Cut Your Course Creation Time in Half by Answering These 5 Essential Questions Upfront
You need to know what you are creating, why you're creating it and who you are teaching
Being able to design courses is a priceless skill. It helps you share your knowledge and advance your career or business. You will also create much better workshops, presentations, and meetings by default.
And you aren’t at the mercy of corporate budget cuts that don’t allow for external courses or a training team. You can design a course yourself as long as you know the material.
In my decades in corporate, I’ve created, co-created, managed, and presented hundreds of courses. One thing I’ve learned is that if you plan your course upfront, you’ll save yourself a lot of time later on.
If you don’t have a documented plan that everyone involved agrees to, you’ll spend a lot of time creating material that no one will ever use.
This happened to me in my corporate life. A senior manager asked me to design a customer services course for his largest team. I spent a few days developing an outline and the content, but I discovered that this manager hadn’t cleared the course with the CEO.
From that experience, I made a commitment to plan each course in meticulous detail before creating anything.
Is this a challenge unique to the corporate world?
No. I’ve heard well-known creators talk about designing programs that were abandoned because they were created without enough thought.
You may be creating a two-day course for hundreds of corporate employees to be rolled out over 12 months, or you may be creating an online course for a few attendees as the start of your online business.
It doesn’t matter; the same principles still apply.
However, the degree of planning needed increases with:
The length of the course
The number of times you deliver it
The impact of the course
For example, if you are planning a full-day course for hundreds of employees to ensure they comply with industry legislation, it will take more planning than a two-hour course for twenty people on optimizing their LinkedIn profiles.
Whatever you create, ask the applicable questions up front, and you’ll save a massive amount of time, energy, and, in some cases, money.
Here are the questions you should ask before creating a course:
1. Who are the stakeholders?
Stakeholders are anyone who has a vested interested in the course going well. They have skin in the game. It’s important to communicate with stakeholders as soon as possible, otherwise the content and logistics of the course will be unclear.
Corporate course: Stakeholders could be your boss, the senior team, operational managers, HR, H&S, Finance, IT, Payroll, outside agencies, clients, or customers.
Consider anyone who you need input from to be involved. You don’t want payroll to tell you that the bonus you’ve offered for attending the course is illegal or can’t be paid as promised.
It’s also helpful to assign each stakeholder a role and a role description. For example, in a corporate environment, the CEO might be the project sponsor, the operations manager might be the owner, and the finance manager might advise on the budget.
Online creator course: Stakeholders could be your business partner, investors, customers, clients, or your partner who is supporting you while you follow your dreams.
If the success of your course will affect your relationships with business partners, family, or friends, you need to include them.
It’s helpful to clarify roles and role descriptions here, too, even if appointing your mum as a project sponsor seems odd.
Action point: Identify as many stakeholders as you can. You don’t have to consult with every stakeholder about everything, but each stakeholder will have valuable input depending on their role.
2. What are the stakeholder’s expectations?
You need to know what each stakeholder is expecting to happen. It’s important to check this as each stakeholder will have their perspective on the course, why it’s being created, and what will be created.
Corporate course: Ask each stakeholder to tell you everything they believe about the course, its purpose, who it’s for, and what they need out of it.
Clarify all this upfront, or when you present the first draft for feedback, you’ll find that everyone has a different view of the content and the logistics.
Online creator course: If you have stakeholders, ensure that you are in agreement about the content, duration, timeframe, investment needed, pricing, and profit. A big-picture discussion up front could save you a lot of time.
Action point: Ask your stakeholders about their expectations about the course. Run all your ideas about the course by them, too; they may not know what your vision entails.
3. Why are you creating the course?
It would help if you clarified why you are creating the course, as the reason informs the content and the structure. There is no point in writing a course because your industry legislators have said you must if you leave out half the relevant content because the ‘why’ got diluted in the journey between planning and execution.
Similarly, if you aim to make money and the course you plan on creating won’t sell for more than $50 because your target audience is unemployed, you may want to think again.
Regardless of your reason for creating the course, it has to make sense, and what you create must align with your why.
Corporate course: Find all the strategic, legislative, and industry reasons for the course and note them down. If your course is for compliance, make a note of it. If it is a directive from Head Office, the CEO, the senior team, or the client, make a note of that.
If you stay focused on the reason for the course, you’ll be able to fend off any changes that aren’t congruent with the reason the course was approved in the first place.
