Online courses are one of the best ways to earn consistent passive income. You only need to create a course once and you can earn indefinitely from it as long as people continue to make purchases.
Depending on the price of your course, the value it offers to buyers, the size of the course’s niche, and your personal brand recognition, you can earn significant amounts of money from online courses. If we are tempering expectations, you can expect to earn reasonable consistent side income if you get things right.
If you are a new or aspiring course creator, chances are you want to know the common mistakes made by creators. Knowing these mistakes will help you avoid common pitfalls and create high-quality and easily sellable online courses.
Many experienced creators learned the hard way, but you can learn from their experience and avoid pitfalls. Below are common mistakes made by online course creators and how to avoid them:
Mistakes Course Creators Make
1. Finding The Best Place to Publish
New and aspiring course creators stress over the best place to publish their courses. They want to find that perfect platform where they publish all their content. However, this approach is wrong as there isn’t a perfect place to publish all your courses.
The goal of every course creator, old or new, is to get their course to a large number of relevant people, and in many cases, this means publishing your courses on several platforms as well as your personal website.
Courses about writing and web development are perfect for Udemy while art courses tend to do particularly well on Skillshare. As you may already know, business and marketing courses are appropriate for virtually every platform.
So, don’t start your course creation journey with the intention of having your courses in one place. Be open to publishing your courses on multiple appropriate sources as well as your website.
2. Not Outlining Course Goals
Before you create any course, you are supposed to take some time to think and come up with learning objectives.
You have to sit down and ask yourself what you intend to teach your prospective students, how the course will impact their current knowledge, and what they should be capable of after completing the course.
Doing this makes it easy to design your syllabus and ensure the content of the course aligns with your goals. The course goals should then be outlined at the beginning of the course and in the course description so students can know what to expect from the course.
3. Lack of Assessment
Simply put, a course is incomplete without some sort of assessment. How do you evaluate and measure what students have learned? How do you help your students identify their strengths and weaknesses?
The answer is simple – assessment.
Assessments come in different forms that include Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs), Essay Questions, Short Answer Questions, and Performance Tasks. Depending on the nature of your course, you may need to use at least two different forms of assessments to properly evaluate your students
For assessments to be effective, they have to be of high quality and you’ll do well to familiarize yourself with a standard test development process that incorporates best practices for educational and psychological testing.
As you’ll come to find out, you have some work and thinking to come up and administer tests/assessments.
4. Lack of Interactivity and Engagement
One of the biggest problems you’ll face as a course creator is the need to make your course as engaging as possible.
It’s very easy for students to get bored with lecture-style content and the onus is on you as the instructor to spice things up without losing sight of your goals.
A way to make your course more interesting is to break it down into smaller sections and multimedia elements like videos, images, infographics, and audio to enhance the learning experience and make it more engaging.
A course solely focused on text gets boring quickly and negatively impacts the learning experience.
Read also: 3 Powerful Ways to Add Extra Value to Your Signature Program & Wow Your Students
5. Inadequate Support And Updates
Chances are people that buy your course will have questions for you and it’s important you have a plan to provide adequate support for them.
This can be achieved by setting up a dedicated help desk, creating a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section, or having a discussion forum where students can ask questions and receive appropriate responses.
Trends change, new development arises, and current information can become obsolete in the nearest future. As a course creator, you need to be aware of changes and update your course to ensure it provides maximum value to students. It’s recommended you set a schedule for reviewing your courses and making appropriate changes.
