Are you thinking of starting your own online course but don’t know where to begin? This article will walk you through the main elements of “What Do I Need To Create An Online Course?”
What are the requirements for creating an online course? A good idea and a dedication to undertaking the effort required to convert it into a course are the two most important things you’ll need to build an online course.
It should be a topic that people want to learn more about and are willing to pay for. You’ll need to plan out your course’s content and set aside time to build it. You’ll also require a platform to host and sell your course.
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Contents
What Do I Need To Create An Online Course?
1) A Concept
You’ll need an idea before you can start building an online course. Something you’re enthusiastic about educating others and believe people would pay money to learn about.
You don’t even have to be an expert to do this. You can position yourself as an interested newcomer who teaches others what you learn along the way.
You should have at least a fundamental understanding of the subject you’re teaching, but you don’t have to be able to teach it at the university level.
You most likely have multiple abilities and skills about which you are knowledgeable enough to build a course. It might be a passion like cooking, tai chi, or interior design that you enjoy. It could also be related to your field of expertise, such as hiring, productivity, or marketing.
Because you’ll be working on it for weeks or months, it should be something you like teaching others about. Because creating an online course is a significant time investment, your topic must be one you can commit to for the long haul.
2) A topic that people care about
You must ensure that there is a market for your topic.
Okay, so the whole “create a course on something you’re passionate about” concept has some limitations. It has to be something that others are interested in as well.
You may be the world’s foremost authority on manufacturing homemade dog boots. Perhaps you have a few alternative patterns for sewing dog booties together. However, if no one wants to pay you to learn how to create dog boots, you’ll have a hard time selling your course!
You don’t want to spend weeks or months perfecting your course just to have no one buy it because you chose the wrong topic.
3) A Willing Audience To Pay For Your Course
People may be interested in a particular subject, but they are unwilling to pay for it.
Making a course about frugal living, for example, might not be a good idea. Because a large portion of the intended audience will refuse to pay for it!
Are there any online courses available on the subject you’re considering? This could be a good sign because someone else has already profited from the identical concept.
Although some competition is beneficial because it indicates that there is a market, you should avoid oversaturated topics where you will be competing against hundreds of other courses.
Try to find a gap in what your competitors are offering, or tackle it from a different perspective. You could even take the same issue and aim it at a different demographic.
You can even compete with existing competitors by creating a course that is more in-depth or provides additional knowledge that they may have missed, or by making it shorter and more simple, aimed at novices.
You should already have an internet audience that you can poll to see what they want to learn about.
You may have a good idea about this because people will constantly ask you questions about your topic, but even so, it’s always a good idea to inquire further about what people would want from a course so you know you’ll be creating something in demand.
If you don’t already have an online audience (for example, through your blog, YouTube channel, or Instagram account), it’s a good idea to start there before creating an online course.
Otherwise, you’ll waste a lot of time creating a course without knowing whether or not people want it, and you’ll have no one to launch it to.
4) A Strategy for Outlining and Creating Course Content
Your course curriculum will be based on your outline. It takes your overarching learning objectives and breaks them down into discrete modules and lessons that students will study in your course.
Begin small. You don’t need a large flagship course to launch your online empire. It’s frequently advisable to start small with a proof of concept before creating a large in-depth resource. It’s especially important if this is your first course.
It’s possible that your first online course will consist of only 5-10 brief videos and a few downloadable worksheets.
Also, don’t cram too much information into one class. Your videos should be between 5 and 15 minutes in duration. I wouldn’t make movies longer than 20 minutes since, no matter how interesting your presentation is, kids will lose interest.
5) Time Available To Complete The Work
Finding the time to actually create an online course can be one of the most difficult aspects of the process.
Set aside a couple of days or a small amount of time each day to work on it.
Even if it’s just for an hour each evening. You’ll be astonished at how much it adds up to.
Over the course of a month, only one hour of work per day will add up to 30 hours. That should get you off to a good start on your studies!
What matters is that you keep pushing forward and don’t give up. You will be able to create an online course if you do so.
For your first meal, don’t get too caught up in the production quality and spend too much time trying to make everything flawless. It will consume a significant amount of your time, and you will never achieve perfection.
Simply concentrate on making progress and progressing through the assignment one step at a time. Even if you can’t afford the most expensive video camera or microphone, your students will almost surely like your course if you put your heart and soul into it.
You can always go back and re-record sections depending on comments later, but the most essential thing, in the beginning, is to put in the time and get the work done.
6) A Financial Plan
Before you begin working on an online course, you should determine how much time and money you have available to devote to it.
If this is your first online course, you may be bootstrapping it and doing the majority of the work yourself. However, you’ll still need to set aside some funds to cover the costs of any web hosting, software, or equipment you’ll use to develop your course.
Expect to pay between $100 and $500 on your course.
If you have an existing webcam and microphone, you can develop an online course for free and then post it to a free online course marketplace.
However, spending even a small amount of money on your project will make it significantly more successful in the long run, and I strongly advise having enough funds to sell it through your own online course platform.
7) A platform to host your course online
Are you going to use a WordPress LMS plugin to host your online course on your own website? Or opt to use an online course platform like Teachable or Kajabi? Or a marketplace for online courses like Udemy or Skillshare?
You’ll get 100% of the revenue if you host the course on your own website. However, you’ll have to put in a lot more time and effort to get everything set up, including various plugins and applications.
You’ll also be responsible for a lot more behind-the-scenes tasks, such as customer support, billing, and refunds.
Having your course hosted someplace else reduces your earnings, but it takes care of a lot of the administrative work and money collection for you.
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