Some years ago, when you wanted to create an online course for your customers or employees, you had to engage an entire team of IT experts to make it work. Thanks to technology evolution, everyone today can easily create an online training course all on their own. There are plenty of tools available on the market which you can successfully use today. Keep reading this article and follow the steps below to create online training courses.
4 Steps to Take to Create Online Training Courses
1. Define the course’s purpose and target audience
When you decide to create an online training course, you need to know who is your target audience. You should decide which is the purpose of your training course. Moreover, one of the first steps you should take is to think of what type of audience is going to receive your message. Learn as much as you can about the persons who are going to get trained online and create a target persona. Ask yourself questions about the ideal trainee. What would they like to learn? What is their preferred method of learning? Once you have found the answer to all the questions about the target persona and purpose, then you are ready to start adding content to your online training course.
2. Create an outline for your training course
If you want to create a clear and comprehensive outline for your online training course, you need to establish how the course will impact your business and what are its objectives. The learning objectives will help you a lot in creating the outline for your course. You can create a simple bullet list where you will include the main topics and the relevant subtopics. Another alternative would be to create a detailed storyboard with all the details you want to include in your online training course. The outline is very useful when you create the content of your training course as it will help you stay relevant and coherent. In addition, when you create the outline, you can also use visuals. They will help you follow the course’s flow easier. Plus, in case you add new colleagues to the team, it will also be very easy to show them the course’s details and do an effective handover.
3. Build the content
This is the phase which requires the biggest amount of work. However, as long as you know the course’s purpose, target audience, and have already developed the structure, this phase is not going to be very time-consuming. When you build the content, it is very important to always have your target audience in mind. Take into consideration the level of expertise your audience has. Therefore, it is better to keep a conversational tone and stay away from complicated language. If you feel you need help to create engaging content, you can always collaborate with professional writers, like the team at Trust My Paper, who can assist you in writing an interactive and successful training course. In addition, you can also include short games or stories to increase the level of interactivity. People like examples from the real world. Thus, you will ensure the success of your training course by using this technique.
4. Make sure you have the right tools
Quality will always win the audience. Plus, it is important to show your learners that you are a professional and you pay attention to all the details. So, you will either need high-quality tools to film and record your course. Thus, you should prepare a list of the necessary equipment. For example, you will need cameras, microphones, and the right software to put everything in place. At a minimum, use at least a high-quality microphone along with an HD device like a mobile phone or tablet to record. While more devices record in HD these days, the sound quality is very important. So, getting a professional microphone or even a lapel mic should be on top of your priorities. The video part also plays a crucial role. Make sure that your viewers can hear you very well and offer them a decent video quality, and you will be fine.
Once you have gone through all the four steps above, you will see how easy it is to create an online training course. These steps will help you stay organized and not miss any important details which could determine the success of your course. Irrespective of the tools you are going to use, it is very important to define your target audience, understand what they expect from you, and how they want to receive the content. As long as you understand it, the rest of the elements will follow.
