How to Determine Your Course Outcome (+ free course worksheet!)
A course outcome is one or more statements about what your audience will learn or what skills they will gain by taking and completing your course. Course outcomes are usually listed on a sales preview page of the course and/or in the syllabus of a course.
Why does your course outcome matter? Having a well-defined course outcome gives your audience a clear idea of what they will gain from your course! You can use your course outcome(s) to market your course to your ideal audience. Also, knowing your course outcome will help guide you as you begin to reverse engineer the content of your course. It will 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.
There are three parts to writing a course outcome statement:
Audience - who you are writing your course for
Skills - abilities your audience will gain from your course
Value add - personal and career value will this course add
Once you’ve identified the audience, skills, and value add of your course, you can fill in the formula below to create your course outcome!
Course outcome formula: By completing this course, [audience] + will be able to [skill(s)] + in order to [value add].
Example: By completing this course, early-career graphic designers will have created three minimalist logo design projects that they can use to start building their portfolios.
Note: you can have more than one course outcome!
Let’s learn more about how to identify your audience, skills, and value add!
Audience - who you are writing your course for
The first step to writing your course outcome is to figure out your audience. While you may think that your course is for everyone, really there must be a smaller subset of people you are writing for. 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 determine your course audience are:
Who am I writing this course for?
What job type do they have?
What interests do 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 related to the course topic my audience should have before taking my course (beginners, intermediate skills, advanced skills)?
Your Task: Take 10-15 minutes to narrow in on who the audience for your course is using the worksheet below!
Skill(s) - abilities your audience will gain from your course
The second thing you need to get clear on in order to determine your course outcome is skill(s). Identifying which skill(s) your audience will take away from your course will help not only to craft your course outcome but will also help to guide you as you build out the content for your course.
Some questions to help you narrow in on your course skill(s) are:
Which skill(s) or abilities will your audience gain from this course?
To what extent/depth will I help them learn this topic or develop this skill?
What value will my audience gain from this new skill?
Your Task: Take 10-15 minutes to get clear on which skill(s) your audience will gain from this course using the worksheet below!
Value add - personal and career value will this course add
The third thing you need to get clear on in order to determine your course outcome is value add. Identifying what the value add is for your online course will take away the guesswork from your potential audience members as to whether they should take your course or not. Clarity on value add will make it obvious to anyone browsing courses why they should take your course.
Some questions to help you narrow in on your value add are:
What will your audience gain from taking your course?
Why should someone enroll in your course?
What value will this bring to someone personally? Professionally?
Why are the skills they will take away from this course valuable?
Your Task: Take 10-15 minutes to get clear on the value add of your course using the worksheet below!
Course outcome worksheet!
Now that you’ve identified the audience, skill(s), and value add of your course, you can put it all together into the FREE downloadable course outcome worksheet below!
