An online course is a series of educational e-mail messages sent to subscribers. Adding an online course to your existing programs can have benefits for audiences, your client and you. Even better, you might be able to create your course easily from existing material. Here are seven easy ways you could do that.
1. Convert a workbook
If your training program or seminar already has a detailed handout or workbook, consider delivering it as an online course (instead of giving it out to attendees at the workshop itself). The material is already highly relevant to the program, so it’s the perfect fit for a follow-up course after the live workshop.
Of course, this might mean you have to provide a different handout at the workshop, but that could be just a cut-down version of the full handout – which is easy to create. Alternatively, you might decide you don’t need a handout at all for the live workshop, and simply deliver it as an online course later.
2. Summarise book chapters
If you have put the work into writing a book, you have thought about organising your material logically and delivering it in an appropriate sequence. So it’s easy to create an online course that delivers the material in those same sections and sequence. Of course, you won’t deliver the entire book chapter by chapter, but you can deliver a summary of each chapter in each course module.
3. Extract articles from a book
In the previous example, your course provides just an overview of your book. You can change this slightly – and deliver more value – by sending more detailed material in each a course in miracles module. All you have to do is identify chunks of the book you can extract as individual articles, and then send these articles as an online course.
4. Collate related articles
You can also take the previous idea and do it the other way around: Rather than extracting articles from a book, you collect articles you’ve previously written, collate them in an appropriate sequence, and deliver them as an online course.
If you publish a regular newsletter or blog, this will be extremely easy to do. It’s even easier if you have been tagging your blog posts as you publish them, because it’s easy to see everything you have written on each topic. Simply look through the list, identify some that could be included in your course, and you’ve done 90% of the work!