Why To Build Your Own Course (and Why Not To).

Course authoring is now a ubiquitous tool in most LMS, but not all are created equally. Building you own course has many benefits, like saving money or instant updating, but it can also spiral into a waste of resources for inefficient training.

What are the benefits of creating your own course?

Complete Control Over Content

This is self-explanatory, so it won’t be covered in too much detail, but if you make your own course, you’ll have complete control over the content your learners consume. CoreAchieve takes this further by allowing a complete overhaul of the course’s style—so it can truly be its own.

Simplify Things

Instead of having to work with multiple systems or dealing with importing/exporting, by creating your own courses, you can reduce the number of moving parts. This makes the learning system more stable, but not just for the technical side of it. You won’t have to deal with any price increases or legal issues.

Tailored To Your Organization

By creating the course yourself, you can make sure that all the details align perfectly to your organization’s functions. Naturally, this affords your learners a much more complete understanding of goals, functions, or culture in your organization.

Update It at Anytime

Another self-explanatory one, but a very valuable one. Being able to update your courses at anytime allows your organization to stay in front of any changes. Whereas, if one licensed their courses, they would either let their training suffer or search for a new course.

You Can Sell It

Well, this depends on your LMS platform. CoreAchieve allows you to sell courses regardless of your plan, others will charge you extra for this feature, and some platforms don’t have this feature. However, if yours does, you could make a different type of profit from the work you put in.

What are the negatives of making your own course?

Big Time Investment

Like creating anything, building a course takes time. Of course, you could build one fairly quickly but then the content will (most likely) suffer. You’ll have to consider if the time investment is worth it.

Can Miss Valuable Content

Building a course is a double-edged sword—while you could include as much necessary information and nothing more, its also possible that you will miss necessary information. A crucial part of developing a course is research.

Damaging User Experience

User experience is a major part of any of our interaction while using technology. The flow of information and how it’s presented can either boost or reduce the effectiveness of a course. While building, it can be easy to overlook these things and hamper your course because of it.

After weighing those points, one must also consider the technical side of their course builder.

When is the right time to author courses?

Determining when to use a course offering tool comes with two major considerations: flexibility and the content.

Flexibility

You can gauge the flexibility of an authoring tool by simply how many features it includes. However, don’t just look at the length of a list and assume everything will be useful for you. The major features to look out for are exporting and different types of content support.

Being able to export your course is vital because you (or your team) are going to be the ones dumping time and energy into it—a process that’ll inevitably take a long time. The last thing that your team will need is remake all their courses whenever switching to a new LMS.

Secondly, make sure that the editor will support a variety of different file formatting, so your team can use whatever content they create or find (video, PDF, or mp3 for example).

Content

Now the content. While it may seem self-evident, you need to make sure that the reason for making the course is obtainable and reasonable. How important is the accuracy of that content? For example, a safety course has more weight on it than a course about how to use the organization’s messaging service.

So, You’ve Decided to Build Your Own Course—What’s Next?

There are a few things you’ll want to make sure you do to maximize your teaching potential whenever building your course. One that was touched on above is having various types of content. In the age of the internet, it takes so much more than a PDF to keep people interested (this was a problem pre-internet too). As a result, learners will be more engaged with content like video courses, so be sure to include them.

The second piece to creating an effective course is by adding extra studying materials. Things like quizzes, flash cards, recaps, or mini courses allow learners to delve into the topics as much as they want to, while decreasing the barriers of accessing it because it is all in the platform.

Like Everything, Weigh It

There are so many positives to building your own course, but the negatives can be extremely damaging. The last thing you would want is to spend so much time and energy building a course, just for it to be ineffective.

As a final piece of advice, make multiple variations on the same course and test them with different groups of learners. Doing this my take slightly longer, but it’ll also ensure you’re deploying the best version.

Begin building courses for free with CoreAchieve.