Welcome back to the podcast today, we will talk about course design, how to create courses, structure, formats, how to not bore people. It's a question that I got from a student and I thought, why not share the experiences that I've had with. Welcome to the content creator kickstart. I sell courses for a living and I've done that for a couple of years now.
I'm by no means as super expert at structuring courses, the perfect way maybe e-learning designers or something are better than me. But I have some experiences that they come from experience. And today you will hear about a couple of courses. I've created how they were structured, the thoughts behind the creation of those courses.
What I would do better now that I'm creating a new course very soon. So the most famous course that I have, the course that most people have completed and that most people come to me to take is go beyond theones at the OnCourse that teaches you the basics more than basics and the advanced stuff how to use Beyonce to create a professional animation.
The goat beyond, beyond course was made many years ago and it's divided into levels. So it starts with the module one, then 2, 3, 4, and five. So you can kind of level up and start to wherever you want to. Depending on your own level at the starting point, right? So if you're a complete beginner, you just start from the beginning and then you move up through the levels.
I think it's a pretty good way to structure this kind of course, because it is directed towards beginners and it is for people who come with no experiences. So it's kind of a, an easy kind of a success path that you create for people and, and promise them to. Be at another level once they complete this course.
So it's a very logical structure. And unlike simple with a completely different structure is strong scripts. It's a script writing course for explainer videos, where I teach people how to how to write scripts, that results in good explainer videos at very fundamental and important skill. The strong scripts course.
Create it later one year ago also it starts with a module that talks about a lot of introductory stuff and overview of the course. Why have I created it? Like I have any prerequisites all kinds of introduction first then comes a few templates. The fish, the better world, the USP, UC, a couple of models.
Then show how to use in practice. So it kind of continues with some examples of how to use these modules. So introduction that templates then examples. And then it has like a summary or a review where I go through all the key takeaways from throughout the course, the newest course I've created is called powerful.
It is a course that teaches you how to combine different formats, animation screen recording, stock, video, and talking hit camera footage into the format that I have on my YouTube channel. So it's a way to teach people how to apply the innovation stuff I create in the answer, the house. We kind of mix that in with other formats to create it or to make it really engaging and create these.
Palpable puffer process was a mates at a time where I was very inspired by the idea of micro learning, micro learning contents, and the microlearning content is supposed to be a short individual pieces of of learning material that you can find through search it's indexed. And you find, you find it based on a urgent question that you have right then and there.
So Powerful process as a number of questions. So all the names of the different lessons are questions. So so, so each lesson answers a specific question. Well, I don't know if it's the perfect structure for a course like this, but yeah, it's, it's created kind of a, like a Wikipedia. Maybe that would be better if I was teaching something like an Excel course or something where you have maybe 200 different lessons with all kinds of different functionalities from within Excel.
And then you would have a concrete, you would struggle with the concrete formula something and then you would search for that and find that yeah, so that's at least how I did it because they want us to test out this microlearning way of structuring things. I am going to create a new course very soon.
It is going to be about scenarios, how to create scenarios in their Vance and the way that I want to structure this course is going to be with ed, just a short introduction module, not a, not a module, just a single video that introduces the. Then I'll have 10 topics that covers something over the course of, you know, eight, 10 minutes.
That's going to be like a talking hit introduction. Then a lot of screen recording where I show exactly step by step, how things are created. And then I'll finish off with a talking head out ultra where I have like one key takeaway to remember from this lesson. So intro step-by-step. Outro. That's going to be the, the format for the individual lessons and then 10 of those, and then a goodbye.
And thank you so a much more, you know I've kind of shaving away all the fluff, all the introduction that I thought was a little boring and strong scripts that I would do different differently. Now, I also actually had some notes to self. For the next course written in my notebook and I wrote tightened scripts, less redundance, less to animate, more talking, hit full energy, less to animate place exercises at the end of every lesson, not in the.
That's something I did in strong scripts that I don't think work very well. And then have that one thing to remember, or one key takeaway for every lesson, practical points, stuff that I would love to have myself. So this is the one key takeaway takeaway that I'll include in the scenario course. And then the last point I wrote to myself was be smart about core structure, stronger beginning, I think who who's, that who talked about that.
But they, they talked about starting off very strong with your course. So people really feel like they've found something valuable here. They might already have paid for it. So they are locked in already, but still, you want to give them a cool feeling in the beginning, not a lot of introduction, not a lot of theory.
You know, behind the, you know, the, all your considerations, creating this course and you know, a lot of stuff that you don't really want to talk about. You just want to jump straight into it and give them value and give them something to learn right off. Then what is value? What is valuable? Well, it depends on the different context that you're in.
So if you want, if you want to build a course, you want to think of your topic. First. I know this a woman she has, she calls herself miss Excel and her courses. I Excel training and they have more than a hundred videos in each course. And I think that's I mean, I have maybe 10, 15 videos in my strong scripts course and 50 in my Vyond course.
So a hundred, 200 videos in one course, that's just very overwhelming. But if it's like a Wiki, like a microlearning format where you search away to a specific solution to a problem, you have, it might be. Like, if you're training Excel, you have a very specific problem. You search for it. And then you found it inside this course.
And that, that just works well. But the pat Flynn, he teaches affiliate marketing, for example, and he's. I don't have so many videos in your courses, it's going to be overwhelming. He only has seven or eight videos in his affiliate marketing course. So that's something that's easy to consume. You buy it, you enroll, you start and you complete it and you feel like you've learned something new.
So it should be like a meal. It's something that you can actually take in and that you can enjoy without just start making exploded, right? Because you eat 200 videos. So it depends on what you teach affiliate marketing, maybe not 200 videos on that. Maybe just a few. If you teach software Excel, maybe 200 videos is fitting because there's so much to, to teach.
And the you're not supposed to take everything in. You're not supposed to start at the beginning and then watch everything to the ends. Just like you're not supposed to read a dictionary or Wikipedia from end from cover to cover. Things that I think you should include in your course, and that I want to focus more on in the future is something like a workbook.
So something that comes along with your video lessons, something that has an overview of all your modules and your lessons with the key takeaways from each, and maybe also some exercises in that workbook way could fill out something with a pencil. I took a course called master YouTube from Matt DIA Villa and his workbook was amazing.
It really was a great supportive material to the video lessons and they were perfectly it's a win in a very, very nice way. So I want to create that for my next scenario course. And. So those were a few thoughts on how to structure courses, what works well, what I've learned from my course experiences, it is up to you how you want to do it.
I think you should think hard about your you or your students. Think hard about the topic that you're trying to teach and see if you can align the formats, the way you structure your course to the topic of teaching and to the, to the student and their needs, then you'll be good. Thanks for listening in.
I'll see you in another episode.
