How to teach online courses - a practical guide from a pro

Everybody is a wealth of knowledge on so many topics, be it a programming language, how to make amazing pastry, embroidery, a language... you don't need to be a super-expert, you just need to know more than the people you're hoping to teach.

The one major thing you do need is an absolute passion for what you want to teach - if you're not interested in your own course, why should anybody else be?

You also need enough substance in the topic to create a course of decent depth, so if you've got a passionate topic in mind, see if you can come up with at least 5 different things that a student needs to know.

So, you've got a topic you're passionate about, and some substance behind it... now we need to see if there's anybody out there actually interested in doing a course on this topic.

The process of checking out whether there's a market for an idea is called "idea validation", and in this lesson we're going to do some really basic idea validation by testing our idea against the search engines inside of Udemy, and YouTube.

If we can find an existing pool of courses on a similar (or exact same) topic with students/viewers in them, then we know that our idea definitely has a target audience interested in this topic.

Should you be worried if someone else is already teaching a successful course on the topic you want to teach?

Nope!

• It shows you a clear proven market for your course
• You'll have something unique and wonderful about your take on the topic
• You'll attract the kind of students who like to take multiple courses in the same topic for greater depth of information.

Don't stress :)

So, you've thought of a topic that you're passionate about and has substance and a market of potential students?

Yay! Good job!

Have a short break, then be ready to knuckle down and get into the next section on planning your approach.

This checklist runs through the main themes of this section on figuring out what you are going to teach. Completing the questions in this list will help you have a better definition of your course idea, as well as check the market for potential students.

Teaching, in any form, is all about your students. It probably sounds obvious, but I want you to keep it in mind as you design your course.

It's really hard to think up a course that is going to be suitable for absolutely everybody - some will find it too basic, some too advanced, others won't see any relevance to their needs. Instead, decide on a particular type of audience to teach to - beginners, start-up business entrepreneurs, non-techy seniors, etc...

Once you have decided on an ideal target student, you can think about why they are doing your course (looking for techniques to make a product, lifestyle skills, etc) and you'll be able to teach directly to those motivations and needs.

This checklist goes through a few questions to help you better decide on and define your ideal target student. This will help you teach directly to these needs and motivations.

To figure out what your students need to learn, you need to figure out two things:

• What is the overall aim of your course? What can a student say in one sentence if they had to tell a friend, "Hey, I just did a course on..." ?
• Come up with three or four specific new skills, knowledge, of ways of thinking that your students will be able to work at and achieve. We call these "learning outcomes".

Everything you teach or test should be directly relevant to your learning outcomes.

Think of the broad topics you need to teach in order for your student to achieve each of those learning outcomes. No need for specific lesson content yet, just the broad themes at this stage.

This quick checklist will help you note down the key themes of your course - the course aim, and the learning outcomes.

Now let's have a look at individual lessons to go into those broad topics.The topics will become your sections, and the lessons become individual videos.

It's always good to start with a sequence of welcome lessons:

• Lesson 1: Hello and welcome to the course
• Lesson 2: About your instructor
• Lesson 3: What to expect in this course / how to work through the course.

You should also end your course with a summary and thank you.

When coming up with lesson videos, stick to one single idea or topic per lesson.

According to extensive research by Udemy, they suggest a single video should be 5-10 minutes in length.

According to extensive research by edX, they suggest a single video should be 6 minutes.

Based on these, I recommend you chunk your videos down into 5-6 minute video lessons.

This is an example of a video recording of a person speaking. I believe that this is the warmest and most personal feeling way to deliver a course.

It's tricky memorising all the lines in order to maintain eye contact with the camera, but if you can remember short bursts of lines, you can cut to another angle between each set of lines you say, making it look more like one continuous sequence.

Try have a clean background if you're recording yourself talking to camera.

Screen captures are a great way to demonstrate how to use a piece of software or web service. There's a variety of programs around like Camtasia Studio, Screenflow, CamStudio... have a look around and experiment with their free trials to make sure they suit your needs before laying out the cash to purchase them.

Slides can often be the easiest way to come up with visuals for a lesson, but you need to make sure you put some effort into their design.

Even if you pay for a beautiful professional PowerPoint template, it's still up to you to make sure the content of each slide stays minimal

Slides work their best when they are kept really simple, and act as visual markers for what your voice is saying.

Animations are great and the tools for making them are getting really cheap.

