Tips for creating online course
1. Notion
I've been working a lot in notion and i'll link to my article about that up above but basically it allows you to work on multiple projects seamlessly and at the same time so what i do is literally create a kanban view of the course that i'm creating all the various modules and where i was previously working just on powerpoint and creating the modules sequentially i'm now able to dip my toe in the water depending on the mood that i'm in that day or what i feel like working on so it doesn't mean that you then have to actually complete everything fully it's all kind of in this virtual world that allows you to revisit it when you read something interesting so the reality is that most of us are going to be creating online courses part-time which means that it's probably going to take you anywhere between three weeks and four weeks to get something up but the beauty of this is during those three and four weeks.
You're going to be researching reading things thinking of anecdotes from your own experience in terms of the topic that you're teaching and you're going to want to be layering those on all the time so what i do love about notion is when i think of something that i want to add to a module that i've not yet shot i'll literally just hop on the mobile app and then add it there so ali abdul he's one of my favorite youtubers he talks about the heavy lift or the slow burn so you want to be doing a slow burn when it comes to online course creation it's very overwhelming and to try and heavy lift something like that in a weekend is honestly gonna put your back on my top.
2. Facebook Group
Facebook group so this is such an underutilized resource and honestly i think it's because a lot of people feel like Facebook is dying it's the platform that everyone's parents are on you know definitely not the tick tock or the cool kid on the block but certainly it has really established communities around very specific niches and that is exactly what you want when it comes to online course creation so you want to unpack the mind of your avatar if you've gone that far in terms of thinking of who your ideal audience is but you basically want to understand what are their faqs what are some of their biggest challenges and really start to mold your mind into thinking okay maybe i'm taking some things for granted because i've been doing something for a particular period of time you want to get into that beginner mindset and you really want to unpack what people are battling with .
so i'll give you guys an example so i'm a female working in advertising and i absolutely love online course creation right so i'm part of future females which is an amazing facebook group and an amazing facebook page all about female entrepreneurship around the world i find that to be hugely kind of inspiring reading other people's success stories and i often post my videos there too secondly the advertising portion there is a facebook group in south africa called the resource which is where a lot of people post job ads and just questions around maybe they're battling to export something of their macbook because obviously everyone uses a macbook and advertising anything like that there's really constructive and helpful banter on that group and then finally from an online course creation perspective i will link to that group down below but it's also really cool instructor hq a lot of people talking about how to create courses on udemy how to create courses on skillshare.
So of course i love posting my videos and they get a great response and then even recently ran about four polls trying to understand what is it about course creation that people find so scary and how can my youtube videos better serve that need my number three top tip is making your intro count so although we don't all have high production quality videos and lots of expensive camera get what is really important to get right is that intro video so this was probably my biggest thing that i underplayed initially i wasn't really sure how one goes about promoting the course so when it came to something like skillshare which i love teaching on that was a case of actually let me dive head first into this and really put a lot of thought into that intro because at the end of the day that's the hook that's going to get someone to watch your course.
In the case of udemy it's even more important because you're actually having someone enter their payment details at the end of watching that little video so even if the rest of your courses may be a little bit more talking head or subdued or screenshot walkthroughs that's okay i think people are expecting that from an online course but certainly you need to bring your energy your personality and definitely outline the benefits that someone's going to actually have from doing your course because remember time is so precious we're living in an attention economy and if you can't hook the person one's off they're not going to take your course .
3. Pick a platform
So I really thought that picking a platform is going to be an afterthought when it came to online course creation but honestly it is such a huge part of understanding the nuances and subtleties of a marketplace or other platform before you even get started Skillshare is intended for creative people it's typically much shorter format content so between 20 minutes and 60 minutes and it really is hands-on so you'll see people illustrating and procreate you'll see them sketching overhead cameras that sort of thing that is what does well in the Skillshare platform in addition to that it is project based .
so you cannot have a project as a an afterthought at the end of your course it needs to be in the kind of bedrock of the course itself you to me on the other hand because people are not paying a fixed fee once a month they're actually buying your course it means that you even more so have to prove the value of your course which typically ends in the courses being really really long because people want to share the fact that they are the thought leader they are the experts so they'll give you a 16 hour course whether or not that's what consumers want i'm not too sure but certainly that is an approach that people take and so if you're deciding between udemy and school share maybe you want to teach a development course about python it's probably likely that you're going to have to do a longer course because it's a detailed topic and you're probably going to want to do it on udemy and not skillshare .
