Here’s Exactly How to Map Out Your Next Online Course (3 Strategies)

Photo by Himesh Kumar Behera on Unsplash

So you’ve decided to build an online course. Excellent!

Pretty soon you’ll need to decide what it’ll include. In other words, you’ll need to create an outline.

But high-level planning like this can feel daunting. And frankly, unless you’re a course geek like me, you’re probably more excited about creating the content than designing a detailed “table of contents” for your course.

The problem is that without some kind of big picture outline, you risk creating a course that’s muddled and difficult to navigate. You may also waste time creating content that you later decide isn’t needed, or should be handled in a different way.

So what’s the answer? How do you create an effective outline without all the pain and procrastination?

Simple! Let one of these strategies do the heavy lifting.

Strategy #1: Divide and Conquer

“Divide and Conquer” takes the main outcome for your course (i.e., the result that students get when they complete it) as a starting point and breaks it down into a series of progressively smaller units.

For instance, you might first break the main outcome into a series of intermediate milestones that lie on the student’s…