to make your online course perfect to be published online.
Before you can call your online course finished, it’s important to go over it thoroughly to ensure every single aspect of it is perfect, professional and has no errors.
Naturally, the first thing you should always do is to go over your project in its entirety as any of your potential students would.
This may draw you to find typos, errors, grammatical mistakes, etc. Keep an eye out for them when traversing your project and fix them accordingly.
In addition to typos and grammatical errors, there are other more subtle inadequacies that you need to be on the lookout for as well.
Let’s talk about them:
We already mentioned typos and grammatical errors but those are only minor mistakes that you need to fix.
There are other things that you need to be more aware of and ensure that your online course is free of.
Firstly, we mentioned in our content writing section how every phrase or sentence within your written content needs to be concise and bite-sized.
Hence, you should go through your online course keeping this in mind. If you find a sentence at any point that could be phrased more concisely, you should change it.
Also, keep in mind any points within your online course’s written content where you may find yourself less engaged or inattentive.
These are identifiers that your content could be more engaging and thus, you should take steps to make it so.
You can do this by:
If you’ve recorded audio files that play alongside your online course, it’s important that you listen to all of them thoroughly for any mistakes.
You will have performed some sort of noise reduction techniques to your narration files so, it’s important to check whether or not they’ve been properly cleaned up or not.
When listening to your audio files, you should be on the lookout for:
You can either fix any mistakes as you identify them but we feel a much more effective method is to listen to all of your audio files and note down every error you find.
A simple way to do this is to create a table with three columns in a text formatting tool or just on a piece of paper.
The first column would represent the file name, the second one would represent the time-stamp where the error occurred and the third column would be a short phrase or sentence describing the error.
Finally, the next stage is to fix any errors that your online course videos may have (if applicable).
Reviewing videos is definitely the most difficult of the three so we’ve made a short list of errors that you should be on the lookout for:
Canva and Powerpoint are just two options of presentation programs through which you could have created your online course slides.
Both of these programs are great for creating slides but another thing you can do with them is to go back and refine the art style or aesthetic of your online course.
When you make personal friends and peers go through your online course, make sure to ask them about whether they think the aesthetic of the course is up-to-date or not.
Trust us when we say that aesthetics are much more important to an online course’s success than you’d think.
It can be a good idea to polish your online course by making its aesthetics more elegant.
Gyazo is screenshot software that you can download for free on Windows, Mac or Linux.
You can use it to add finishing touches in the form of any screenshots that you may have forgotten to add when creating your online course.
Lightshot is similar to Gyazo in that it’s used mainly for taking screenshots.
One unique feature that it has is scroll capturing. This means that you can capture the full length of a certain page even if it doesn’t fit your screen.
Both Gyazo and Lightshot have hotkey bindings which make taking screenshots a breeze.
One final thing you can do to add a polished touch to your online course is to add music to your audio narration.
This is something that should be done with care as it can distract from your audio narration if not done correctly.
We’ve gone over the basics of adding audio using Audacity that you can check out.
We’ve detailed all the techniques needed for you to make the finishing touches to your online course and make it class-ready.
If you’ve followed everything detailed in this post, you should be left with an online course that’s ready to upload either onto your own website or onto an online course platform.
In the end, we must say that you definitely want to review it thoroughly once it’s finished and should not be hasty with uploading it to the internet.
An online course filled with mistakes and typos is never going to gain popularity or a loyal customer base.
Helping you make passive income by creating, managing, selling and scaling online courses.
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