Animation is all about story and rhythm, and they need to be scripted really well to keep moving along and keep your students engaged.

Unless you are doing truly remarkable expensive original animated content, I suggest keeping animations under two minutes in length, and using them only once per course intro or major section intro.

Now that you've seen some examples of presentation styles, are there any that feel like a natural fit for your course? As you've seen in this course, there's nothing wrong with using a combination of methods if you like.

However, if you are planning a software or web service course that is going to rely on screencasts and slides, I strongly recommend that you film at least a short welcome video of your talking head, just to put a face to the instructor name they see on their course, and build closer rapport with you.

A suggested structure for each lesson:

• Start with a quick hello, and introduce the name of the topic you're about to cover.
• If this lesson builds on anything the student learnt previously, you can say a quick one-liner to remind them of that lesson.
• Follow it with a one line description of what you're going to cover in this lesson.
• Then get into your lesson content.
• At the end of the lesson, let people know they've reached the end of that particular topic, and summarise the most important points of the lesson in 10 seconds or less.
• Finally, say thank you or some other sort of positive encouragement, and tell them that you look forward to seeing them in the next lesson.

What do you say in a lesson? Well, "Hello" is a good start!

• Keep the tone really conversational.
• Confident but casual.
• Use case studies or personal stories to illustrate things if you can.
• Give solid proof to back up any grand sweeping statements that your students might hesitate to automatically follow you on.

practice

practice

practice

practice

practice

• practice

1. practice

PRACTICE!

I know we've covered heaps about structuring and presenting lessons to make it easy for students to view and understand... but don't forget that learning is really an active verb - we should be getting our students to actually do something every now and then.

A good place in your lessons to stick deep questions, activities and action points is at the end of a lesson. Students can watch your lesson, get something to do, work on it, then come back and watch the next lesson.

There are great Udemy resources and specific courses around on recording videos, making screen captures, marketing, etc...

If you're at the point of having everything scripted and you're now about to press record on your first lesson, then congratulations!

Make sure you take good care of your audio. Students will often forgive a poorly composed visual, or animation that isn't Pixar quality, but they've got a low tolerance for bad audio.

Make sure you check out as many resources as you can about marketing your course. No point making an awesome course if nobody knows it exists!

Once your course has launched - stay involved! Track how it's going, answer questions, look for opportunities to add updates.

Once your course is up and running, you need to make time for formal evaluation

• Does the course achieve the overall aim you set in your designs?
• Do your lessons actually help your students reach the learning outcomes you came up with?

Find a balance between looking to make sure your course is good, but not being way too over-perfectionist.

Look for opportunities to add in little bonus videos, as well as possibly some whole new course ideas (don't forget to validate the ideas though!)

If you get great reviews, then yay well done! It's rare for people to take the time to leave a good review, so be grateful and enjoy them when they come.

Bad reviews: they'll happen. Some students give silly bad reviews simply because they didn't even read your course description and then they rant that it's not what they thought - not much you can do about that.

Legitimate bad reviews might be disheartening, but they can be a great source of information on what needs fixing up in your course. Make private contact with the student through the messaging tools, tell them you're sorry they had a bad experience but thank them for the feedback, and ask if they'd like to give any more detail so that you can improve the course better. You'll not only have good info to fix up your course, but you might turn that 1 star review around into a 5 star based on your fixes and the time you took to politely work with the student.

Phew! We're at the end of the course!

Thank you for taking part, and if you've planned, designed and started teaching an online course, then that's fantastic and I hope it's going really well for you :)

If you have finished this course and enjoyed it, then please leave a positive review.

If you have finished this course and are confused or find something lacking, then please use the messaging tools to make contact with me first, and let's see if I can help you in some way.

Please check back every now and then to catch any updates I add, and stay engaged through the forum, messages, and you can also reach me on my site at edustylist.com

Thanks for taking the course, and I hope to see your amazing work online sometime soon!

:) Ricky

Although I tightly scripted and practiced this course before filming, I still ended up with about five and a half hours of footage just to make this one hour course.

Here's a fun blooper reel of some of the mistakes along the way :)

Welcome to this audio summary version of the course. These are quick concise summaries of each section (not simply the audio ripped from the video and re-posted) that you can download and listen to as a quick portable reference guide once you have finished the video lessons.

This is an audio summary of the "What are you going to teach?" section from the video lessons.