Progress Report 1: Setting Goals and Planning an Online Course

This is I'm Learning Out Loud, a newsletter about an instructional designer who is trying to create and launch an online course while publicly documenting it along the way.

Let the games begin!

If you’re anything like me, whenever starting a new project you easily get carried away with brainstorming ideas or solutions. Creators, obviously, want to create. But any ideating done at this point will be premature. Our goals should always drive our design.

This week, I kicked off this project by getting very clear about my intentions. Here’s what that looked like:

Goal-Setting

One of my favourite podcasts called Brain Science: Neuroscience, Behavior has an episode about the mechanics of goal setting. Three types of goals were discussed; outcome, performance, and process goals.

Understanding the differences really helped me define my own. If you’ve ever wondered how other course creators write out their project objectives, here are mine:

Screenshot of goal-setting notes. Feel free to read or copy this as a template from my Notion here.

You’re probably wondering, “Heh? No revenue goals?”

I understand that many people create courses to make money (especially passive income). But I’ve also heard this advice; people pay more for more value. So, as part of this experiment, I’m testing this hypothesis. I’m prioritizing an effective learning product rather than dollars sold.

If you’d like me to elaborate (or see this coming back to bite me), let me know in the comments!

Planning

I’ve given up a long time ago on expecting design projects to stick to the original plan.

That’s why I like to use what I call a Subject To Change (STC) Plan. It’s a rough outline of everything I think I’ll need to do for the project. That is, what I think at this early point and I recognize how it’s likely to be adjusted along the way.

My STC plan is based on an instructional design model called ADDIE, which stands for Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation.

I added a Marketing section, which I anticipate will get frequently revised as I learn what it takes to actually do marketing and sales. The initial tasks I listed are the most common tactics I’ve been seeing in regards to selling an online course.

Here’s what the current plan looks like:

Screenshot of STC Plan. You can read or copy this as a template from my Notion here.

Things I Googled

• SMART goals

• average completion rate for online courses

• how to launch online course with no audience

• lead generation vs demand generation

• prioritizing product quality over revenue

Here are some articles I found and wanted to share:

• Online Education Statistics 2021 (For Creators & Entrepreneurs…) by Elite Content Marketer

• 10 Steps To Creating A Wildly Successful Online Course by Thinkific

• Sell a course without an audience—yes, it can be done by Teachable

Thanks for reading!

My next update will be Progress Report 2: Researching a Course Niche and Target Learning Audience. I’m hoping to land on a course topic then (which some of you have been asking about, so stay tuned!)

Until then, feel free to comment or email me about your online course goals. :)

Laraine

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