It will also help you down the track. When I showed a senior colleague a course I’d created 18 months ago, he was surprised about what had been left out. I was able to provide the course proposal, which documented the course contents. We worked together to update the course once he understood that the training needs had changed.
Online creator course: Why are you creating this course? Is it to make money, expand your client base, promote another product, or raise your profile? Is it for a client or a customer? Is it to answer a specific need in your industry? If so, what?
Clarifying why you are running the course will inform what you create and how you roll it out. If you are starting out, you may want to create something smaller, to see what sells well. Or you may be building a bigger offering and pivoting to a different audience.
Action point: Write down all the reasons you are creating the course. Make sure to include both your personal and business reasons. Creating your course should be rewarding and bring you joy, not become a burden.
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4. Who are the students?
You need to know who you'll be training so you can design your content to suit your audience. Your trainees' age, gender, education, ethnicity, and cultural background will inform your course design.
For example, if your course is for people over seventy, does it make sense to design an online course without checking the digital literacy of your attendees?
If your course is for people for whom English (or the language you use) isn't their first language, you may need to check their language capability.
Might your attendees have issues with literacy, disabilities, or be neurodivergent? When designing your course, consider all these factors.
Corporate course: Get clarity about who will attend. For example, if your course is for customer-facing staff, check that all relevant roles have been considered and get a firm 'yes or no' for each.
Do the trainee's supervisors and managers need to attend if they sometimes step in to cover their team's duties?
Look at the demographics of the selected roles to help you design suitable course material.
Online creator course: Get clarity around where your students will come from. Are they your existing community, or are you heavily marketing your course with paid ads?
Who are your ideal customers? Are you marketing your course where your ideal customers will see it? Do you have an idea of who is likely to attend your course? What are their pain points? Are they the sort of people that will pay for an online course?
Action point: Create the most accurate picture of your typical course attendees and tailor your content to accommodate them.
5. What are the course objectives?
It doesn't matter whether you call it an objective, an outcome, or a transformation; at the end of the course, your students will be able to do something they couldn't do at the beginning.
You need to be clear about your objectives. What's in and what's out. It's easy to put in everything you know about a topic and every story you've ever heard.
Your stakeholders will have different ideas of what's included unless you specify the course objectives.
Objectives should always be written like this: "By the end of the course the trainees will be able to {do something}."
When you write your objectives, be specific and leave no room for doubt. Remember that agreeing on the objectives upfront is so that you and the stakeholders agree about what you will create.
When marketing the course and in the course materials, you may talk about outcomes or transformation.
Corporate course: In your stakeholder meetings, consider all the options for objectives and make sure you get agreement. Document this process so everyone has a clear idea of the course objectives.
Make sure that if Bob from Finance mentioned he'd like a topic, say 'influencing skills' in the course a couple of weeks ago, but there are no influencing skills in the objectives that are about to be signed off, you check that Bob realizes this.
You'll be amazed at the misunderstandings that can happen.
Online creator course: If you are a solopreneur or business owner, being strict about course objectives is even more critical. If you have free reign, you'll likely put in too many objectives and include your pet topics or those subjects you enjoy teaching.
Stakeholders who are business partners, friends, or family may have more difficulty expressing their views than you think.
Remember that the most effective online courses have one specific outcome in a set timeframe.
For example:
Build a website in a week
Tidy your closet in a weekend
Sew a skirt in six hours
Your students probably have full-time jobs and family responsibilities, so a big course with many objectives might overwhelm them.
Action point: Write your course objectives and ensure they align with the original purpose of the course. Ask yourself if the objectives make sense, given everything you and the stakeholders have discussed. Ensure all the stakeholders sign off on the objectives.
Takeaways
You need to plan before you dive straight in and spend hours creating a course and planning how you will roll it out.
Otherwise, you won't have a clear idea of what you are creating or who it's for. Neither will your stakeholders, setting up your course for failure when all the misunderstandings come out after you've put a lot of work and effort into the course.
You must know:
Who the stakeholders are
The expectations and beliefs of the stakeholders
Why you are creating the course
Who your students are
The course objectives
Once you are clear on all these questions, document the answers. If misunderstandings about the purpose and content of the course arise, having all the course parameters documented will help clarify things.
There is still plenty of work to be done before launching your course, but having robust discussions and brainstorming sessions upfront will help you build a strong understanding of what you want your course to be.
Use this free resource to help you plan:
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