The 7 Must-Have Elements of a Good Online Course

Along with the high rise of user-friendly technology and online course platforms, creating an online course today is easier than ever. However, the question is whether all online courses available on the internet are good enough to hold quality content! Because nowadays, with minimum know-how, anyone can launch an online course.

So while creating an online course, you need to prove to your prospects why you are worth investing in and how you are an expert in your field. Moreover, to accelerate your course success, there are many aspects to consider.

Elements that can help to plan a good online course

To craft an effective online course, you should be clear on some essential aspects, including

• What content should be included?
• What will be the supporting materials?
• How the content and materials will be delivered?
• What sort of support will be available for the learners?
• What will be the course duration?
• How will it be marketed?

And many more. Needless to say, there are a few elements that make an online course successful.

1. Picking the right platform

Be it to deliver the content and materials to your audiences or to interact with your learners, selecting the right platform is the first and foremost thing that will affect the success of your online course. And, nothing works better than launching your course on your own website. Again, if you choose your website to manage and sell your online courses, make sure you own a responsive, feature-rich website designed by a powerful ecommerce platform. Because selling online courses turns much easier if you already have a well-established platform that holds some leads and traffic in prior.

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2. Easy navigation

An outstanding online course must have easy navigation because it is a key to engaging learners. The interface should be easy to understand and navigate, and the course should be accessible on any device. It is a good idea to include search bars, arrows, menus, links, previous, next and move-to buttons and other adequate e-learning navigation controls to help the students find what they really need. Also, to ensure a top-notch e-learning navigation system, you can create a course tour video, provide shortcut links and maintain a consistent experience for students.

3. A complete course outline

A course outline is a roadmap that will allow the learners to identify how your online course brings them from A to B. Create a course outline around your learning objectives. Include everything necessary, from the title and semester of the course to what the course is about to why it is taught to what will be required to succeed in the course. Mention what activities you are going to assign, the assessment you are going to follow to evaluate the performance, description of course contents, pre or co-requisite etc.

4. Content

Content is everything. Without content, nothing is going to happen. Also, it is one of the first things your prospective learners are going to notice. So the content should be informative, engaging and exciting to your audience. They need to feel they are learning something new. Make sure you have topics that your learners will look for and where your interest and experience intersect. And once you come up with the content topic, you need to analyse and measure your materials and figure out whether they are relevant and up-to-date.

5. Easy access to course materials

Online learners must be able to access each and every material with ease. Having a platform that allows your customers to collect any form of course materials like photos, videos, PDF files, or texts is a crucial component of a successful online course. So while uploading course materials, try to organise those chronologically and, if possible, arrange those based on your course schedule, like for a three-week course, you can use three tabs to upload the materials per week.

6. A diverse learning environment

The use of interactive tools can help you to engage your students and keep them interested in what you are teaching. Introduce a variety of learning ways to capture learners’ attention and boost engagement. You can use quizzes, polls, surveys, and many other tools to make the learning process more engaging.

You can use some appealing visuals, host lives or bring more storytelling into your teaching and make your course a delight to take. Also, to make the course interactive, you can use trivia or interesting research, add questions and promote discussions, give-out homework, and add gamification elements to your course.

7. Some elements of surprise

No doubt, online courses often get dull. So before your attendee check-out mentally, you can try on adding a few surprises to your courses. For example, instead of providing the students with the same blend experience day after day, you can arrange an online competition and reward smaller milestones. Or, while going through the lecture slides, you can play a random video or announce a video conference with a surprise guest each of your learners admires. Try to plan for a new series of surprises for each week to ignite the attendee’s curiosity.

Make transitioning to a successful online course easy with WebCommander

WebCommander is a powerful ecommerce solution which has helped thousands of businesses grow online over the past decade. The platform comes with the solution of managing and selling online courses easily from websites. You can add multiple courses to your website effortlessly simply by using the course widget of WebCommander.

From adding free tutorials to previewing course outlines, you can design your courses utilising all features available while setting all basic course details. You are also open to organising the course materials per your course schedule. And once you start selling your courses, the course overview panel will provide you with a summary of courses sold and statuses.

So be it to integrate advanced analytics capabilities to manage your online courses or to implement custom functionalities to create highly engaging courses, let WebCommander give you a high-quality, responsive website through which you can manage and sell online courses with ease.