3 Things to Think About Before Writing Your Online Course (+ course building worksheet!)
If you’ve decided that you want to build an online or in-person course, you may have started to draft out ideas of what could be in the course. Maybe you’ve even started to draft out a course outline! Wherever you are in your course-building process, there are a few key things to think about to make sure your course reaches the right audience with the right content.
My goal is to make getting started easier for you and to set you in the right direction for a professional, impeccable course. In order to create a course outline, you can start by thinking about three things:
Your audience
Course outcome(s)
Prerequisites
Let’s dive deeper into each of these.
#1 - Audience
First, you can start to think about your course audience. And what I mean by determining your audience is that you need to answer this question - who is the audience for my course? While you may initially think that your course is for everyone, really there must be a smaller subset of people you are writing for. Starting to narrow in on your potential audience will help you to get clear and concise on the content that will be in your online course. If you’re not totally sure about the audience of your course, that’s ok! Try to just be a little more specific than “this course is for everyone”. An audience can be based on experience level (i.e. beginners, intermediate skills, advanced skills), job type (managers, marketers, developers, etc), topic interest, or a combination of the three.
Some questions to help you to answer “who is the audience for my course?” are:
Who am I writing this course for?
What job type or interests does my ideal audience have?
What would my ideal audience want to achieve by the end of this course?
How in-depth does my ideal audience want me to go into my course topic?
What is the level of skill /knowledge I want someone to have before taking my course (beginners, intermediate skills, advanced skills)?
Example: This course is for aspiring and early-career graphic designers. They have 0-1 years of experience with Adobe Illustrator and want to learn fundamental techniques to create their first logo project.
#2 - Course outcomes
Second, you can figure out what your course outcomes are. Course outcomes describe the exact skills and/or outcomes that the audience will obtain by completing your course. The reason you should determine your course outcome is that this outcome will help to guide you as you begin to reverse engineer the content of your course. If you start with the end (or skill/outcome) in mind, reverse engineering the content of your course will be much easier. It will also make sure that as you build the content out, you can stay clear and focused and not stray too far from the purpose of your course. Knowing your learning outcomes also lets you know how in-depth you should plan on getting into your course topic.
To determine your course outcome, you need to think about what skills or outcomes your audience will obtain by completing your course. Here is a quick formula that you can use to determine your course outcome.
Upon completing this course, [audience] + will be able to [skill(s)] + in order to [value add].
Example: Upon completing this course, new and early-career graphic designers will have the skills to build out logo design projects in order to start building/adding to their portfolios.
#3 - Prerequisites
Lastly, you can start to identify any prerequisite skills or knowledge your audience might need before taking the course. Knowing the prerequisites will make sure that the right audience is taking this course. If there is a beginner-level graphic designer taking your Advanced Graphic Design Techniques course, they may feel frustrated and quit. Letting your audience know up front what skills and knowledge they should have before taking your course will ensure the right people are taking your course.
To get started thinking about prerequisites, consider these two questions:
Who is my audience for the course?
What level of skills/knowledge do I want my audience to have before taking this course?
Example: Before taking this course, you should be familiar with basic graphic design terms, have Adobe Illustrator downloaded + an account set up, and be able to use Adobe Illustrator to create simple open shapes.
Course building worksheet!
Now that you’ve learned the three things you can think about before writing your online course, take a look at the FREE downloadable worksheet below to organize your thoughts!
