Those Who Can, Teach - For Profit!

New Course Helps You Learn how to Use Your Writing Skills in Online Education

Note: I will be teaching a course that details how writers can make money creating and selling online courses. It will be offered by SavvyAuthors beginning February 10. The registration fee is $40. Click here to register.

George Bernard Shaw quipped, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” I take exception with that bit of “wisdom.” For many years I have done both. I have been successful at both writing and teaching. It brings together two of my passions.

Today, there are great opportunities for people with skills to share those skills with others and profit from the effort. The online learning sector of the economy is expected to generate more than $300 billion in revenue this year. In the US, more than 60 percent of all students are taking some sort of online course.

This isn't limited to colleges and universities. Many, if not most, of those courses are being offered by independent teachers or commercial educational websites. You can supplement your income from writing by offering online classes.

Back when I taught my first writing classes, I did so at a recreation center. I walked around town putting up flyers. Later, I was able to teach part-time at a local community college. That eventually led to a full-time job as a communication professor.

Today, I am not limited to a single community. Teaching online, I can have students from around the world. Also, I’m not limited by time. I can work on my courses on my own schedule as can my students. And there is no more walking around town putting up flyers. I can reach thousands of potential students through social media saving time, money and wear and tear on my shoes. :-)

Yes, You Can Teach

Some people would like to teach, but when they start, they feel overwhelmed. I may as well tell on myself. When I was in college preparing to become a teacher, I was placed in a class as a student teacher. I hadn’t even taken any courses on preparing a lesson plan or any other teaching techniques.

I failed miserably. They asked me to leave. And after crying over my humiliating defeat, I was relieved. I felt totally overwhelmed. After taking my education prep classes, I felt better and performed better.

The Process

Most often feeling overwhelmed with anything is the result of not having a process or “workflow” in place for accomplishing a huge task. Think about writing a novel. Whether you plot every detail of the book or write “by the seat of the pants,” you still have a process of sorts.

You break it down into steps. Some may start with the characters. Others with the inciting incident. Some may write out a plot outline. Others may make just a few notes if any. But we all focus on one thing at a time. We don’t try to write the whole book in a day or write three chapters at once.

Building a course also requires a process. Once you break it down into steps, it becomes less overwhelming. I’m going to present you with the process most professional educators use to create courses. After years, some of us may skip a step or combine them. And we may not always do them in this order, but these are the things you need to do to create a course:

Narrow Your Topic

Nonfiction writers are already aware of this principle. You can’t do everything in a single article or book. You have to have a clear focus. The same is true of a course. Next week, I will be starting a four-week course on course creation. That’s somewhat specific, but it is still somewhat general. So, I’ll be focusing on how writers can profit from offering online courses. I’m not talking about anybody. I’m talking about writers. Likewise, this course is not about all kinds of courses. I’ll be focusing on those offered online.

If you have a large topic, you must narrow it down significantly. One way to do this is to make a list of subtopics. For instance, with the topic of course creation, I might list the following:

• Course creation as a way to expand one’s business

• Course creation as a lead magnet for coaches

• Course creation for writers

• Course creation with the assistance of AI tools

• Course creation as a group function within traditional educational institutions

I could go on. Each of these could be a different course. Right now, I’m working on two from that list. The course that starts next week for writers and another one about using AI tools to assist in course creation. Some lessons in each will be similar, but most will be drastically different.

Create a Student Profile

When I ask prospective online teachers to describe the type of person most likely to benefit from their course, I often get either a blank stare or they just say, “Everyone.” Think about it this way. When you send a text message, you don’t compose the message and then decide who the recipient should be.

As writers, we understand that we need to know our readers. This is no less true in education. I like to create a student profile much like I do a fictional character. Some things to consider include demographic factors like age, ethnicity, religion, gender, occupation, education, economic status, special interests, and hobbies. Not all of these apply to each course. The key is to focus on what does apply.

You also want to consider their motivations for taking the class. Do they want to improve their skills out of personal satisfaction? Do they want to aim for publication? Do they want to sell more books? What is the primary reason they took this course?

Personally, I create a student “avatar.” This is a short description of what I see as my typical student. I give them a name and physical description. Everything I write, I write for that person. For instance, in my upcoming course, I created this avatar.

Carla is a 35-Year-Old mother of two: Jason, 15, and Caroline 10. She has been writing for a few years. She has had some success in publishing a few magazine articles, and creating advertising copy for a local ad agency. She also self-published two novels and a collection of short stories.

She works full-time with a non-profit literacy project. It doesn’t pay well, but it covers living expenses. She would like to make more money from her writing and writing-related activities.

In my mind, I see her with light brown hair which is a bit wavy and it just brushes her shoulders. This bit of visualization helps me think about my future students not as a generic group of characteristics, but as real people.

Set Behavioral Objectives

There’s an old saying that goes, “If you don’t know where you are going when you start, you will wind up somewhere you don’t want to be.”

This is certainly true in education. Defining a clear set of student learning outcomes, also known as behavioral objectives, is a key to student success. Creating a list of objectives will also help guide the rest of the course creation process.

Effective objectives need to be specific and focus on what the student should be able to do if they successfully complete the course. Avoid words like “know” or “understand.” Those are vague. Go for something more focused on a behavior like “write,” “describe,” “create,” “analyze,” etc.

