If you are an online educator or an entrepreneur who aims to make money through the new trend of eLearning, you must be putting real efforts to create effective online courses. You might be an excellent instructor with an abundance of knowledge and skills.

But creating an online course is not an easy task as it sounds, It takes a lot of planning and preparation and a lot of work. It is a journey that can be overwhelming at times.

However, the efforts you put in can pay off as it brings bigger results. If you fail to understand the basic principles of online course creation, you might be at the risk of completely wasting your efforts and time.

To make the process easier for you, we have compiled some critical course creation mistakes you must avoid when crafting your online courses.

Failing to understand your target audience

One of the major course creation mistakes most beginner level instructors make is failing to understand their target learner base. If you don’t understand who your audience is, you might end up choosing the wrong course topic.

You might not even know what courses to create for your audience and completely fail to attract leads to your eLearning site.

To avoid this mistake, find who your target audience, be clear who your courses are for and who it’s not for. When choosing a niche, don’t try to make it appealing to too many people, you will risk appealing to no one.

Collect as many details about your audience as you can have like their interests, thoughts, and feelings of the audience you are aiming to serve. Doing this will ensure that your online courses have a clear audience to target to which will help to sell your courses easily.

Creating big courses

If you are an expert educator with a lot of passion, you must be interested in offering as much knowledge to your audience as possible.

While learners also love to gain knowledge, they prefer shorter courses that are easy to consume. If you are creating big courses, you have to charge accordingly and you might risk missing out on your target audience who are not ready to spend a lot of money on online courses as they might not know you yet.

Hence, it is important to create short courses and incorporate as much as information possible in the online course the most precise way. Learners might get accustomed to bigger online courses as they progress, but this happens slowly.

Hence, when you are starting out, it is a good idea to create several short courses instead of creating a single big course. Completion of each short course encourages repeated purchases especially if all the smaller courses follow a logical flow from one to the other.

Creating courses you think your learners might need

When creating online courses, it is an obvious practice for instructors to think that they know what their audience needs. It is one of the mistakes to avoid in online teaching. Most instructors make the mistake of thinking that they know what their audience needs.

But there is a great difference between what you think your audience needs and what they actually want. Hence, before spending hours creating an online course, make sure you conduct in-depth market research to check whether your online courses have a needy market.

To find what your learner base actually wants, you can directly ask them. Ensure that you ask very specific questions and offer them space to discuss their suggestions.

Underestimating the power of engagement

Students often learn more through interaction with each other and engaging creatively with course content. Unlike traditional teaching where teachers take control over teaching, in the eLearning environment, students communicate and interact through online tools like forums, YouTube, and other multi-media platforms leading to outstanding results.

If you want to facilitate an engaging learning environment, make sure you integrate relevant features and functionalities in your eLearning platform by using professional eLearning software.

For example, Pinlearn is an efficient software solution that allows you to create your own eLearning platform in simple steps so that you can cater to an audience who crave for engaging learning experiences.

Getting lost in details

This is another course creation mistake most instructors make in the journey of creating an online course. Before you begin, it is natural to get overwhelmed by the steps ahead of you and become lost in detail.

Once you plan to start, you might waste hours choosing the right equipment to use or how to host your content. Hence, when you start out, plan about the equipment you are going to use, the tools you need, software choice, etc so that you don’t mess up things towards the end.

Also, plan on the course content so that your courses don’t become too lengthy or lack a clear logical sequence.

Failing to market your courses

So you have learned how to teach online classes and have created amazing online courses and finally launch it. But if no one buys your courses, your efforts go in vain. That won’t probably happen if you have chosen the best topic, and know the needs and interests of your audience.

But, even if you follow all these things, you must promote your online courses if you want your target learner base to buy it.

Market your courses on social media platforms so that you can reach out to your target audience easily. Consider giving away quality freebies so that you can collect the email addresses of your potential learners and then begin to sell your courses to them by showing how you can help them achieve their learning goals.

Read More: Challenges Every Teacher and Educator Must Face in Post-Pandemic 2020

Selling your online courses before creating a finished product

Some online instructors make the mistake of starting selling their courses even before finishing it. It might help you get more sales and gain momentum but it might not always have a positive impact as you think. As online course creation is a work that requires creativity, they might not turn out exactly as you have envisioned it.

In such a scenario where things don’t go as you have planned and you require more time to edit and complete your online products, you might fail to bring your online courses to your students at the promised time. Hence, it is good to create your courses first and sell them later once the whole product is created.

Not pricing the courses right

When deciding the pricing of your online courses, it is a challenging task to get the balance right. If you price your online courses too low, they might have a perception of poorly valued courses and you might end up attracting the wrong learners.

On the other hand, if they are priced too high, your learners might not be willing to purchase your courses. A win-win situation is where you can get the pricing of your online courses right is to mix up your online classes with different pricing models so that you can offer high-quality courses.

Another tip would be to price your courses according to the value they offer so that your learners won’t mind paying for them. Make sure you don’t make it too cheap just because you want to attract more learners, especially if you have put a lot of effort into designing and creating your online courses.

Consider implementing a tiered approach where you use a combination of open content for potential earners who cannot afford more and offer more layers of course content for learners who won’t mind paying more if the value of the course is great.

Conclusion

When you are creating online courses, take time to understand the requirements of your target learner base so that you can serve them better with your content. Follow this guide so that you know the mistakes to avoid in online teaching so that you can create great online courses appealing to your potential learners.

What are the strategies you commonly follow to create amazing online courses? Please share it with us in the comment section below We would love to hear from you!