So what's the best structure for your course? How should you outline your course? I believe if you teach people in person, the best thing you should do is to mimic what you do in real life. That's how I structured my online courses. Whether it's media training, or public speaking training, I try to teach my online clients the same way I do in person. And that means I get them doing exercises constantly.
There's never long stretches, where they're just listening to me. Now, some things are different about online versus in person. But what you don't want to do is to just treat your online audience as a group of people catching information and just throwing stuff at them. Now, if you are a new trainer, and you're starting your training career is an online trainer. Nothing wrong with that. But what I would recommend you do is get one person a friend, family member or colleague, teach them what it is you do one on one Want to in person?
Record that on? You got it, your cell phone. Watch that and look at how you did look where they asked questions, look where you try to demonstrate for them or ask them to do things, then build your course around that structure. And you may find a whole lot of small videos a whole lot of small lessons. But that's gonna be much better than here's a 30 minute video and here's another 30 minute video because it can be harder to capture and keep the interest of someone online if it's just talking head video. Compared to a professor in a class you can walk around, look students in the eyes.
So that would be my advice, come up with a structure that is very similar to how you would treat someone one on one and then come up with an outline for your course. Now, different people are different, different in how they present here. My entire notes for this course, I can glance at it look, and then just talk for three, four minutes and say everything I want to, you might need more notes. But what I don't want you to do is start reading that makes it seem like you don't know what you're talking about. Anybody can go to the internet, go to Wikipedia, print something out and read. So I do think you need to speak to it.
Whether you need more notes in preparation, maybe, maybe not, but you need to speak. If you find that you're forgetting too much stuff. Typically, that means you're trying to cram way too many points in one video, focus on one thing, talk it out. Then look at your notes and go to the next point. That's the best outline structure for most people presenting online. Now various platforms have minimums For some it's an hour worth of content for others.
It's a half an hour. Try to put everything you have that's really, really useful to And see what you have. If it's 12 hours, that may be way too much. But if it's five minutes, maybe you don't have enough for course, I would recommend whatever it takes to cover the stuff that you really care about and to give people the time to interact. Don't put in an unnecessary padding, but don't try to shrink it. To make it brief, very brief, short all the time.
People are signing up for your course they want your stuffs if you have to shoot for a time period, shoot for around an hour. So although the half an hour may be perfectly fine for many topics,