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My 3 Step System To Easily Outline Your Online Course

Outline-your-course

When you think about creating your online course does it feel exciting, or overwhelming and daunting? Truth be told there is quite a bit of work that needs to be done to create a 6 figure course, BUT the process of putting your course outline together doesn’t have to be stressful.

It comes down to having a proven framework to follow…

And after creating many courses of my own and working with dozens of coaches and online business owners to create their course outline, I’ve pinned it down to a proven framework, and I’m going to share that with you today.

This framework is 3 steps and if you follow them in order I know that you’re going to find the process of outlining your course pretty simple and very effective.

Step 1 is to look at the transformational journey your students are going on.

Every successful course, program or service has a clearly defined transformational journey clients and students go through. From their current state where they are struggling with something that you can provide a solution for, to their desired state, where they are after they’ve achieved the results from your program. How do we want them to feel when they exit our course?

So grab a big piece of paper or a white board and on one side write down Point A, their current state. Then all the way across on the other side, write down Point B, their desired state.

Step 2 is considering all the major steps or milestones your students need to take to get from Point A to Point B of that transformational journey. These milestones should be the big ones. The must do steps for the transformation to be complete.

I recommend using post it notes with the sheet of paper or whiteboard from step 1. Write down each milestone on a separate post it note. You can easily move the post it notes around to get the most effective and organised flow for the milestones.

In case you haven’t guessed, these milestones become your course modules.

Step 3 is to consider all the smaller steps or mini milestones that go together to achieve the larger milestone. Brainstorm everything you can think of for each milestone, no matter how big or small. Again I recommend using post it notes, and one note per item. You can then move them around under modules to get the best flow for each module.
These mini-milestones are your course lessons.

Now what you have in front of you is an outline or map of your course.

Taking a birds-eye view of what you’ve created, ask yourself if each lesson is really needed. Is the information you plan to include in that lesson critical to cementing the concept of the module, or could it be too much information and overwhelm?

I personally like to aim for between 6-8 modules and 6-8 lessons per module. More than that can often be information overload. Too much less and you risk not covering all the critical points your students need for success.

Now that you’ve got your outline, creating the content for each lesson will be a much simpler process. I recommend batching your content creation into like tasks. What do I mean by that?

Well instead of creating the slide pack for module 1, lesson 1 and then recording the video, editing the video, creating the worksheets, and loading it into your portal, I suggest setting aside time for each type of task. I would for example, create the slide packs for each lesson under module 1 on one day. Then on another day I’d create all the worksheets for module 1. I set aside a block of time to record all my videos for a module at once and again for editing.

Batching is a really valuable process because you can keep the momentum up of similar tasks, rather than losing productivity by switching between different task types.

Give this a go, and I assure you that the process of outlining your online course won’t be as stressful or overwhelming as you think.

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