Creating a course: How?

(For the slides and Arabic videos about this topic, please visit the TOT course website)


In a previous article, we discussed some ideas about the course and what we need to have for creating one, in this article we will discuss some guidelines for creating a course.

How to Create a Course?

To create a course, we will need to go through several steps, some of which will be repeated.

Where does it fit in the big picture?

Any course, as we stated earlier, should be filling a Gap, this gap is define by two points!

• Start: Where does the learner come from?
• End: Where do you want to deliver the learner?

In academic courses, that part is not that hard to identify, usually, since the program objectives are usually preset for you, and where your course lies within the program framework is usually clear. If the course is developed within a company human resources development program, a similar level of clarity is available, since the framework is already set by the development program.

Your job may become a little harder if you are developing a course to sell it for yourself or your training company. In such a case you will be developing the course to serve a factitious persona that you create in your mind. You will need to imagine what that customer wants and how you may serve those wants, then try to market that course to the people who may match that persona. This is not an article about marketing, but there is in important point that I want to emphasize here: "Wants" 

I emphasized the word "Wants" in the above paragraph to draw your attention to the fact that people buy what they want NOT what they need! You may identify a real need in the community or the group of people you interact with, but if they do not want to satisfy that need, or even worse, if they do not recognize that they have that need, you will never be able to sell them anything!

In this case, you should focus on one or both of:

• Identify what the customers want and create courses that you have the knowledge of, to satisfy some of those wants
• Work on showing your customers what there needs are and how satisfying them may help them in there life - Turn there needs into wants.

Set objectives/ILO's

When setting the objectives of your course, you need to keep a few points in your mind:

• The objectives of the course should serve the general objectives of the customer, as you imagine or know it. Thus, you need to create that big picture and keep in your mind all the time (refer to the previous section)
• The objectives should be relevant and achievable within the educational level of the learners you are serving. It is not easy to achieve proficiency in programming for graduates of art school! (not impossible though), not to mention the relevance of such a course for those graduates!
• Each objective statement need to be serving a single knowledge, skill, or ability item. The statements should avoid the word s AND and OR, and they need to start with an action verb. (refer to action verbs related to learning levels in this article about Bloom's Taxonomy on WikiPedia)
• Finally, when creating your course objectives, you need to keep in mind "how are you going to measure the objective?". Let's just keep it this way for the moment, as the topic of assessment of course objectives is one that may not fit in this article.

Plan the knowledge gap filling – Prerequisites to objectives

In this step of the course creation, you will focus, in broad terms, om what the learner needs to know in order to reach the point you want to reach by the end of the course. Usually, you need to start from the end (the objectives) and plan backwards until you reach the starting point (prerequisites).

Starting at the objective, you ask the questions: To get to learn this, the learner needs to learn what?

Follow this line of questions until you reach the point where you answer is: They already know that! (prerequisites)

Most of the time, checking other courses, that deliver similar or the same topics, helps in having an initial idea about the topics that are included in such course. However, you still need to do your own planning since you are the one responsible for this one.

Select topics – Plan sequence and relations

In the previous step, you identified some, or all, the topics that you may include in your course. In this step, you need to plan the logical AND chronological sequence.

Examine each topic you will include and create a draft about what you are going to say about it. This will clarify the logical order of topics. This is not a standard step, in the sense that, this is not where you should follow what everyone does. Since you are the one who is delivering the course, you have to identify how each topic is related to the other from your own point of view and plan accordingly how the topics will be arranged.

You will also need to create a time table for the topics. The time table (calendar) should include all the days/hours you are teaching as well as the ones you can not teach in (breaks, holidays, ...) as well as an initial idea about the assessments and assignments, if any, you are planning to have.

Creating the course calendar will help you visualize the topics and their extension in time as well as their relation with the assignments and assessments. This is a crucial step for having a good plan. Now, you can revise the topics and their extension as well as their priority for inclusion in the course. Usually, you will try to fit much content that the course can bare (because of time constraints), so this is where you eliminate topics or reduce the depth of some.

Plan lessons

In this step you get to apply what you have learned before in planing lessons.

• Ste lesson objectives
• Identify prerequisites
• Identify benefits of learning the lesson for the learners
• Plan topics
• Decide about methods of delivery
• Identify assessment methods, if any

Create/Curate Content

Now, you start preparing the content of each lesson. IT IS best to prepare all lessons of the course before the course starts. This is not a big deal if your course is a short one, however, if your course is a long one, it might be more practical to prepare few lessons into the future, and add to them as you go on in the course. This is not the standard advise, but I am just trying to be practical!

For advise about the sources you may use for content creation, you may refer to the lecture about sources of learning and teaching. The Academy Of Knowledge also have full course on Content Creation for Trainers and Teachers.

Plan assessments – Remember level and time

Now you arrive the the step that most people consider "the last step" in course creation. You will need to create a plan for the assessments you are going to use in your course. You should determine how heavily you want to assess the learner performance as well as how you are going to do that.

Then you will go back to your calendar, the one you created with lesson plans above, and set the assessments on the calendar to complete the visualization you started. Now you will see another picture for the course. In this picture you will be able to identify the relations between the different assessments and the course topics in time. Make sure that the sequence is LOGICAL!

Now, you will need to consider some other aspects related to the assessments.

• How much time and effort is needed from the learner outside the classroom?
• Does the learner have access to the required resources for the assessment?

You HAVE TO think carefully about the about those two questions in order to prevent a lot of problems that you may face during the course delivery.

Go in cycles

Now you arrive to the final step!

In course creation and delivery, you have to know clearly that this is a never ending story. You will always have something new to add, something better to include, somehow better to deliver, so, never stop!

when you realize that you are not improving much on the course you are delivering, then it is time to move on! Hand he course to someone else, and start creating a new course.