Online courses have been something of a trend over the last few years, and there may be a few reasons for this, one being that people prefer to study in the comfort of their homes, whether this is training in a role or learning a niche skill.
It’s not surprising that 90% of organizations use some form of e-learning package as part of training or a development plan, as in some ways, this can save you many resources that you may need to use elsewhere.
You might have thought about course creation for your business or a way to earn more income, but you might be stuck on where to start. How to build an online course can be a complicated process if you haven’t done it before.
That is where an online course creation consultant can prove helpful, and below, we’ll look into how what this is and the best one for you.
What Is A Course Creation Consultant?
Consultants can come in many forms in many services.
Still, in essence, you can work with one of these that uses strategists, curriculum developers, designers, web developers, copywriters, and videographers to help you create an online course for whatever you need it for.
We’ve also seen services that give you all the tools and functionality to make your own courses, with builders that provide you with access to a wide range of themes, templates, and formats, with the added benefit of a visual editor to make the process easier.
With strategists, though, you can arrange a consultation to go through your ideas and help build storyboards, and scenarios, scale up your business, and even with advertising if you want to create even more revenue from your course.
Why Should I Use A Creation Consultant?
One of the most significant benefits of a consultant is that you can get a tailored experience to meet the requirements of your course by offering strategic planning and optimization of your content by creating a model that can improve your business in the long term.
This could be something you can try if you have little to no experience in course creation and you are a business or individual who wants courses that deal with a niche topic that may need careful planning and research to make them as effective as possible.
It’s easy to research and have a simple plan of what you want to cover. Still, if you are making these part of training for your employees, you want the course to be inviting while teaching skills that are useful and relevant to the development of employees in this area.
Best Course Creation Platforms
While you might be ready to get started, choosing the right platform is a good indicator of how successful you’ll be for whatever your goals may be, so below, we have provided some consultant-based services that can help you realize your goals and get you off to a great start.
Megan Harrison Consulting
For premium WordPress training platforms that specialize in training, online courses, certifications, and membership sites, you are in pretty good hands as you can consult with a team that will help you realize your content and how it can be displayed.
You can select from their database of templates and customize them to suit your branding and logo, with the option to access the course page and review and approve them to your liking and the best thing is the team will design these for you.
The more ideas and information about your topic you have, the more tailored it can be to the purpose but you will have to do your own copywriting and video if you want them, but the team can refer you to partners they have worked with in the past.
Nerds Of Business
Suppose you want a comprehensive package that gives you everything you need for your course design.
In that case, this is an excellent place to start, as you have content creators, a video studio, web developers, and course-writing templates.
They can even recommend the best platform for your course and how to publish it.
There are so many opportunities for a business or individual to educate a community, generate leads, raise your profile, and gain credibility in your subject or topic of expertise.
You can find everything from direct-to-consumer courses to consulting courses and even create internal staff courses.
You can facilitate your course in areas such as technology stacks and how to use them on other platforms such as IOS and Android.
Rachelle Deem Coaching
This service is for those who want to focus their time squarely on their content and less on the platform’s building aspect.
With a consultation, you can discuss things like templates, integrations, and ways of automation to make things run smoothly.
If you have a deadline, not to worry, as the team are more than happy to work to specific requirements and achieve certain targets at a particular time while having a professional-looking course that attracts customers or employees.
You can pick from 3 packages depending on the level of service that you need, so if you’re not too concerned about marketing and you need it for a specific purpose, but be aware that for any of these packages, you’ll need to enter your own copy and fill in any templates yourself.
Absorb
This service has a more hands-on approach as you are given the tools to make your own interactive courses with a simple drag-and-drop feature that lets you insert elements of your choosing and are able to create scenarios to make your course more versatile.
If you want a course that reinforces the knowledge learned, you can add assessments, quizzes, and questions to keep students engaged and on their toes, and you can even share this service in teams where all of you can contribute to the process in any way you wish.
