When you’re creating a course, it’s really important that you’re intentional with the delivery method and flow of content. You want to design your course in a way that works for adult learners. 

The end goal for any course is that your students purchase it AND also implement the teachings into their businesses and lives. But if your course overwhelms and confuses them, the chances of them finishing it decreases significantly. 

I hear questions about this all the time: “Well, how do I not make it overwhelming? How do I make sure it is clear and easy to understand so my students make progress and actually take action?”

Now, you can’t ensure or control that everyone finishes your course, but you can increase your chances by implementing these tips and strategies. 

1. Outline your course journey.

Before you even create your course curriculum, make sure you outline the journey you want your students to follow. 

A lot of new course creators like to stuff their courses with information and resources to increase the course’s value. Try to avoid this. It’s your job to consider what is a reasonable amount of information to share with your students. How much knowledge can your students actually consume and retain each week? How much are they able to implement? 

If you overload them with information, they’ll start to feel like they are falling behind and no one likes to feel that way. Design your course to flow in a realistic way, so that you can make it clear to your students that they’re not behind as long as they are taking consistent action. Share those reminders consistently throughout the course so they’ll feel confident to work through it at their own pace without losing momentum.

2. Give people a roadmap.

Always give people a roadmap and make it an essential part of every course you create. 

You may think it’ll be obvious for students to understand the modules and the lessons.  But I would highly recommend that you create a separate document (add it to a lesson within your course) that talks about the curriculum, the pathway that they should take and the transformation they’ll experience at every step. 

Our brains need a lot of repetition. A lot. 

It takes a while for us to learn something new, and it’s difficult to focus on everything all at once. Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself multiple times. That’s how your students will retain more information and experience the exact transformation that they envisioned when signing up. 

3. Make sure each video is short and actionable.

Each video should be between 15-20 minutes long and followed by an action step that they can implement (and do so pretty quickly). This can be a worksheet, an invitation to participate in the course comments or Facebook group, or an embedded quiz. You can also frame it as a challenge and encourage your students to take certain steps over the next several days. 

These activities give your students an opportunity to generate more ideas that they can actually put into action. If you only consume information and never implement it, then that information becomes useless. But information followed by implementation turns into results. And as your students continue to experience more results, they’ll be excited to finish the course and become raving fans. 

4. Prevent students from rushing through or skimming the course.

There are various ways you can prevent students from skimming over the course materials so that they actually take action and retain information. And these various ways vary in degree of “severity”...

Here are some of the things you can implement as ways of blocking students from progressing through the course too quickly: 

• Drip content on specific dates only (this is great if you’re doing a live course)

• Drip content after a certain amount of days after they register (this can be used for an evergreen course where you don’t want students to see lesson 2, for example, until they’ve been inside the course for at least 7 days)

• Add a quiz at the end of each lesson to encourage them to complete it before moving on

• Set up forced progression in your course hosting platform in a way that allows students to see all the lessons, but doesn’t allow them to click on lesson 5, for example, until they’ve clicked through the first 4 lessons. 

5. Share the content in different formats.

Create content in different formats so that you can match each student’s learning preferences. Everybody learns differently so we all have a natural tendency to consume information in the form we understand best. 

That’s why it’s important to repurpose your course content to tap into their natural learning tendencies. 

Here are the 4 learning styles and ways in which you can create content tailored to each of them: 

1. Visual Learners: Create videos and include slides that they can refer to as they follow along.

2. Auditory Learners: Then you can convert your video into an audio recording. This is perfect for people who don’t need the visual aspect and prefer to consume your content on the go.

3. Reading/Writing Learners: Transcribe your video and clean it up to create a written version. Feel free to include checklists and summaries that these learners can refer to.

4. Kinesthetic Learners: Worksheets work great for these types of learners. They can print them out and write down their thoughts and ideas as they follow along.

If you’ve already created your course and want to make improvements to it, take it one step at a time! Go through the strategies above and start to review your course while implementing them in phases. This process should be as fun for you as it will be for your students who go through it all!