How a strategy consultant went from a frozen course redesign to a relaunch-ready online course

Vidya and I first met through a mutual connection because she was completely overwhelmed with the course she had created. She’d spent time and energy on this course, and she only got one person to finish. She said, "It felt very slapped together by duct tape when I created it, and so I was looking for something that felt a little bit more professional. I couldn't figure out what order things should go, what would make it easier for people to finish."  

So she knew a redesign was in the cards if she wanted to sell it again, but in her words:

 "The thought of going in and re-recording and almost having to think of this from scratch… do I need to throw this whole thing out? I don't know how these pieces all fit." 

When she described it to me, she said she wanted to launch it but wouldn’t the way it was. 

Left alone, she figured the course would keep doing what it had been doing, which was nothing. If nothing changed, Vidya was afraid that the course wouldn’t sell, and worse, that the people she wanted to help wouldn’t get what they needed.

It would have sat on her own digital shelf collecting dust, and that’s where most courses go to die before they’ve even been given a real chance. Vidya is absolutely not alone in this.

What she needed

Vidya knew she needed help figuring out what wasn’t working. And she wasn’t wrong. Being too close to something you’ve created makes it difficult to see gaps (especially if you’re the expert in the thing). She also felt like a redesign might be more work and more time consuming than the initial design. But beyond that, she didn’t know what the redesign should look like.

At first, it seemed like an instructional design problem; the course needed restructuring, pacing updates, more accessible materials. And it did need all that, plus it was all fixable.

But Vidya didn’t just need structural fixes; she needed a verdict. She needed someone qualified to look at the underlying idea, not just the packaging, and tell her whether it made sense. Designers can polish a course that shouldn't exist. What she actually wanted to know was whether hers should, and whether it was worth her energy to rebuild.

So before we touched the structure, the real work was answering that question honestly. The idea was sound. Once she trusted that, everything downstream got easier, because she was no longer rebuilding something she secretly doubted.

What the Redesign Actually Looked Like

So she hired me to do a course audit (which is a comprehensive look at a course covering three areas: clarity, completability, and accessibility). When I got in there, it was clear Vidya cared about client outcomes as she had activities and she gave them permission to be kind to themselves.

The big thing I found was absolutely what I guessed at the start: a structural issue. Nearly every question I had was answered in the final module. 

So we flipped the last module to be first. The original course saved the body for last, in Lesson 6. But that's where the real entry point was. Taking stock of the body was the foundation everything else stood on, so we moved it to Lesson 1. The course stopped feeling like a pile of topics and started moving in an order that matched how someone actually learns this material. 

I also found that there were issues with the instructions; because Vidya had been working 1:1, some steps were skipped because they happened organically in calls. There was also a disconnect between the videos and the activities. So I gave Vidya suggestions and questions on the handouts and assigned the homework of addressing them. She is the expert in helping women create capacity and recalibrate to their natural energy and time rhythms, I’m just the expert in learning design.

Pacing was the next problem. The energy and time tracking exercises had been stacked together, which is a lot to ask of anyone, let alone people taking the course precisely because their energy is unpredictable. We spread them out, one exercise per week over three weeks, so practice had room to breathe.

And we added something the original course was missing: a way for learners to decide what to focus on, rather than feeling obligated to do all of it. A matrix exercise helped them see their own patterns and make their own calls.

Through all of it, I let Vidya set the pace. She has energy ups and downs, and rushing her would have meant losing her. The irony wasn't lost on either of us: the course is about working with your energy instead of against it, and so was the process of building it.

When she was done, I compiled everything into a single document and made it accessible (alt text on images, proper headings, etc.) and sent it back so she could screencast the exercises and send them to be spliced into the videos that already existed.

How We Made the Course Accessible

Accessibility wasn't a finishing touch. It's one of the three things I check, so it ran through the whole rebuild. The videos had no captions. The handouts failed a screen-reader check. The movement lesson had no described alternative for anyone who couldn't see it or couldn't do it the way it was written.

So we captioned the videos, fixed the read order and alt text on the handouts, and built seated and mobility options into the physical exercises. For a course about helping people work with their bodies and energy, a version that only worked for some bodies wasn't going to cut it.

What changed and why it mattered

I’m gonna give it to you straight: this isn't a story about enrollment numbers doubling. The work was about getting a stalled course unstuck and getting its creator to believe in it again. On that, it worked.

The clearest sign was how she described the difference between what we did and what she'd expected. "This feels like we moved a mountain," she told me. "There's no way I would have been able to do it if we had just done an audit and then you're like, okay, here you go." The fix list wasn't the thing that saved the course. Staying in the rebuild with her was.

By the end she had a course she was willing to put back in front of people, a relaunch planned, and her own words for it:  "I feel really excited. I wouldn't have launched it again the way it was so it probably would have sat on the back burner for a few more years."

That's the shift that mattered: the difference between a course that would have gone to pasture and one ready to be engaged with. And the thing that unlocked it wasn't just the restructuring. It was confidence. It was understanding where it truly fit in her ecosystem. 

She says, "I can talk about it more confidently now. It's much more clear to me: here's the problem this course solves. And here are the results… there's tangible results that you can get." 

And, as she put it, having someone sign off on it "not just from an instructional design perspective but also a 'this idea makes sense' perspective" was what she'd been missing.

The structural work made the course better. The validation made her willing to share it. You need both.

What’s Next

Getting the course right turned out to be the thing that made Vidya look hard at everything around it. Once she could say plainly what the course does and what people actually get from it, the rest of her ecosystem came into question. She had a pile of free resources built up over the years and no clear sense of how they fed into each other, or into the course. So now she's building the on-ramp with a purpose: a free reflection guide that starts people on the question underneath all of it, "what needs to shift?", and moves them toward the course from there.

She's also owning the name. It's LIBERATE now, "align your energy and time to you," and she frames it as more than finding a spare hour. It's about pushing back on how we're all expected to function and rewriting that story for ourselves.

The course that almost didn't survive its own redesign is the thing the rest is now built around.

The Takeaway

Vidya didn't need a louder pep talk or another course on how to make courses. She needed someone to find the real problems and then stay in it with her while she fixed them. The audit told her what to change. The rebuild made the change sustainable, and that's the difference between a course that gets fixed and one that sits in a drawer for another two years.

Ready to get the course you already built out of the drawer?

Start with a course audit to see exactly what's clear, what's completable, and what's getting in your clients' way. We can take it from there.