4. Different Platforms
This is just two examples there are so many teaching platforms out there so i've tried skillshare , udemy and teachable but the other ones that spring to mind are thinkific and podia and they all have their own pros and cons so definitely do your own research the biggest marketplace is udemy however it is highly competitive Skillshare is also quite a big marketplace but then some of the other ones you are actually responsible for getting 100 of the traffic to that page if you don't for example have an audience like i didn't have when i started it might not be the platform for you and that doesn't mean that your content is not good it just means that you don't have the money to send people to that website or arguably the mailing list so those are the sorts of things you want to bear in mind .
5. Keep to the point
My fifth top tip comes into play when you're building your slide decks now not everyone teaches with slides but i find that it's helpful to keep to the point and not to ramble however that being said i do always open with the talking head shot like what you guys are watching now and i then put my video in the bottom left hand corner which actually helps people to follow along with me and follow along with the slides however one thing that you obviously want to bear in mind is when you're creating your slides you don't want anything in that corner so you need to be sure when you structure the slides themselves how you're going to present them at the end of the day but each to their own i mean some people love using a variety of different tools like for example loom is a great one that actually allows you to press pause and then it's gonna subtract all of that editing work at the back end .
so you're just gonna pause before you look at your notes and do whatever with me i leave the camera rolling and then have 100 arms and arms and bloopers but that works for me other people would prefer to use something like loom where they're actually able to pause on their computer and then drink a cup of tea in the meantime before they resume with their next module another learning was i really like having a final slide at the end of each module telling people what is coming next so not only is this likely to keep the student more engaged because they know what to expect but they're probably likely to look forward to whatever it is is in your next my deal too so they're not going to maybe get distracted and start checking their phone something that is hotly contested is point .
6. Batching your content
A lot of people feel like shooting three to five videos back to back is going to be so exhausting and you just never make it through but can you imagine cleaning your room five times putting on makeup five times and finding a cute outfit five times it can be really time consuming to break up your forming across multiple days so almost always it makes more sense and it's more efficient to do your filming in batches when it comes to filming you do not need the latest equipment but what you do need is a good microphone so i at the beginning just use my iphone in voice record mode i then subsequently got a rode video mic which i will link to and then in today's article i'm actually trying out something new and that's a lavalier microphone .
So it comes in a little patch like this and it only set me back 250 rand on take a lot but i'm recording on two nights so i can compare and see what the quality of this one is like if i think it's a good fit for online instructors i will be sure to mention that down below so that you guys know whether maybe this is something that you're going to want to buy before your weekend of filming you also don't want to complicate things for yourself when it comes to forming so initially i used to form with a teleprompter app on my phone because i was so nervous that i was going to fumble my words but if anything it just made me a little bit distracted and probably looked a bit catatonic if i'm honest so now i like to have all of my talking points in notion but really i'm just talking off the cut .
7. Editing
My last tip is all about editing this is also a really really scary step in the process when you're first getting started but it really needn't be so i actually started with a program called Wondershare , filmora. I then moved on to adobe premiere pro i then moved on to imovie .I'm still on imovie but i do sometimes do color grading on premiere pro so why i love imovie and why it would be the first thing that i would recommend to beginners is i really feel like it doesn't complicate the process it really is just exactly what you need and nothing more and i think sometimes its constraints make you be a little bit more creative like for example i use canva for a lot of my overlays and i've really found a lot of workarounds using imovie if you do have the manitou invest and paid for platforms then obviously that's great but if you're wanting to do it on a budget then for mac i would suggest imovie and for a normal computer i would suggest davinci resolve in my poll and instructor hq i asked some questions as i mentioned around what people were confused about when it came to online course creation and someone had a great point around whether or not to use music so i've dabbled in using embedding tracks in terms of both youtube skillshare and udemy but really on hindsight when i look back at some of the courses or youtube videos that do have it it's honestly often just more distracting than what it's bringing value.
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Course Tips