7 easy tips for you to create online courses
Currently, creating online courses is one of the best ways to earn extra revenue. If you have a skill that others would like to learn, you can turn a hobby into a lucrative side job or a full career.
How to create online courses
The eLearning market is expected to exceed $ 320 billion by 2025.
– Data on the eLearning Market Growth
As more people seek to improve their professional skills or learn a new hobby, business opportunities for anyone who wants to create online courses abound.
Today, with few resources, it is possible to develop and sell courses on the internet, being an enterprise easy to start and implement.
So, if you have some knowledge that other people want to learn, see the tips that we list below and learn how to monetize this idea, turning it into a distance learning course.
1. Find a topic for the course
The topic that your course will cover needs to be something that you completely master, that you are passionate about and that can be profitable.
To determine whether a topic is profitable or not, research what people are looking to learn.
– 10 profitable niches for online courses
Who is your target audience and what problem are they facing? Choose a demographic group that has a specific problem for which you can provide a solution.
Ask yourself how this audience is going to use your course and how it can benefit them by helping them improve their lives.
After deciding on a topic, think about what will be the value proposition. To do this, you need to find something different from what your competitors are already offering, this will help you to stand out in the market.
2. Create an outline of the course
Planning, planning, planning! To create online courses, you need to have a solid strategy.
Defining a plan will help you decide what the course will be about, what it should include and how you will teach it.
Write learning goals and objectives
Setting learning goals and objectives will help you get organized and your potential students to know what they should achieve.
Start by presenting your long-term goals. For example, in a music course, a learning goal is to help students learn how to play and write music in a variety of genres. A learning objective is to learn to read notes and musical scores.
Divide your content
Plan your content and divide it into sections to create the course program and facilitate learning.
This outline should give students an idea of the steps they need to take to complete the course. You can divide the material into levels, (beginner to advanced), by lesson topics or by chapter, for example.
The Coursify.me allows you to divide your course on sessions and lessons, precisely to facilitate the organization of the teaching material and the follow up by the student.
Use a storyboard
An excellent way to organize your content when creating online courses is through storyboards, a sequence of panels on which the course structure is designed.
A storyboard specifies the visual elements of each screen that will be presented, as well as what information and activities will be included in each section.
3. Decide what type of media you will use
What kind of media will you use to expose the content to your students? Will it just be text-based content or will there also be images, videos and audio?
This is very important when it comes to online learning, and the advantage is that you can use whatever is necessary to better explain each part of your content. In addition, the more diverse your course, the more it is able to hold the student’s attention.
Aside from the explanatory material, consider other teaching resources to create online courses.
Design quizzes, exams or assignments that you can add to test your students’ knowledge. Remember, people have different learning styles and you should try to attract as many people as you can.
4. Develop the content
Gold Tip: Take advantage of the material you already have to build and enrich your online course. This can come from webinars, blogs, presentations and other training / workshop materials.
Other than that, the basic step by step to start developing your content is:
Write your schedule
Take your written plan or storyboard, see what needs to be created and decide how you will work in the following four phases: pre-production, writing, recording and post-production.
Prepare your equipment
Before you start creating media content, including audio and video, you need to prepare all of your equipment. Many recording tools can help you provide the best learning experience.
Free of charge, you can find a variety of video creation and editing software on the internet. Other than that, it is interesting to invest in a microphone and a camera, in case your smartphone does not come with a good quality one.
There are really many options on the market today, so do your research and go with the best option within your budget.
– See which are the best screen recorders
Write the content and start shooting
Create a script for the content you want to shoot. This will help you to not forget anything and to train before taking action.
Make sure the video script uses simple, clear language to help students understand key ideas and concepts easily.
When rehearsing, pay attention to pauses, the speed with which you speak and your intonation. Be very careful not to speak ten minutes in the same tone and end up boring your students.
Practice and give yourself time to become more comfortable, until you think you have achieved a good result. It is always interesting to ask for feedback from someone you trust.
– Tips for speaking well on video
Go to editing
Recorded material, remove the parts you don’t like or don’t need and check if the video works well.
Make sure that the video and audio are synchronized and that the recording duration is not too long. We typically do not recommend more than ten minutes per video.
Finally, make sure that the video format makes it accessible to all users and devices.
– Basic video editing techniques
5. Find the right hosting platform
A Learning Management System (LMS) offers a space to host your school and sell online courses.
A LMS like Coursify.me, is a software as a service (SaaS) designed for anyone to create online courses, manage enrollment and student performance, distribute educational material, receive online payments and more.
Before choosing your hosting platform, we recommend that you review the list of features that each offers to decide which one best suits your needs.
– Whats is a Learning Management System
6. Determine the course price
Finding the right price for your online course is a challenge. However, your goal here is to find the ideal value, that is, the one that pays off your investment and still generates a reasonable profit margin.
There are different ways to charge your students to do this:
One-time payment vs. Recurring payment
To create online courses with one-time payment means that your course will charge the student a one-time fee so that he or she has access to your learning material.
Recurring payment, on the other hand, works on the model of subscription or monthly plan, and every month your students pay a certain amount to continue to have access to your content.
Values
To start, think about how much you have spent so far, including your time and labor, and estimate how much you want to profit.
There is no right value for everyone. The price charged can vary widely, depending on what your course offers and how many people are looking for it.
However, here’s advice: don’t minimize the value of your work. If you have good material, there is nothing wrong with charging for it.
Free courses
Offering a free course does not bring any money, but it can be an advantage to encourage people to know you and what you do.
This is a strategy widely used by those who are starting to sell courses online. A good idea is to make available a module of your content or a short course for free, so that the customer has a better idea of what the course offers and feels more relaxed to make the purchase.
– Free online courses as a strategy to attract students
7. Create a relationship with your audience
Course ready, now it’s time to attract a qualified audience and start a relationship with them.
The process of selling a product online requires gaining the consumer’s attention and trust, since he is not seeing your product, so he needs to take your word that it is good.
That is why the importance of offering quality content (blogs, videos, social networks, e-mails) to attract students and maintain a relationship with existing ones.
In the digital age in which we live, it is not enough to create online courses and put them up for sale. You need to connect with the audience, keep them engaged, listen to their feedback and make sure they’re happy.
Create relationship channels
There are several ways to keep contact with your students. One of the most popular is by email.
You can send scheduled emails to inform them about news in the area, the launch of new modules for your course and special promotions.
– How to create a successful email marketing campaign
Another way to communicate is through an online community, where you create an environment to exchange knowledge, ideas and opinions about the course.
Don’t forget that there are also very simple and practical video tools to use today, such as stories, live streaming, webinars and many others that offer a more personal approach and interaction with your students, regardless of where they are.
Reasons to create online courses with Coursify.me
Now that you know how to create online courses, all you need is the right platform to host them and make them available to the public.
The more learning resources the platform has, the better your students experience and the easier it will be for you to create and sell new courses.
Coursify.me is a dynamic and customizable eLearning platform, which offers all the features you might need.
Present in more than 60 countries, Coursify.me is the perfect solution for those who want to create and sell online courses.
– Learn how to sell online courses
Complete platform, you can upload content through your computer or other channels such as YouTube, Dropbox and Vimeo, and your classes will be ready to be watched.
With a friendly and intuitive design, anyone can use Coursify.me, whether as a teacher or student, without having to understand computing for that.
To learn more, visit our website, test the platform and learn why we are the best option for you to create online courses.
