Online education is gaining popularity every day with more and more people deciding to study online rather than in person. Moreover, due to the pandemic, a lot of educational institutions had to switch to offline learning for a while which led to educators and students alike getting used to this kind of setup.
Luckily, it has never been easier to create an online course of your own if you want to find students and teach them remotely. Without further ado, here are the techniques and strategies for creating effective and engaging e-learning content.
Establish the Goals of Your Course
First, you will need to establish the goals of your course. Depending on what your objectives are, you will be prioritizing specific topics over others. Moreover, your goals could also help you choose the best types of content for your course (e.g. texts, images, videos, audio, etc.)
Decide what you want to teach throughout the course and what you want your students to learn by the end of it. What are the learning outcomes of this course? You can also decide how you will test the newly acquired knowledge of your students (e.g. quizzes, tests, exams, assignments, projects, homework, etc.)
Select the Topics You Want to Cover
Once you have established the goals of your course, you can select the topics you want to cover throughout your course. They can be as general or as specific as you want, but they should help you achieve the objectives you set for the course beforehand.
As you design your course and start preparing materials for it, you might decide to exclude certain topics or include some that you overlooked or forgot. Don’t be afraid to adjust your topic selection, but always make sure that the topics you choose make sense for the course you are designing.
Gather the Materials You Already Have
As an educator, you likely already have some materials or content that you could use for your course. If you do, this is the time to gather them and decide where you can use them in your course (i.e. which topic they belong to).
If you want to improve the materials you already have and plan to use for your course, you might need to get help from a professional writer or editor. You can check writing service reviews at All Top Reviews to find and hire a writer who will help you improve the learning materials that you already have.
Organize Your Materials into an Outline
Next, you will need to organize your materials into an outline of your course. You already have a list of topics you want to cover and the objectives you want to achieve, so you can use them to guide your decisions regarding the structure or outline of your course.
For example, you can organize your topics from general to specific. On the other hand, you might want to organize them in chronological order (e.g. if you are creating a course on the history of a particular topic).
Create the Missing Course Content
You definitely have some gaps in your course outline that will need to be filled. This is why the next step is to create the missing course content. Here are some tips on how to do this well:
- Be Consistent – Use the same writing style and tone as in the content you already used for your course.
- Experiment with Formats – Include texts, images, videos, audio, and other types of content in your course.
- Get Additional Help – If you need help, hire a professional writer from the writing agency Trust My Paper to help you create your content.
- Check Similar Courses – They can give you ideas on how you can create content for your own course on a similar topic.
Choose Your Educational Platform
Now that you have all your course content ready, you will need to choose an educational platform for publishing it. Of course, you can publish it on your own website, but it is much easier to find an e-learning platform because it will already have all the features you will need for uploading and teaching your course.
Some of the most popular educational platforms include Coursera, edX, Udemy, and Skillshare. They have different requirements for educators, so you should check them before you decide to publish your course on any one of them.
Upload Content and Fill Out Templates
The next step is quite obvious: you should upload content and fill out any templates you encounter. Make sure that you upload all your content in the right order and that all the media files you upload work properly. If there are any issues, you might have to re-upload some files. Some educational platforms offer their own templates for course content (e.g. for presentations), so you might have to fill out the templates as well.
Proofread and Edit Your Course Content
Before you finally publish your content, proofread and edit it carefully. First, check that there are no factual mistakes. If you were using specific sources, make sure to list them all in the right order. Second, check that there are no linguistic mistakes (particularly in your texts). You can use a tool like Grammarly or Hemingway Editor to check grammar, spelling, punctuation, word choice, and readability among other things.
Ask for Feedback When Teaching
Last but not least, even after you publish your course, you can still continue improving it. As you teach your students, ask them for feedback on the course regularly. Which topics did they like the most? What else would they like to learn? What was hard or easy? By getting feedback, you can better understand the weaknesses of your course and improve it progressively so that it becomes better the more students you teach.
