When you created an online course, the hardest part is coming up with – and then producing – the content. I mean the nitty-gritty stuff: the lessons, and the text/audio/video/PDFs that make up the content.
Or, that’s the way I see it. If you’ve got a simple structure, I’ve made courses where I just number the lessons, stack them in order, and then that’s how the student takes ’em. If you want to break the course into modules, and the modules into lessons, and add quizzes after lessons, then creating the structure of your course gets to be a pain.
Recently, I’ve been converting a couple of my books into online courses. I did the first one “all by myself,” making the content and the structure all by myself. But at the same time, I was looking into Learning Management Systems (LMSs). When it was time to create the second course on a different site, I took the plunge and bought a license for LearnDash. It’s a WordPress plugin that handles almost everything you’d want for running a course, including taking payment.
Look, building and administering one or more online courses is still work. But using an LMS to create the structure makes things simpler. You can just plug in your content in the places you want them to be. Want to re-order your lessons? Just move them around in a list. Lesson 3 becomes lesson 8.
But you still have to know what you want to teach, and then create the content to build the individual lessons.
