How to decide what content to teach your students

“Always deliver more than expected.”

– Larry Page

When it comes to your online course, content is the soul because it is what attracts your students to purchase the course in the first place. It’s important to create content that engages your student enough to make them want to complete the course. You don’t want bored or uninterested students as they just won’t stay around long and give up before the course has ended.

In this blog, I am going to be talking about how to decide on what content to teach your students for your online course. It can be really tricky to nail down your content and also the amount of content that goes into creating an effective online course.

I’ve got 3 tips that I am sharing with you.

TIP 1 – Get clear on the goal of your course

It’s important to have a clear idea on why you are creating this course and what your students will get out of it. Your students will be buying your online course to get a result of some kind and this result will be a solution to a problem that they are facing right now. The clearer you can get about this, the easier it will be to market and sell your course down the road.

By getting laser clear on your course goal, you can then determine your student learning outcomes. The goal of your course is to get them to a result they desire in the quickest and easiest way possible. Your online course is the vehicle, it’s the mechanism by which the teaching is being delivered. Always lead with the result, not the vehicle that gets them there.

TIP 2 – Develop a step-by-step system

Once you have identified the problem your student is facing, the next step is to develop an easy-to-follow system that gets them to the end quickly. This is where you get to spend time brainstorming ideas and mapping out what content to include in your course. By breaking down your content into topics and subtopics, it will help you to create the pathway.

I like to use a tool called Trello which is a kanban style productivity tool. It’s one of the easiest tools I have come across and is great for outlining your course. The app version of Trello allows you to work on your course on-to-go so if I have any ideas then I have a column dedicated to ideas which I then add them to.

When I created my Crafting Your Brand course, I used Trello to plan out my entire course – it was brilliant. It helped me to get really clear on my content pillars and the topics I wanted to include. The best thing about it was that once I have created my step-by-step system, I had a birds eye view of what it looked like.

As a teacher, you need to create a plan for how you want your students to learn your content. Create a clear structure for your course because this will underpin its success. As you deliver your content, you are going to want to break it up into manageable sections so that students can digest it more easily.

TIP 3 – Decide on your content types

How do you like to learn?

Everyone learns differently and so how we consume the world around us is different. There are so many different ways to deliver your course content to your students. Knowing what your audience likes will put you in good stead to make informed decisions about how you deliver your content. For example, will you be delivering your course content via video with you on screen or will you deliver it as audio? Will there be visual aids, slides, graphics or downloadable resources?

It’s important to get a balance between theory and practical methodologies so that you can provide the optimum learning experience for your students. This is where you can get really creative and deliver it in a fun, compelling and engaging way. There is no right or wrong way to deliver your content but if you are unsure of what the best way is then ask them.

The most successful courses are the ones that use interactive elements such as polls and quizzes because students will connect to the course material on a far deeper level. Some of the ways you could deliver your content is as follows:

• Videos
• Tests
• Quizzes
• Audios
• Downloadable pdfs
• Assignments

There are so many options available that you could choose to engage your students, it’s just about choosing the right options that’s right for your course. You may decide that the best approach is to have various different options available.

The more engaging your course is, the better your students will enjoy learning from you. Consider your own experiences of learning, what worked for you? What helped you to retain content? Understanding our own personal learning experiences can help to enrich the teachings we provide to others so don’t be afraid to play around.