Even if you are an expert in the subject you are teaching, you may find it difficult to develop an online course curriculum in your first year as a teacher or trainer. Fortunately, creating an online course is not difficult, but it is critical. This is due to the fact that it provides learners with a bird’s-eye view of what they can expect to learn and achieve by the end of the course. For your convenience, we have broken down the process of creating an online course curriculum into simple steps so that you can create an easy-to-follow curriculum.
Establish the Online Course’s Outcome
When you think about it, eLearning courses are all designed to help you achieve your goals faster. You educate and provide your learners with the learning resources they require to succeed in their field or develop a thorough understanding of their subject matter.
Your audience or learners are experiencing specific difficulties. Once you’ve identified them, your goal should be to use the online course to solve problems for your audience. As the first step, you must identify the desired outcome. If your online course curriculum does not address those pain points, it will fail.
Here’s how you can figure out the outcome:
Investigate Your Preferred Learners
To create an online course that will astound your audience, you must first determine who your target learners are. “What group do I understand the best?” ask yourself.
Consider a community that would benefit greatly from your expertise and knowledge. Ideally, you should select a group that you are intimately familiar with.
If you believe your target audience is made up of digital marketers, investigate further to determine whether your course will benefit all digital marketers or a subset of them.
You may discover that not all digital marketers are your target market, but only social media marketers in the e-commerce industry, for example.
Alternatively, if you already know who your target audience is, you can ask them directly who they are and what they value. One effective strategy is to create a relevant survey and distribute it to your email list. The goal of the survey should be to understand your target audience’s pain points or what they are struggling with.
Consider the following example. Assume you’re creating a survey for social media marketers. You should ask them about their goals for implementing a social media strategy, how they are monetizing their social media efforts, how much money they make from work, what they struggle with, and so on.
You must ask demographic questions to sort through outliers. Allow your audience to answer questions anonymously if they so desire. This should lead to more honest results.
Aside from email, there are numerous other methods for identifying your audience’s problems. You can use Instagram Stories to create a poll, share a high-quality and relevant blog post with a CTA to share the issues they face, include questions in your Instagram story captions, share posts on Facebook groups, conduct discovery calls with the most relevant audience members, post in subreddits where your audience hangs out, and so on.
Once you’ve gathered responses from your audience, look for patterns and trends. Make a list of the similarities and common themes in the audience’s pain points. Then, narrow them down to the top two or three issues.
Determine the End result
Once you’ve identified the most important pain points for your target audience, decide which ones you’d like to address. This will assist you in defining the outcome.
Assume that your target audience’s biggest challenge is converting their freelancing work into a full-time earning potential. They are able to earn a few hundred dollars for clients through social media marketing, but they would like to earn more money from their work.
Using those insights, you may decide that you need to teach the learners to earn five times what they are currently earning. You know what social media strategies work for marketers to increase revenue because you’ve done it yourself. As a result, you are confident that this is feasible.
In other words, make a list of what you want your course participants to learn and achieve by the end of the course. Define specific goals for your learners, including what knowledge and skills they will gain. These objectives will not only assist you in developing the course curriculum, but they will also assist you in evaluating students after the course has been completed.
Create a Curriculum That Is Tailored to the Goal
Now that you know what you want to achieve, you can create a curriculum that will work for the students. It should provide learners with the same level of success that you have. Here are some steps to creating a strong curriculum:
Collect Teaching Resources and Materials
Gather all of your resources, including instructional materials and content you’ve researched as well as previously taught materials online and offline. Organize them in order of relevance and importance and save them on a USB drive, online, or in your PC for easy access when needed.
You may be tempted to skip this step, but organizing your resources and materials will save you a significant amount of time when it comes time to use them to create your curriculum.
Syllabi from related college courses, textbooks, notes, worksheets, quizzes, assignments, exams, articles, online resources, and so on may be included in the material. Request that your colleagues or subject matter experts provide useful resources on the subject. Simple course lessons or curriculum templates can help you get started quickly.
Set goals and a timetable.
