Course Design Formula: How to Teach Anything to Anyone Online

But as with medical procedures, real learning should not be painful. A skilled practitioner, whether educational or medical, needs to know how to help you move from your “before” state to your desired “after” state in a way that is relatively painless. In fact, the art of truly skilled teaching involves knowing how to help the learner get from thei

It can be harder than it seems to answer that question. If you’d like some structured guidance to help you brainstorm your answer, I’ve created a free course-planning journal you can access on my website (see “Next Steps”).

When you go in for a medical procedure, the doctor does not meet you in the lobby armed with a sharp instrument and immediately begin poking around in your guts. That would not be surgery, it would be assault. There is a process you go through before, during, and after a medical procedure that ensures that everything goes smoothly, that the right p

and use it after said “helper” is gone, you’ll never find anything in there again, no matter how nice it looks. (Don’t ask me how I know this.) The same is true for learning. We learn best when we are able to process, label, and organize new information using our own mental models and our own mental storage and retrieval system.6 We have to build s

You, the course creator, are at the point of building activities into your lesson to help your students go over the new material you’ve just taught them.

Even though the instructor has already processed and labeled the information, the student needs to process and label it again for her own brain’s storage area. That’s because when we process, label, and store information, we relate it to what we already know and then store it according to how our own mind works. If you’ve ever had someone else come

Verbal information. Attitudes. Cognitive strategies. Intellectual skills. Motor skills.

how do you get your learners’ attention? At the level of your course as a whole, one way to get their attention is through proper use of search engine optimization (SEO) and digital marketing techniques. You want your course to be visible to and gain the attention of the people you created it to help.

Answer: The learners will be able to bake a cake. That seems simple enough, but there are some other things we need to know before we can delve deeper, such as: How well will the learner be able to bake a cake? Under what conditions? Using what equipment? How’s this: Given a cake recipe, raw ingredients, an oven, and baking utensils, learners will