I start each one with “Student should be able to…” For instance, in the course I’m teaching some of the objectives are:

Student should be able to:

• Create a student profile

• Develop a content outline for their course

• Create lesson plans

• Write lesson content for their course

• Develop a marketing plan for their course

Create a Course Outline

This isn't a detailed outline. It is a listing of the lessons in your course. One of the simplest ways to create this outline is by creating a lesson for each of your objectives. Sometimes you can combine two objectives into a single lesson or possibly take more than one lesson to complete an objective, but most of the time one lesson per objective works.

The other approach is to simply brainstorm the topics you want to cover and then put them in order. For my current course, the content outline looks like this:

• Choosing and Narrowing a Topic

• Creating an Ideal Student Profile
  Setting Course: Creating Behavioral Objectives for Your Course

• Researching Your Course

• Creating a Course Outline
  Creating Individual Lesson Plans

• Designing and Writing Course Content

• Engaging your student through application exercises

• Social Learning: Connecting your students to one another.

• Promoting Your Course

Creating Individual Lesson Plans

For each of your lessons, you need to create a lesson plan. A lesson plan includes the specific objectives for that lesson, a content outline, a strategy for conveying that content, and a student engagement activity.

Objectives

While there is an overarching objective for each lesson, to accomplish that objective, you may have sub-objectives. For instance, one of my objectives might be: Student will be able to create a marketing plan for promoting their course. However, for that lesson, I might have these sub-objectives

Student should be able to:

• Create a social media strategy

• Define content marketing and describe how it differs from traditional marketing approaches

• Compare different promotional media options delineating the strengths and weaknesses of each

• Create a plan to reach one’s best prospects

• Compare and contrast each of the major social media platforms

• Create a marketing plan.

Content Outline

This is an outline of the information you want to convey in this lesson. This is just an outline and not a complete text lesson or media script. It should be a detailed outline identifying the main topics, sub-topics, and information points under the sub-topics. You can use a traditional outline format or something more customized to your personality. You will use this outline to create the fixed content for the course.

Content Strategy

How are you going to present this content? Will you use text-based lessons, audio files, or video recordings? If you are using video, will it be mostly head and shoulder shots, video clips and still images, or a narrated PowerPoint? Will you include textbook readings? Will you create written lessons? Will there be a combination of each?

Student Engagement

How will you get your students involved in learning? Most students will only remember a fraction of your content. However, when they put what they learn to work through exercises, discussions, projects, and creative assignments, they will not only enjoy the learning process more but will also pave the way for long-term retention of what they learn.

Create Your Content

There are three basic forms of content you can create: Text, Audio, and Video. Some courses on this subject imply that everything has to be video. Video is good for some things. However, it is hard to produce well, and it requires technical and editing skills which may take a long time to learn. It works best for courses where you are teaching someone how to do something physical or visual like using a computer program, cooking, or doing crafts.

Audio is easier to produce and edit with free or low-cost software and sound professional. Still requires some basic skills, but fewer than with video. Audio has one advantage over both video and text. It allows for multitasking. Your student can listen while exercising, commuting, or doing chores.

One of the downsides of both audio and video is that they are both tech-dependent. You have to be online or with a device. Also, unless you have other people taking the same course you have to be alone so as not to disturb others unless you are using headphones.

Text lacks the “cool factor” that video and audio have. It is also not as good for illustrating a physical process. However, it is easy to produce a professional-looking result without having to learn new tech skills or use sophisticated editing programs. And for the student, they can print out the materials and work offline. They don’t have to search for headphones if they are working in a library or other location where either audio or video recordings could disturb others.

Additionally, it is much easier to pause and reflect or review a previous paragraph or point you didn’t understand on the first read than it is to rewind and find something you missed on a recording.

While I am proficient in all three, I must admit a preference for text-based materials. They take less time to produce, don’t require a major investment in equipment, and the students can use the materials anywhere.

Feedback and Engagement

Without some form of feedback from the instructor, you are not a teacher, but a publisher. It’s okay to be a publisher. I publish a lot of things. But I don’t confuse that with teaching. True teaching is interactive. Students ask questions, do exercises, and complete assignments. Teachers answer questions and give feedback on exercises and assignments.

There are several forms of feedback you can provide. Email is one of the most practical. Students can attach writing assignments and send them to you. You can provide feedback in the same way.

However, there are other means. Savvyauthors uses a discussion forum where students can interact with each other and the instructor. You can use similar forums in your courses to create a type of critique group.

You can also provide feedback using programs like Zoom and interact “face-to-face.” You can even create real-time class sessions. However, unless you are working on a regional class, it is awfully hard to create real-time programs everyone can attend when your students may be spread out all over the world.

Text and Direct Message programs can also be options. However, it can be difficult to provide in-depth critiques in those programs.

Upcoming Course

This is an overview of the process. If you want to go deeper, we have a course starting Monday February 10 at Savvy.Com. This four-week course takes you through the process of creating your course. I will be with you each step of the way answering questions and giving your feedback on your work.

The course uses an asynchronous format. That means you can access the course content on your own schedule during the length of the course.

The registration fee is $40. Click here to register.