Introduction
If you’re interested in teaching and sharing your knowledge with others, you may be thinking about creating an online course.
This can be a great way to develop your expertise and grow your audience. However, if you’ve never created an online course before, it can seem like a daunting task. In fact, there are many steps involved in creating an online course that can seem overwhelming at first glance — but they’re really not so bad once broken down into manageable chunks! Here are some tips on how to create an online course.
Decide on the topic you want to teach
Once you have the basics of your online course down, you need to decide on a topic. There are many factors involved in choosing a topic, but here are some things to keep in mind:
- As with any business venture, it’s important for your passion for your subject matter to be authentic. It has to come from a place of genuine interest or enjoyment. This will come across in how you talk about the material and in how engaging it is for others who listen or watch. You want there to be no question that this is something worth learning about because of how much passion and excitement comes through when you discuss it.
- The second important factor is expertise—not just on the subject matter itself but also in teaching it! If someone asks me what software program they should use for blogging (like WordPress), I would tell them that I am not an expert at using these types of programs; however, if someone asked me whether Facebook ads were effective platforms for driving traffic to their site or blog post content (which I am an expert at), then I would definitely recommend using them as part of their marketing strategy!
- The third consideration is demand: Is this something people actually want? How do we know? Well according to Google Trends data from 2010–2017: “Programming” ranked 8th among other search terms like “cooking classes near me” at 56%. That said though given its relative popularity compared with other topics like sewing machine repair courses which only saw around 3% of searches during those years makes sense since most people won’t need them since most modern machines don’t require maintenance beyond regular cleaning–but programming courses are less likely unless they specifically need some kind of backend coding done themselves (which isn’t common).
Begin writing to learn
The best way to learn how to write is to start writing.
The only way you can know if your idea is any good is by trying it out and seeing what happens.
Start with a few paragraphs at first, then try adding more until you have enough content for an entire course.
This will also give you a chance to revise and adjust your proposed course based on what works and what doesn’t work as well as test the interest level of people who hear about your new project through social media or through friends who are interested in taking courses from you once they see it come together.
Choose your platform
- Choose an easy-to-use platform.
- Choose a platform that is easy to update.
- Choose a platform that is easy to share with your audience.
- Choose a platform that offers monetization options, if you want to make money from your course.
Work on your visual style
Now that you have a general idea of what your course will be about, it’s time to think about the visual style.
Even if you’re not a designer, this is still an important step in the process. A strong visual style can make or break your online courses and can help differentiate them from other offerings out there. You need to decide how big or small you want your visuals to be, whether they should be colorful or simple, and how much detail they should include.
Picking an appropriate format for your course depends on your audience and budget as well as things like time constraints (ease any pressure by setting deadlines for yourself) and skill level (if possible). It’s also good practice to assess what strengths and weaknesses might help inform this decision—maybe you love working with graphics but aren’t great at writing scripts; maybe all your experience lies in teaching people how to cook; maybe most of what makes sense when explaining something comes through body language rather than words alone! Either way remember: there’s no wrong answer here so long as it feels right within those four walls that encompass everything above plus below…
Learn how to edit video and audio
Editing audio and video can be tricky. If you’re new to editing, it’s best to start with something simple like a screencast (like the one we’ve included in this course).
For more advanced projects, there are plenty of tools available that make it easy for anyone to edit video with just drag-and-drop functionality.
Audio editing is another area where there are many options depending on what kind of project you want to create.
There are free audio editing programs like Audacity which can help you record your voice when speaking into a microphone or reduce background noise from an existing recording.
There are also paid software packages like Adobe Audition that offer more advanced features like noise reduction and vocal equalization (which makes different parts of your voice sound better).
In this course we’ll introduce you to some basic tips on both video and audio editing so that by the time we get through everything in our roadmap, you’ll have a good foundation for creating high-quality content without having to learn everything from scratch!
Start small and work up
Don’t try to do everything at once! Starting with a small course and then building on it is a good strategy for building your online teaching business.
You don’t have to be afraid of making mistakes or doing too little at first. The point is to start somewhere and see what happens from there!
Creating an online course can be a simple process if you break it down into individual steps.
- Choose a topic you are passionate about and that is relevant to your audience.
- Write to learn, and use this as an opportunity to learn something new about the topic you are covering. Know what information is important for your students, and make sure that it’s present in your course material (even if it is just an introduction).
- Choose a platform or format for creating the course — whether it be a video or audio-only, or both — and know what tools will be required for producing those types of content (iMovie on Mac computers has built-in video editing capabilities). If producing video content seems too daunting at first, begin with audio-only courses until you have more experience under your belt. These can later be transcribed into written form so that they can still benefit people who don’t have access to video recording equipment but still want access to this information online!
- Work on developing your visual style: purchase stock photos from Flickr Creative Commons pages; shoot photos yourself; create graphics using Adobe Photoshop Elements…whatever works best with whatever equipment/software package(s) happen(s) available during production timeframes! In addition: start small when building an audience; build slowly over time rather than trying something big right off the bat that may cause disappointment later down the road when things don’t go according to to to plan as well as expected (you wouldn’t want someone saying ‘well I spent $100 but only got 1 subscriber after 6 months).
Conclusion
If you want to create an online course, the first step is deciding what topic to teach. Then, you’ll need to break down all of the steps involved in creating it and learn how each piece fits together. Finally, you can start by creating a small course that’s relevant for your audience!