How to design a successful online course?

A well-designed online course will not only benefit learners but will help the entire organization in improving its productivity. Online courses have not just become more popular than their offline counterparts but have become the main mode of education in many organizations thanks to the flexibility offered to the learners in terms of location and time. On top of it, the current situation of COVID-19 has elevated the importance of these online courses even further. However, course authors face challenges while creating and managing these online courses due to the lack of proper resources. This results in poor engagement amongst the learners and ultimately the purpose of creating the course is never met. To ensure that your objectives are met, a course has to be designed properly. We have compiled a list of 8 steps that you can follow to create an engaging online course. Here are they -

Identify the target audience for the course

The first step in building a successful online course is to identify the target audience for your course. Who are most likely to attend this course in your organization? What is the seniority level of these learners? To which department do they belong and so on. It is imperative to have answers to all these questions before you embark on your journey to create the course. Answers to these questions will help you to customize and chisel them based on their requirements. For example, if the course is designed for senior folks, you do not have to spend a lot of time explaining the basics or even having multiple levels of assessments.

Identify the results you wish to generate out of the course

Try to understand what your employees would ultimately achieve from this course or in other words what is expected out of them once they complete the course. Do you plan to make them handle another department, or do you plan to make them more adept in the current department, or is it just a regular training course to improve their knowledge on a subject? This understanding is crucial to determine various aspects of the course such as difficulty level, the difficulty of assessments, etc. For example, if you intend to use the course completion as a measure of their capability in their department and plan to promote them based on that, you could make the assessments quite challenging to make them think beyond their current level.

Identify the immediate rewards for the learners

Never create a course without defining a clear reward for the learners. You might use the course completion as a means to promote them to a higher level at a later point in time, but everyone needs rewards immediately. In most cases, a completion certificate works well as the employees will feel a sense of satisfaction when they see it. Also, it is a physical copy of their achievement which they can portray in various forums. Similarly, badges can be a good option that can be awarded to learners who complete a milestone in a course. You can also publish the award in a forum to let other employees in the organization know about this achievement. Invest in an LMS tool like KloudLearn that makes it extremely easy to create a certificate and badge and assign it to a course in minutes. Also whenever a certificate or badges are awarded, all the learners in the same group of the course taker get notified immediately.

Gather your course content

This is one of the toughest steps and the one prone to maximum procrastination. The sheer volume of content available makes it a daunting task to gather content for your required course. Not just the internet, you could have collected information from books, hard drives, scribbled in your notepad, or just stored in your heads. The only way to get this step done is by not deciding what to include in the course, but what to leave out. As you browse through the content, throw out all those that don’t help in achieving your learning outcome.

Determine the most engaging delivery method for each lesson

Once you have collected the content of the courses from various sources, the next step is to determine how to deliver these content to the learners in the most engaging way. There are various possibilities for you to communicate a lesson. It could be through a recorded video, or images or a text. Whatever mode of delivery you choose, ensure that it is the ideal form to communicate that message. For example, it would be ideal if you could use a video to depict the functioning of a tool as the textual format might make it quite difficult for the learner to visualize.

Create the structure of the modules

Now that you have collected the content and also decided how to deliver those content, the next step is to start designing the structure of the course. Generally, all the courses are divided into modules or lessons. Ensure that every module’s learning objective is aligned with the learning objectives of the course. At the same time, it should focus on learning at a more detailed level. Have one or two assessments after every module to keep the learners engaged and also to give them an idea of where they stand in their understanding of the topic. While deciding the structure of the modules, don’t forget to list the time the learners are expected to spend per week on each module. Also, take care to evenly pace the course and give enough time for the learners to complete a module.

Add a Social Angle

While the current circumstances have made WFH (Work From Home) the “New Normal”, humans are social animals. It is hard to eliminate millions of years of our evolutionary elements where live, in person interaction has been key to individual and societal progress. Adding social interaction, peer learning forums are great mechanisms to keep the teams organized in a cohesive group.

Add Gamification

While remote learning has lots of benefits, one of the significant downsides is active participant engagement. It has been widely established that gamification [contests, pop quizzes, tests, leader boards, etc.] facilitate active engagement.

Choose an ideal LMS

This is the most critical step and involves careful evaluation and planning. There are many LMSs that are available in the market that are available in a wide price range and also come with a wide variety of features. One should carefully analyze what features that one wants and eliminate the LMSs that do not offer your necessary feature. Some of the most popular features that every LMS seeker looks for are — mobile learning, SCORM compliance, Course Recommendation, and so on. KloudLearn offers all these features that create a perfect learning ecosystem not just for the learners but also for the course authors.

Start adding the course content

Once you have chosen the LMS, the last step is to start creating a new course and start adding the content. An LMS like KloudLearn makes it quite easy to add content due to the plethora of course authoring tools it has. Create documents, add images, embed videos, and record your own video in minutes to create that perfect course that can captivate your learners. While designing both courses and modules, ensure to use clear wordings that are understandable to the learners. Also, make sure that every instruction is elaborate by giving clear labels and titles to media such as videos and images.

To Sum Up

Creating an online course may sound difficult. But with the right set of processes aided well by a perfect choice of LMS, it becomes an enjoyable activity. The 10 steps highlighted in this post can help you to create an engaging and informative course.