With better flexibility, convenience, comfort, cost-effectiveness, and accessibility offered, online teaching platforms are growing rapidly. There is a tough competition going on in the e-learning field. In this, to make students willing to pay for your online course, you need to make study material that is effective, meaningful, and provides learners with a valuable learning experience. This step should top the online course creation process. Proper planning and the formation of effective study material will ensure high learning outcomes and course sales. Let us discuss the key points to remember while planning for the course content.
Steps to planning an online course study content
1. Go for learners’ language
To plan out how to make effective study material for the students, you need to go for the learner’s language. To sell online courses effectively, the content language should be properly understandable and reliable for the customers. If teachers will use high-end vocabulary, phrases, idioms, and more, the videos, audio, and other study content will not be understandable for students.
Also if teachers will share too much information more than the subject expertise needed, students will get confused and face difficulties in academics. To avoid all this, teachers must focus on developing the study material that is easy to understand and memorize. If Teachers use any kind of new words or terms, make sure to explain their meaning there and then only. This will make sure that there is no scope for misunderstanding.
2. Think about how to make it engaging for students
The main step to think about is how to make the content engaging for students. If the study content is not engaging, the students will lose interest in learning. Your course image and sales can be affected this way. Therefore make sure to create study material that ensures high student engagement.
Using audio-visual tools to teach is the best idea for this. Today’s kids are highly attracted to technology so why not use the same in online learning. Teachers should make videos for students. Other than this they can record podcasts too. Other multimedia tools like demonstrations, picture cards, PowerPoint presentations, visual notes, and infographics should be used too.
3. Focus on active learning
Passive learning won’t work to design effective study material for students. Only watching the video lectures, or listening to the audio won’t serve the purpose to provide students with an effective learning experience. Making students think, solve problems and apply the gained knowledge is equally important. Your study material should include practice exercises to check students’ class performance and understanding. Some of the examples are
- Quizzes: tick the correct option, answer in one word, true or false, or select the odd one out are a few examples of online quizzes that teachers can design.
- Assignments: giving models, PPTs, videos, animations, or solving a question worksheet can be assignments that can be given to students. This will ensure a balance between classroom learning and self-studies.
- Class discussions: include topics for group discussions in the class. Debates, recitations, question-answer rounds, and presentations are a few other class activities.
4. Quality matters the most
To increase online course selling(read how to create an online course here), making effective study material is important. Now the main point to remember here is that quality matters more than quantity. No student will enjoy watching videos of poor quality or reading e-books and notes full of errors. Make sure to keep the content free of mistakes. To do so, it is necessary to record or shoot the videos from a calm and dedicated place. This helps to make high-quality videos without any distractions. Similarly, before sending the reading PDFs to students, check that it is free of grammatical errors. Keeping the quality high and intact holds utmost significance.
5. Conduct surveys
To plan out effective study material for students, taking their suggestions, and advice can be very helpful. On the course selling website(read how to sell online courses here), survey forms can be uploaded to collect the data of students’ reviews, feedback, and suggestions. This will help you to know what are students’ expectations, what is an ideal study material for them, what are the main technical learning components to be included and more such questions will be answered this way.
Conclusion
With the tough competition going on in the online education sector, making the target audience give value and preference to your particular course demands proper planning of the study content. By following the above-mentioned tips, online course creators can plan and design effective study material for the students. This will ensure course and student success both.
