What Is The Best Way To Create A Course?

There are so many ways that one can actually create online courses. And based on my experience of training over 20,000 people in this, I'm going to break it down to the most simplest way to get results for your students through courses. Let's get in.

Hey there, Sidj here. Welcome to this episode of the Freedom Business Podcast. And if you're not subscribed to this podcast on Apple or Spotify, please make sure that you subscribe for my future episodes. If you want to get notified on awesome new content coming your way. So my name is Siddharth Rajekar. I'm the founder of the Internet Lifestyle Hub. I've been in the education online education space for more than four years. I used to be running a digital marketing agency before that. So more than 10 years in digital marketing, and I've trained over 20,000 paid members in my community through my different courses. And if you look at overall through webinars, over half a million people have attended my webinars over the last four years. So why am I recording this podcast? This podcast is to give you my perspective on what I feel is the best way to design courses. Now, there are. There could be many approaches to the game. There are many other course creators from all over the world who are doing things in a particular way. But I'm gonna be sharing with you what works for me. Because the way that I design courses, it's not so much about giving all the information that I have in my head, but it's more about designing it in such a way by which my students can consume the information and get results. So there's a slight difference between creating courses just to give knowledge versus creating courses to get results. I want to give you the example of Google Maps versus a real map. Now, there are two ways that you can know about a place. One option is you mug up the entire map of a city, and then you figure out where to go from one place to the other. Or the simpler thing is you just open up Google Maps. You're right. Now at point A, you want to go to point B. You set the destination, you get there so you don't have to mug up the entire map to know how to get from point A to point B. Now, the formal education system, the curriculums that have been designed in the traditional process, is all like mugging up the entire map and retaining that map into your head. In your head. But in the digital age, where you can actually search for anything that you want and you can navigate through all the information to get to what you Want, we have to start thinking about curriculum design from a perspective of Google Maps. Formal education system was built on the foundation of memorization and volume of information. But digital coaching and creating online courses, it must be taught through the lens of simplification and gamification. So when you're able to simplify your concepts and provide a path of least resistance for your students to go through that path to get to where they want to go, and you make it fun through different kinds of gamification and achievement levels, that's going to create progress, that's going to get results for your students. So before I get into how I design course curriculums, I hope in the last two and a half minutes I've been able to give you a perspective on how I approach course design. It's about simplification and it's about gamification. Now let me break it down and tell you how I approached my content creation process and how I used to use a combination of prerecorded courses as well as live training elements to deliver better results for my students. Because for me it's just not about giving information, it's about helping people get to the goal of what they're looking for. Step one of my course creation process is to develop a three day course prerecorded content. For example, I have a course called the Freedom Business Model course, which is a three day course where everyone gets to learn between five to six videos per day for three days. And the daily learning times time is probably 45 minutes to an hour per day. What is the purpose of a three day course? The purpose of a three day course is to ensure that the foundation is set and the context is also set to enable your students to understand how to learn. I'm going to repeat that. It is to set the foundation and to set the context to teach your students on how to learn. It's not about what to learn, but how to learn. So in my Freedom Business Model course, I give the entire approach, I set the foundation, I make some of my students go and do research and then I make them to think for themselves. I ask them to share their research back in the comments. In our learning management system, and currently we have more than maybe 125,000 comments below all our courses put together. So this is what I learned from my mentor, Blair Singer. He says that it's not about what you teach, but it's about the way you teach it and more importantly, who you are as a person. So the way that I like to approach this entire course creation process is by first designing a three day course course to set the foundation. And from there I create many different sub courses or other.

Other micro courses to enable my students to continue that learning path. So to recap, the three day course is how to learn. And the other courses from there on are what they need to learn. And what I've done is I've designed a learning path and an implementation path. So people need to learn a sequence of courses to get a few foundational principles right. And based on what they have learned, they have to complete a few tasks. Okay, so learning path and implementation path are very critical in your curriculum design process.

Once you are able to get this basic prerecorded content set up, then the next step is to have some live elements. For example, I do something called a hackathon. A hackathon is a live game that is played between all the members of my community. There are different missions in the hackathon. People need to complete one mission after the next. And these missions are designed in such a way where I deliver it live. I teach people a few concepts and then as a homework or as an assignment, I make them to go back and watch some of the courses where I've shared all the templates and tools and some implementation stuff inside the course. So this way, a combination of prerecorded content as well as live content enables me to get more people activated in completing the courses. If you look at platforms like Udemy, Coursera and other platforms, the average course completion rate is only 5%. But in my community I have more than 60 to 70% course completion rate because I have enabled this aspect of live plus pre recorded content. And when my students are playing this hackathon game, I group them into different teams and each team has a facilitator that ensures that every member is going to finish all the tasks and assignments. And because of this, when I finish this hackathon in three months, I'm having lots of members getting results in terms of launching their online business. For example, in the last hackathon mission that we did, we had more than 600 of our members who built and launched their own website within 30 minutes. I taught them for one hour, I gave them the themes, they just downloaded it. And even non technical people were able to build their own website within a few minutes. Now this is how you reinforce live interactive learning combined with prerecorded learning and people who were not able to catch the steps. I would give them a recording and a replay of that session. They go watch the replay and they come back the next week with all of those tasks completed for their next mission. So when you have a combination of a game that you create, like a gamification process with awards and rewards and recognition combined with pre recorded content, that is the ultimate form of community building as well as course building. Now, the icing on the cake is to design a certification path. So I tell my students is if you complete all the tasks in my course, you get an award called the Freedom Finisher Award. If you achieve a financial result and cross over three lakh rupees, you get a hall of fame award and you get spotlighted. And if you cross over 1 crore in total revenues, you get, you know, you get an award on stage, the 1 crore achiever award in our community. So even when people are coming into my first course, I have, you know, oriented them, telling them that you're coming into this journey to achieve 1 crore in the next 12 to 18 months. That should be your focus.

Now why am I calling this as the icing on the cake? When you are able to give clarity to your students on the destination, like you're going to show them the peak to climb the mountain, but you're also going to tell them the base camps that they need to cross for them to reach that peak and what they need to do and prepare themselves to reach each of these base camps or milestones. Once that is defined, the journey becomes much more simpler. So imagine it's like Google Maps going from point A to point B. And you're also going to give some pointers to your students on what to watch out for, what could be the pitfalls, if there are any roadblocks, how do you overcome those challenges and give them clarity on the journey Also, so when you stop selling information and when you start selling journeys, when you're able to simplify your knowledge, provide a path of least assistance along with gamification and simplification of ideas, you are going to get more results for your students in whatever topic that you're teaching. Whether you're teaching business coaching or career coaching, or you're teaching people how to code stuff, or you're teaching people in the relationship space. Every single topic under the sun can be structured in this way. So I hope you found this podcast useful. If you're already a part of my community, please make sure that you tune into my future episodes and become a Diamond member if you're a part of my community. But if you're not a part of my community, please click on the link below or even just go to sids.comlive Register for my next live webinar and make sure that you be a part of largest community in the world of coaches, teachers and experts. We are over 20,000 paid members right now and growing every single day. Looking forward to serving you and supporting you more and I hope you found this podcast useful. All the best.