Ep.1 – The Course of Your Dreams

Creating an engaging, creative, successful eCourse is no small task.

In our first episode of eCourse Adventures Live, we explore what it takes to build a course you love making and that your students love experiencing.

Watch the show, download the audio and read the show notes below…

Episode 1 Show Notes:

There’s more to creating a great eCourse than power points, PDFs and autoresponders.

The Reality:

  1. Humans have ridiculously short attention spans.
  2. The failure rate of online courses is incredibly high.
  3. Most course creators focus too much on marketing and selling, rather than creating epic courses.

This is a cycle we found ourselves in with our previous course, “The eCourse Creation Blueprint.” Sure, we were making money, we could’ve been successful at it, but it didn’t feel like the eCourse of our dreams.

So we started asking ourselves questions…

  1. What kind of eCourse would we have actually been excited to pay money for?
  2. What kind of learning experience would keep us fully engaged?
  3. How would we want to be sold to when arriving at the website of this eCourse?
  4. How would we want our relationship to feel with the teacher of the course?
  5. How much would we have been willing to pay for this course?
  6. How could we infuse a learning experience with our passions and talent?
  7. How do we make a course that’s a work of art?

This opened up a whole new possibility for how we facilitate transformation and teach online.

Instead of selling information, we sought to create a learning experience that is a work of art.

How to Create an eCourse that is a Work of Art? 

STEP 1: Choose a Topic you Love!

  1. Come up with 5-10 possible eCourse ideas that you could create.
  2. Download the Idea Generator 3000 and see which one is your strongest idea.
  3. Go with the eCourse idea that gets you THE MOST EXCITED.

More important than which idea will make you the most money, is the one that you’d be most passionate about creating. The hope for money will NOT be strong enough to get you through the fear, resistance, distractions and learning curve ahead of you.

But your passion, love and enthusiasm will!

STEP 2: Create your Theme

What brings your course to life, makes your students fall in love with their process and takes it from a boring presentation to something memorable is the story that ties you, them and all the other participants together?

You do this by creating an eCourse theme.

Your theme  is the setting and narrative where everything happens.

In the Great eCourse Adventure, you’re on journey to the top Launch Summit. When we decided on that idea as our theme, all sorts of creative ideas started happening on how we can build that world, story and learning experience.  The creative inspiration has been non-stop ever since.

The most important thing about your theme is that it’s consistent through every aspect of your student’s experience:

  • the lessons,
  • language,
  • backgrounds,
  • colour scheme,
  • sound effects or music,
  • the vibe or personality,
  • the tone and language you use in all your writing,
  • your branding and tagline,
  • the characters or how you present yourself…

All these things add up, and the more you do this, the more enrolled your students become in the world and learning experience.

Thus, increasing their participation!

STEP 3: Making it All Work

Once you have your brilliant idea and theme picked, now it’s time to make your modules and lessons.

A few tips for increasing engagement and supporting more students to succeed are:

  • keep your lessons short and digestible.
  • be creative with your filming and delivery.
  • make the experience entertaining if you can.
  • script and rehearse before pressing play.
  • keep your lessons consistent with your theme.
  • tell a story.
  • gamify the experience (a conversation for another day).

There are no limits to what you can do. Think WAY outside the box.

Don’t let your course be another boring powerpoint that people don’t enjoy (those are painful).

Do something memorable; something people thank you for; something that changes the future of eLearning.

Resources:

  1. Sign up for our next eCourse Adventures Live show.
  2. Idea Generator 3000
  3. Art of eCourse Creation webinar replay
  4. The Great eCourse Adventure Trail Pass

Over to you – What is the single biggest thing holding you back from creating the course of your dreams? Share in the comments below! 

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