If this sounds too overwhelming, you can take advantage of the services of an onboarding specialist who can suggest ways to make the learning aspect of your course more successful by drawing on other use cases so you don’t have to go it alone.
Sponge
If you run a business and want more optimizations to use for courses and you want a focus on skill retention, this service may be able to help you, as Sponge focuses on global businesses that want to use e-learning capabilities that are creative and uses leasing science.
This is even more impressive when you add in the potential to create video, animation, VR, infographics, 3D, and anything else you can think of.
You can publish it to your platform so the whole organization can see and access it.
You have active learning focusing on talent and people development, so your employees can become more knowledgeable in the field.
Sometimes, it may even allow you to expand operations and workforce.
Teachable
This service is for those who want to generate an income from their courses or showcase the best of your business as this is ideal for any ambition or subject matter, as you can design pretty much any course type you like, ranging from self-paced courses to interactive live teaching.
You can accept payments from over 130 currencies, so your courses have a broad reach, and you can connect integrations such as Mailchimp, Google Analytics, Zapier, ConvertKit, and many more, so you have more automation when it comes to releasing your content.
If you want more flexibility for your potential customers, you can create free trials, subscriptions, and payment installments to make your courses approachable, as customers may be doubtful and may want to try it out first.
What Challenges Will I Face?
So you’ve got the tools at your disposal and teams that are on hand to give you support, but it’s no secret that this area of content creation is highly saturated, and there’s no doubt that someone else has created a course similar to yours.
If it’s mainly for training, you’re not free of challenges, as even though these courses can be appealing and make a difference in your workforce, you may find it challenging to get employees to use your course if they’re non-mandatory, so getting interest might be difficult.
There’s also the problem of the course itself, as you might have a goal in mind and a block of courses on a board, but how likely is it that people are going to see value in it and invest their time and money into your content, which is where marketing comes into play.
Tips To Create Successful Online Courses
With these challenges, you also have solutions or ways that you can make your course more approachable and teach the skills and knowledge that you’re passionate about and want to share, so below are some tips to make your course more successful.
Work On Engagement
The people who are interested in your course are at the heart of your plans, so if you can build a community or social media integration into your platform, there’s a good chance that it will be shared with more people and eventually reach those who want what you’re offering.
You can even create a comments page for each course so learners can give their feedback, include an overview of what is being taught, or say how relevant the course is for them, so wherever you host, the course seems more active.
You could even create Facebook groups to discuss some of the elements of your course in more detail, so you have a community of learners who can share what they’ve learned and provide other resources to enhance people’s learning further.
Make Your Workforce More Ambitious
There’s nothing worse than having a silent response for those times when you may offer to provide a course that they can take to learn new skills, so make the prospect more appealing by creating a course that is flexible and can help them improve in their roles.
One of the most significant issues is trying to incentivize your team to get on board, so if you’re in a position to do so, explain the promotion benefits that can come from your courses, which can also save you time and money for hiring someone and training them.
By making the course available anywhere, employees can dip into the content as they like, and you may even get the opportunity to provide classes in training that are highly requested.
Hence, it’s all about listening to the needs of your teams as well.
Improve Conversions
You can do this by having analytics on your course pages to see which ones are more popular than others, and this is useful if you find there is a drop-off near the end of your course, which can be very frustrating, especially if you’ve offered a free trial.
You can then go into these pages and make changes to the content, and if you’re using one of the services above, you can get support from experienced teams who can point out where your content could be different and serve the needs of your prospective customers.
The goal here is to have e-learning courses that are relevant to the topic or subject, as it can be easy to veer into different aspects, especially if it’s a technical course and a lot of jargon is used.
Final Thoughts
We haven’t yet mentioned the use of keywords, which you can find databases of a given set that people are more likely to enter into a search engine.
With Google trends, you can analyze different behaviors and determine what skills are searched for by country.
It all starts with an idea, and with automation, it can be even easier to detail the exact contents of your work if you need to change it around from time to time, so try out different ideas and get some feedback from them if you can.
