"Failing to plan is planning to fail."
- Alan Lakein
Without a plan for a course, you might start creating, popping in text here, a video there and an activity in the middle. Then review it or get it out to learners only to realise there's no flow or your content doesn't actually teach what you were trying to teach. And what that means is... rework. Wasted effort. You don't want that.
So, plan, plan, plan do.
Completing some of the planning steps below will help you refine your solution, focus on what's really needed and create something that actually delivers. Let's take a brief look some key planning steps.
Identify your audience - Figuring out who your learners are and how you can meet their needs.
Define the "flavour" of your courses - Outlining how your learners will experience the courses and what learning and teaching principles your courses will follow.
Set the goals - Defining what learners will get out of your course means you can refine your solution and makes sure learners know what's in it for them.
Plan assessment, then activities, then content - Using a backwards design method to make sure you focus on what's needed and that your content reaches the goals.
Set the style - Setting an editorial style makes for consistent and professional courses and saves oodles of time when creating and reviewing.
The links in the list above will take you to more details on each planning step.
Completing the steps
We haven't numbered these "steps" because they're not necessarily a linear progression. For instance you might have some ideas on the style or goals for the course before you've really had a chance to identify your audience. That's okay, the order you do these steps in is not particularly important. Instead, what's important is that for each planning step you check it against others. For instance, once you've identified the audience, go back to the goals - Would our audience value that goal? Does the goal we've set get our learners closer to where they want to go? Is the level or difficulty of our goal about right for our learners?
So realistically the ideal is: plan-check-revise, plan-check-revise, plan-check-revise, do.
It might seem like a lot of effort, but in the articles above you'll find some guidance that should make these steps easier. Trust us, a little time before, will save a lot of time later.
Get started by picking one of the steps above that you're interested in, read up about it, then give it a go.