Hi. It's Paul again. So before we go too much further, let's actually define what an online training course looks like. So a course can be a whole bunch of different things, but essentially it's text, possibly video, interactive video, and you have the opportunity to ask quizzes so you can test your audience on the progress made in acquiring the knowledge for the course.
It differs from a book because it can be very interactive for things like sharing software. You could do a screen share and show the users exactly what you do with pull down menus, checkboxes and all the different configuration options that you select when you're using the software that you're training your users with. The great thing about an online course is it can be viewed everywhere.
Some people will sit in front of the computer at their desk, working through the lessons. Some people will be standing in a queue supermarket and just want to actually revise or refresh their understanding of a lesson they've already done. Some people may even be in the bathroom. We won't say any more about that, but there are other places where people can sit down at an airport in a queue somewhere else, a doctor's surgery on a smartphone, and actually absorb the knowledge from the course you've created online for them.
So let's assume the stage where you've created all your content in word format. So you have your chapter headings or your lesson headings if you like. You have the text all ordered in the right way and you've created some videos, maybe put your videos on YouTube or any of your other hosting platforms, just a temporary measure, and you can put links in the text so that you can see how the links for the videos associate with the text.
And of course, you create some images to make it look pretty, as I was mentioned before, and you can add those in there as well. Now, a little bit of advice with regard to naming conventions. When I first started building online courses, I tended to create all my files and call them lesson one. Lesson to lesson three turned out to be a big mistake, the reason being that I was always moving lessons around and the videos that were called lesson one actually didn't end up going with lesson one.
Things got disjointed and split up and moved around, so what would be very careful to avoid numbering your files with 01, 02, 03 because you may want to move around. And when you've got a number that no longer correspond with the file name that goes with that lesson, it just creates more confusion. So my suggestion is don't use a numbering scheme, have a number of a lesson, your ordered the lesson, have that dictated by the row number in a table in Microsoft Word or maybe in a spreadsheet.
But don't actually hard code the number of the lesson into the file names that go with the lesson like the images or the videos. So in terms of the different free tools that you could use to create the content for your lesson, you've obviously got Google Drive where you can store files Google Docs, which is compatible with Microsoft Word, so you can create your text.
You've got some Canva, which is great for creating images and graphics. You've also got Google sheets. So Google sheets is compatible with Excel. Google Slides, you've got loom, otter.ai for speech recognition. So again, a great way to create a content for your course is to dictate it. So if you're very slow typing but you're very good at speaking your lessons, you could use otter.ai or even Google Docs most word processors these they have an inbuilt speech recognition engine so you can actually dictate your text straight into the document, then do some editing afterwards.
I would say it's quite important to spell check your text, grammar check it, make sure your grammar is correct and your punctuation, your apostrophes, all that kind of thing. That all looks very, very professional. So by now you've written your content, you've got your images in place, you have all your videos, maybe you've created some quizzes. Again, that can still just be in a in a word format inside a document.
In the next video, I'm going to talk about how you can take all that fantastic content you've created and actually put it onto a teaching platform such as Kajabi, Thrive Apprentice, Teachable. There are lots of different platforms out there. So we're going to talk about that in the next lesson. Thanks a lot. See you soon.
May 26
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