Speaker 1: When you're organizing your online course, it's very important for you to take a number of things into consideration. And I get this question a lot as we're building online course sites for our clients. So I wanted to share with you a number of tips that will make your course better for your audience and just as important, make the content more valuable to you, give you more flexibility on how you can offer it and make money off of your course. So let me start off with the advice that put together a really good outline. This reminds me of when I was in high school and my English composition teacher said, before you write a single word of your research paper, your article, whatever it is that you're building, I wanna see the outline. And I remember a couple of times I was pig-headed. I just started writing the thing and I gave it to the teacher and the teacher said, I'm not gonna accept your paper until you give me the outline. Because what the teacher wanted to do was to review the outline, make sure it made sense, make some adjustments and then the paper you write will be much better organized, it will flow better. You can always look at an outline and say, hold on a second, something's missing here or gosh, I think these are in the reverse order because until you understand this idea, this other idea won't make sense. So you wanna make sure that you have a really good flow of your course. So outlining your course, and this is independent of how you have your content built, whether you're using video, whether it's a very copy or written course or something that relies a lot on handouts, doesn't really matter. You really wanna come up and create an outline. Now, as you dig down into the outline, you want to think about, can you divide things up into bite-sized chunks? Your learners today are not like people that you would teach in person. I mean, I used to teach at the university level and you had a captive audience and you had a motivated audience because they needed your course in order to complete their degree and if they didn't pass, there were implications. So even though you did have some lazy, disengaged students, there was a motivation that was built into the system and if you were gonna be talking for 45 minutes, they were stuck in the class until the bell rang. That's not the case online. Online, you have someone that wants to learn enough about what you're teaching them to get something done and that something done is not necessarily tied to every single lesson that you're teaching. So you have to keep that in mind. Now, the reason I want you to cut this up into bite-sized chunks is because you're teaching a distracted learner. So just think of a mom who has to learn something but she also has to take the kids to soccer practice but she takes the kid to soccer practice, she knows it's gonna be an hour, hour and a half, however long it takes. That gives her plenty of time to grab her phone, sit in the car, if you're like me in Miami where it's 95 degrees, you probably wanna turn on the air conditioner but you're gonna be sitting in your car and you're gonna be learning off of your phone. And the distracted learner is coming up and trying to fit things in at different times in their life. So it could be that they watch courses as they go to bed. Instead of watching TV before they go to bed, they're watching it in bed. So they don't really have an opportunity to take a lot of notes, they have to absorb it in chunks which is a reason why you oughta package, you know, if it's video, keep your videos to eight to 12 minutes. And the reason I recommend this is because, and keep them consistent because what you want is for people to have an expectations. I know I can get a lesson in based on how long they typically take between now and when my kid finishes soccer practice, between now and this meeting I have that starts at the top of the hour. So I've got a 20 minute space, I can fit a 12 minute lesson in there. So you wanna work with that sort of mentality. Now, quizzing is interesting. If you're offering a certification, you have to have them because otherwise you can't prove these people learned it. But if you don't, what you want is to have a quiz that helps the learner understand, did they pay enough attention? Were they so distracted? Or if they were reading it in bed, did they fall asleep? And the next morning they have no clue what the course was about. And the quiz is a great way for them to turn themselves in going, hey, I've gotta go back and repeat that because I didn't get enough of that. So the quizzing is a way to help the student understand what they should have learned based on what you think was important in a lesson. And if it was only 12 minutes, eight minutes, I mean, all you need is four or five, maximum six questions, true or false, multiple choice, plenty of opportunity for them to validate that they have without having to think, oh, I gotta go through 35 questions. Do I really even wanna take this quiz? So that's something you gotta think about. Now, if you have a small course or if you're just starting in this, the outline, the cutting up of the course into small lessons is probably all you need to know. But if you have a lot of content and I run into a lot of customers, they're building a site and they're pulling in a lot of content that they've been using in a consulting, training, some sort of a practice of sorts. So they have a lot to pick from. And when they come up with the outline, they may come up with an outline that is very, very big, thinking it's a course. Now, what I would challenge those people to think is, is it really a course or is it a curriculum? And the reason I use the word curriculum is because back when we were in college, what you did was you looked at your curriculum and you said, okay, these are required courses. So I have to take one, two, three, and I have to take them in a certain order. And then there were these electives. And so it was a jumble of course. And depending on how you wanted to get at the bottom, did you wanna get a degree? Were you just doing continuing education? Whatever that was. There were certain courses that were very important. There were others that were like icing on the cake, nice to have, but I don't have to take them. Now, if you take a very large course, divide it up into curriculums, then what you can do is sell them as different curriculums, different paths. And it gives you the opportunity to maybe sell one specific topic that's very hot, very in demand. So by cutting it up, it gives you the ability to sell it all as a package. And it could be, hey, if you want the full package, you can sell it and maybe you get a discounted price or you can pay to get the whole thing at this four payment plan. But it gives you then the opportunity to sell pieces and parts of it at different prices. And it could be that today, you only wanna sell the whole thing, but in the future, you might want to sell something separate or as you see people going through the course, they might say, hey, this one here was so valuable. And it gives you the idea, hold on a second. Maybe if you had built it all in one place, it's like, oh, I gotta pull it out now. And then there's work involved. But if you had already built it in pieces and parts, you can take that out, separate it, and then sell it individually. Now, whether you're using, it doesn't really matter. The platform our team specializes in LearnDash and we typically use WooCommerce. Sometimes we'll connect it up to a CRM like Keep or ActiveCampaign or some other platform. But regardless, if you already have this outline and you already have your courses divided up so that they can be moved around, they can be sold individually, it gives you a much better, let's say, asset that can service your business in many different ways as you grow into the future.