A quality course curriculum takes time to develop. You must devote uninterrupted time to the process of planning, designing, and building an online course curriculum. Obligations, such as family and work, determine the time it will take to develop the curriculum, whether you are redesigning an existing curriculum or developing an entirely new curriculum.
As a result, you must set realistic goals and deadlines for yourself based on these factors.
When creating a timeline, remember to factor in the time it will take to deliver the course. Determine the time that must be allocated to each session if it is an ongoing course with a series of online sessions.
Make a list of your success strategies.
Consider what you did in the past to achieve success or reach this point when developing an online course curriculum. This will assist you in determining everything your learners need to know in order to achieve the outcomes you specified earlier. Work backwards from where you are now. Make a list of the most important things you did in your early career.
Developing a large professional network on LinkedIn, increasing the number of followers on your business profiles on Facebook and Twitter, joining relevant groups, developing a habit of studying popular online marketing blogs such as Moz, Search Engine Journal, Neil Patel, and others, approaching major influencers on different social media platforms, creating a lot of content on the subject, searching for social media marketing clients on those platforms, and so on are some of your strategies.
After you’ve made a list of strategies, break them down into actionable steps.
Create Online Lessons Based on the Steps
Group the key steps into lessons now that you have them in order. For example, you can combine developing a professional LinkedIn network, increasing follower count, and joining relevant Twitter and Facebook groups into a single lesson titled ‘Maximizing your social media reach.’
Avoid including too many lessons in a course when grouping steps. Keep in mind that many students will not finish the course in one sitting, and others may jump around a lot. As a result, it’s critical that you don’t make it too difficult to find specific lectures within the online course.
When organizing the lessons, use logic. Your curriculum should be logical. For example, if you’re creating a social media marketing curriculum, it makes sense to start with the fundamentals before moving on to more difficult, time-consuming, and paid marketing strategies.
Divide the Lectures into Lessons
Break down the lessons into logical lectures to further simplify course delivery and make lesson navigation easier for learners. Instead of cramming a lot of information into a 30-minute video, divide the lessons into multiple 10-minute videos.
There is no hard and fast rule requiring videos to be no longer than 10 minutes. Certain skill training videos, such as painting or cooking, can last longer than 30 minutes. In fact, learners would prefer that such training videos not be divided into sections.
As a result, organize the lessons into lectures based on your specific subject. Some courses have fairly obvious organization. Others will require you to apply your knowledge, experience, and intuition.
When developing a curriculum, use stories.
Include stories in your online course curriculum because they promote engagement, which leads to effective learning. As a result, you must include them in your online courses. Keeping this in mind, your curriculum should include compelling story scripts to convey concepts and ideas.
The scripts, images, or videos you use, on the other hand, must be highly relevant to the targeted learners. They will only be able to captivate them if they are something to which the learners can relate.
Prepare for Assessments
Finally, don’t forget to specify how you intend to assess learners in your online course curriculum. This will aid in determining whether the learners obtained the knowledge and skills that they set out to acquire.
This, in turn, will determine the curriculum’s success and value, as well as the course format and delivery. You can use quizzes in between lessons, ask questions through the scenarios and stories, and take comprehensive tests at the end of the course to evaluate your progress.
Remember that U-Turns are permitted.
You may be creating an online course curriculum for the first time as a first-year teacher. While there are always exceptions, there is a good chance you will not be able to perfect the curriculum the first time. It’s okay if you don’t get there on your second or third try.
Sometimes a curriculum appears to be flawless, but it is not, and the only way to determine how effective a curriculum is to implement it.
Once you’ve completed the curriculum, start delivering the course and analysing its performance. You won’t know whether the content, stories, quizzes, and assessments are appropriate for the targeted learners until you present them to them.
Some aspects of the delivery will go perfectly, while others may not. This is part of the curriculum development process. Use the failures to improve the curriculum and make it better the next time.
Last Word
You should have a good idea of how online course curriculums are designed by now. Creating an online course curriculum should be simple if you are an expert in the field you are attempting to train learners in. Don’t worry if you’re new to it; you’ll pick it up quickly.
Once you’ve finished creating an online course curriculum for your eLearning course, contact Get AcademyPro to build your online business in Budget!
