Developing a course online is a difficult process and it is easy to get lost. Online courses involve combining learning with the latest technology for maximum advantage. In today’s digital world and due to the pandemic, everything has a place online – including teaching. You should know that online learning is here to stay! The change has been revolutionary when it comes to teaching. Therefore, we think that you should also jump in on the bandwagon and create an online course to share your expertise. In this article, we will go through the basics of Online Course Development and share a few tips that will help you in the future! Read on:
The Online Course Development Process
The Online Course Development Process usually involves four steps. While there may be different versions of this approach, these four steps would cover most of the crucial aspects of Online Course Development.
1. The initial meeting- Online Course Development
This step includes identifying course resources and requirements, setting learning objectives, and allocating resources. Conducting a comprehensive analysis of the audience’s needs and their learning patterns will help you a lot in beginning your online course development process.
2. The Planning Phase
Planning the course and the resources required for the course is the second step in the online course development process. Here, you need to review the current content and match it with the older content to understand what changes are to be made.
3. The Building Phase- Online Course Development
Once you have understood your audience’s needs and planned the course thoroughly, you can start the building process. This step includes storyboarding, creating course content, and creating multimedia content for the course. Uploading the course and configuring the learning management system to make the course ready for use also comes under the building phase.
4. Test, Review, and Revise
Once your course is ready for use, you can launch it and look for any bugs or glitches that require fixing. The user interface and other user experiences can be tested by multiple people. These may include the course designers themselves, the instructors, and a few learners to get a review from every kind of user.
Some helpful tips from our side to aid you in developing an online course easily
1. Analyze your training goals- Online Course Development
Analyzing and setting your training goals from the very beginning helps you to understand what is expected from your online training course. Your business plan and target audience come into view by doing this.
Vast research on your audience and content has to be done here, as it defines your entire online course development process. Because this is easy, it gets overlooked by even the most experienced professional online course creators. Having a training goal and knowing your target audience are two of the most critical aspects in the process of online course development. Everything you plan from here on would be based on these two aspects, which will also make your decision-making process a little easier.
2. Organize your current content
Organizing your current content helps you in any kind of online course development process. It is always best to analyze your current content and resources and organize them according to what is to be used wherein your online course. This also helps you to understand what can be used from the older content and what is to be excluded. This also helps you understand how much multimedia content will be required for your course. You can then plan the resources for the multimedia content. This should ideally be a consistent practice for any course developer as it keeps your course updated at all times.
3. Create an outline of your course
Once you have organized your current content, you can start to create an outline of what your course should be like. Once you have all the texts, images, videos, and other media in place, you can design an outline of your course and do the content placement accordingly. This will help you understand what your online course would look like to the users. You can also break down the entire course on a per-slide basis to view and analyze your user interface.
This also helps you understand where to place your media files. Creating an outline will greatly help in the process of an online course development process. This outline will help you and your course development team up until the course is ready to use.
4. Simplify course delivery through your LMS
Your Learning Management System can also play a huge role in your online course development process. Understanding and choosing the right LMS for your course is one of the key aspects of the success of your online course. Your LMS should be easy to use by all kinds of audiences. You can simplify your course by giving better and easier access to your audiences. Gamifying your course by introducing rewards and score points, sending out automated certificates and other such elements help you to boost your course and reach more people. Look out for such features in your LMS.
5. Do a pilot run
Once your course is uploaded and ready to use, do a pilot run of the whole course. You can also send it to a few employees and learners, and gather their feedback on the course. It is wise to take feedback from potential users to understand any troubles that they might face. Doing a pilot run also helps you to check if there are any bugs or technical glitches that should be fixed. The online course designers can check the look and feel of the course, and the user interface, and change anything if necessary.
Also Read: Proven Tips to Secure Your WordPress Website
To sum up the entire informative blog:
If you want to succeed in building an online course that’s effective and efficient, you have to understand the steps well and put them to use. Having a working plan takes time and effort and if you consider the aforementioned points, you can be sure of success!
We hope this article has been helpful to you. Thank you for reading and all the best with your online course!
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