Online Course Creation: From Idea to First Cohort 120+ Tools

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Most courses that fail were invented alone. The topic was chosen because the author knew it well, and the first real person appeared after everything was already recorded.

By the time you find out what people wanted, re-recording is out of the question

That is the whole problem, and it happens in a specific order. You pick a subject you are good at. You write an outline of what you consider important. You record fifteen lessons over two months. Then you launch, and the questions people ask turn out to be about something adjacent that you covered in nine minutes near the end. Now you are choosing between shipping a course that misses, and starting again. Nobody starts again.

What this course covers

Forty lessons in the order the work actually happens, beginning before the outline exists. Research first: what a study can tell you and what it cannot, the types and what each is good for, question design and how the type of question changes the answer, scales and length, whether open questions repay the analysis, fielding the questionnaire like a small campaign, the report, analysing free text, and turning findings into a concept. Then the learning science: how adults take in information, ADDIE, setting the end result before the outline, mapping the learner journey, what a piece of learning is made of, the nine steps and the bottlenecks between them, the importance of repetition, sixteen factors that decide whether knowledge reaches real work, the power of reminders, performance support after the last lesson, evaluation in six steps, and the difference between training somebody and developing them. Then building the course: what changes online, the platform and production stack, programme and material, sources when you are not the only expert, assignments and intensive design, behaviour on camera, the participant life cycle, holding attention to the end, and evaluating both the people and the course. Then the craft of teaching a group: Dale's cone, problematisation, group size, the four-beat cycle, group dynamics and norms, resistance, facilitation against moderation, metaphors, the five rules for sub-groups, how to end, and running a webinar so it is not a broadcast. Then production with AI: the platforms, course generation, materials, video and tests, adapting one piece of material to several learning styles, personalised paths and analytics. Finally the launch: the course site as an entry point, referrals as an organic channel, email, search, video and copy, paid promotion and remarketing, each social platform on its own terms, and the numbers that tell you whether the launch worked.

Three blocks were recorded for a workplace audience

I would rather say this before you meet it in lesson three. The research block was recorded around employee studies, so its catalogue of study types is internal — but the craft of a questionnaire is the same craft: a scale is a scale, a leading question is a leading question, and free-text analysis does not care who answered. The learning science block is a course for someone running a learning function, and six of its ten lessons speak about organisations; the other four describe how a human being absorbs and applies something, and without those this course would be production advice. The channel block was recorded around employer marketing, so the mechanics are general and the examples come from hiring.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 40 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: the questionnaire design guide, the diagnostic and design checklists, the nine steps of learning, the sixteen transfer factors, the four-beat session model, the five rules for sub-groups, the AI production stack, and the launch channel plan

• The research stage, which most course-creation programmes skip entirely

Where to start

Write your course title as a question your audience would actually type. Then ask twenty of them whether that is the question they have. Enrol now and start today.