The Course Creators’ Achilles Heel
"What to leave in, what to leave out."
Bob Segar, Against the Wind. 1980
It’s common for new and ambitious professionals to lack substantial educational credentials when they join the course creation industry. Many of them are completely inexperienced.
In pursuit of their goals, our creators find themselves needing to rapidly acquire several new skills, such as internet marketing, public speaking, and basic graphic design, to succeed seriously.
Respect is due to those who can get courses up and running.
Photo by Noah Silliman
However, many course designers fail miserably when it comes to the actual design of their courses. Very few people have mastered the art of curriculum development, which entails planning and organising all of the course content.
Choosing what to include and exclude is never easy, but it becomes even more challenging when dealing with less frequently taught topics.
Errors typically fall into one or more of the following categories:
Unsuitable volume of curriculum (too little or too much)
Including the wrong set of curriculum; (e.g. presentation of curriculum that doesn't match the learner's current needs)
Curriculum that bounces back and forth between different levels of difficulty (i.e. suitable for learners at different proficiency levels).
For learners, these errors have two main effects:
Only certain parts of the course are entirely relevant to the majority of learners,
Parts of the curriculum are either too simple (and thus unnecessary) or, conversely, too advanced and, therefore, of little value.
From a business perspective, the errors lead to students choosing not to finish the course, rating it poorly, or both. This, in turn, dramatically impacts the course creator's earnings, given the business terms commonly used in the industry (see below).
Help Needed
The poor quality of the advice available to aspiring and new course creators makes it more challenging to carefully outline the curriculum. The most common advice simply urges the creator to "choose a topic about which you are passionate." I'm not sure this could be less useful.
Why is the advice so weak and limited? It's due, in part, to the difficulty of explaining how to thoughtfully define the curriculum. But it's also a by-product of the incentives of the types of organisations providing the advice. The advice comes from two main sources: brash and unexplainably confident Internet entrepreneurs who claim to be experts in all matters related to online courses, despite their lack of experience, and online course platforms that prosper by providing course creators with online space to host and market their courses.
In each case, the primary objective is to sell services to as many aspiring course creators as possible. If the course creator succeeds, great. However, the creator's success is not the primary means by which the service provider succeeds.
