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• Contents

Introduction

Creating online courses does not require huge investment in time or money. Although they certainly can cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce, with professional video editing and branding, they don't have to. In fact, my favorite way to create and launch a course is with my future students!

This follows agile design principles (check out the agile manifesto here). The goal is developing rapidly, with frequent input from key stakeholders, not building so much behind-the-scenes that what you’re working on becomes out-of-date or out of touch with what your audience and potential future students actually need. Here’s a breakdown on how I love launching and creating courses.

Related Pivot Podcast Episode

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4Tb3EtvE4F9NRIgwbRfjiP

Pre-Course: Initial Design and Vision

• Survey your audience to find out what their biggest challenges and goals are
  • Update the survey settings to send each participant a copy of their responses; this will help them benchmark and celebrate progress when they take the post-survey.
  • Pre-surveys are also a learning tool, and create initial sparks for each participant about what their biggest challenges are, and what support would be most helpful.
• Narrow in on topic and ideal course participant. This can go beyond demographics (age, location) and also cover psychographics:
  • How do they think?
  • What values are important to them?
  • What are their biggest challenges?
  • Where else do they “hang out” online?
• Identify Know / Feel / Do / Resources and create an outline. What do you want participants to know upon completing your course? How do you want them to feel? What do you want them to do? What resources do you want them to check out? Answer these for the following sections (see template below):
  • Entire course
  • 3-4 Major sections within the course
  • Each lesson within the 3-4 major sections
• Create a content delivery schedule for your course
  • For example, for a 5-day live course: 4 days of content, 1 day of Q&A (people don’t have an attention span for much more than this)
• Identify course delivery program and complementary applications.
  • For my own courses, I use Kajabi for housing the course and sending email notifications.

Before Enrollment

• Create the course overview page and set the dates if the course will run live.
  • I recommend a live version to start, so you can build the course with direct feedback — then you’ll know exactly how to revise it
• Create an onboarding survey that people take upon signing up for the course
  • Be sure to include some high-level questions, then one question for each day of the course (ideal outcomes and/or biggest sticking points on those specific topics). For example, here is the onboarding survey for (He)art of Podcasting, a 5-day live course.
• Now you know exactly what course participants want to know the most, for each part of your course!
  • From here you can tailor your discussion and resources, and can even create handouts before going live. You can also pre-populate Q&A sections of the course with what came in on your survey.

During the Course