How to Create Course Content so Clients Will Get Real Results
When we just focus on “course content” as giving people information in a course, we're putting the onus of learning on them. We're asking them to figure out how to make connections with the information, engage with the information, apply the information. We haven't given them any structured way to do those things.
And that means we haven't actually created a course.
We haven't created a learning experience. We've created a book. We've just dumped information in, kind of like spraying them with a fire hose, without the pieces that actually make information stick.
Because people don't actually learn by pouring information into their heads, they're not going to be successful in your course. That means they're not going to:
come back for other things,
recommend you,
make good referral or affiliate partners.
What’s the difference between an info dump and course content?
A curated, designed learning experience is one where you are creating the pathways and the direction through the materials in a way that it actually sticks in their memory.
They can actually use it.
What We Want Course Content to Do
This idea is called transfer, and it’s the goal in the field of education. Transfer is when you can take what you are learning and apply it not just to the context of the course, but also outside of the course.
That's when you know something has really stuck. And it's the golden moment in teaching. It's what we strive for.
We want people to remember information, understand information, and apply information in multiple different situations, because that's how we know that they've learned it.
What We Don’t Want Course Content to Do
Be an info dump. We don’t want that because the thing that we want to stay away from is information regurgitation. And when we just provide info and then pop in a poorly written quiz on it right away, that's what we're getting: regurgitation.
That's just having someone spit back exactly what you gave them. And that's not helpful, because if we are not encoding that information in ways that are useful to us, then we're not actually learning it.
And in some ways, digitizing the learning experience has actually made it worse. We're no longer sitting there taking handwritten notes.
There's a lot of research that connects handwriting notes in your own words as one way of encoding things, if you're writing it in your own shorthand. Now we kind of copy and paste from slides. As humans, we need to connect the things that we're learning to the things that we already know.
Why We Don’t Want a Video Book
I've been doing a lot of comparison between books and courses, and I want to make it clear that I'm not saying you can't learn from a book. You can. Some books are actually designed to do this very well. They have activities built in. They have discussion questions, ways to help you connect to the material. I wrote one like that.
My award winning Teaching Literacy Online book is entirely built around what to do, the actual activities to take and use in the classroom. And that's how you really start to integrate information: taking it and adapting it.
But most courses aren't doing that, and a lot of books don't do that either. Most courses are books that you just press a play button on.
Making Course Content That Gets Results
We know we don’t want a content dump because people don’t learn through osmosis, but how do we fix it or avoid it?
Start with Outcomes before Course Content
It all really starts with active outcomes. If you phrase what your learners are going to be able to do by the end in action verbs, instead of vague aspirations like "they will understand," then everything else will get easier. It is the core foundation of an action based course.
We don't want them to just understand it. We want them to use it. We want them to do it.
So your outcome isn't
"learners will understand email marketing."
It's
"learners will write a five email welcome sequence designed to convert 1% of leads into buyers.”
Not every outcome looks like a thing that you can hold. What I mean by that is sometimes the deliverable isn't something that you, as the teacher, can see. It's something that is inside someone's head. It's an adjustment of their thoughts.
For example, let's say you're teaching people how to evaluate whether or not a course is actually working. The outcome isn't a document. It's that they can look at a course, any course, and diagnose what's broken. They can compare what they're seeing to what good design looks like. They can analyze it and make a call.
This is why I don't actually teach people how to analyze their own courses in a course myself, because that is hard to teach. It is very squishy to teach. I can give them all of the action oriented things to look for, but it's something that takes a lot of years of practice. I'm not going to get you there in a six month course, and that's because it's a metacognitive skill that you refine over time.
To get there, you can't just give them information about what good course design is. You have to build in structured ways for them to practice using that information. Looking at examples, comparing them, naming what they see, putting what they see into their own words.
It's the doing and the thinking piece.
And if you skip that and just give them the theories, they'll be able to tell you what good course design is, but they won't be able to spot it or fix it when they're standing in front of their own or someone else's.
That's what you're trying to work toward when you write outcomes that are action first.
Then Write the To-Do List To Determine Your Course Content
Okay, so after we have those active outcomes, our next steps are really about what they need to be able to do in order to get there. And you’ve got some options.
Thinking backwards.
Some people like to work backwards. I tend to like to work backwards, and it's a really common instructional design method. My brain finds it easiest to do it that way too. And the way that you do backwards design is you ask: to get there, what is the last step? What is the last thing they've done so that we know that they've met this goal? And then what's the step before that? You keep asking what's the step before that.
Thinking forwards.
If thinking backwards is difficult for you, you can also think forwards: if this is the end goal, what's the first step I need to take now? If you do it that way, I do recommend looking at it backwards after you've done the forward motion, because moving forwards, sometimes folks skip steps, especially if you're an expert. So I would still look at it backwards after you do the forward motion.
Yeah, but You’re Not Done with Your Course Content
Okay, so you might be with me so far, and you might be thinking, this isn't groundbreaking shit. Yes, I get that. But that is where a lot of people stop. And I think that's how we end up with so many surface level learning experiences where people don't actually implement.
Because there are two extra layers that a lot of people don't do when they are outlining their course.
The first is going through all of those steps and writing out the tasks. The tasks are basically the to do list for reaching that step, for being able to say "I have completed step three." They are more granular than the step itself, but haven't quite jumped into the how to. And that's actually the next step.
So after you have step three, you have all of the to do tasks under it, then you start getting into the "okay, well, how do I do this task?" And that's where we get into the activities. For each task you're going to ask, how do I do this task?
And I know it's going to feel like you have already given them a list of things to do. But remember, this is where your expertise gets in your way. You need to give them enough details in order to be able to do the thing. You can't just say "go do keyword research."
You need to say "this first step of keyword research is doing this thing, and then we're going to validate it." You break things down. And going through steps and tasks and activities is a way to do it so that you know that it's always action oriented first.
NOW You Get to Write Your Course Content
And then, and only then, will you start to pull in information. This is the part everyone thinks of when they think of “course content.”
You still do need information. When I was homeschooling my kids for a little while, one of my biggest frustrations is that we had this math curriculum, and the math textbook was full of all of these activities, but nothing that explained what we were doing, or how we were doing it, or why we were doing it, or why it built on the last thing that we did.
It was super frustrating. You do still need information, but you need the information to be curated to help them do the actual activities, do the thing that they're coming to you to get done.
Your Next Step in Course Curriculum
So if you're new to this and just starting out, all of this should feel pretty approachable, because you haven't built anything yet. You're not trying to dismantle things. You're not in the weeds.
If you've already started, there's no harm in going back to the beginning and checking those outcomes to see if they're action based, and reworking things from there. When you get to the point where everything is action oriented in your course, you can look at what you've already built and then start to pull things in.
We don't throw the baby out with the bathwater here. It might mean leaving some things behind. But that's okay. Not everything is going to fit. Do not give them more for the sake of giving more value. More information does not mean more value.
If you're still not sure if a course is a good fit for your business, check out my Is a Course Right for Your Business quiz. We also walk through all of this in my Course Maker Membership.