Course planning

In this post, we'll introduce five stages we think are important in planning your course.

This is the main post in our collection on course planning. See below for links to each of the stages.

To begin, this short quote quite aptly highlights the importance of planning.

"Failing to plan is planning to fail."
 - Alan Lakein

Sure you can build a course without a plan. You can wing it. But that doesn't mean you should. If you build a house without a plan, you might end up having to call the builder back in because you actually need the door to open in the other direction, or you don't have any electricity for your oven! The costs of poor planning add up.

Building a course is not that different. You might start with popping in text here, a video there and an activity in the middle. Then when you look back at what you've done, you realise your content doesn't actually teach what you were trying to teach. The video doesn't relate to the activity at all. And what that means is... rework. Wasted effort.

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 at some key planning steps.

• Identify your audience - Figuring out who your learners (and other stakeholders) are and how you can meet their needs.
• Define the "flavour" - Outlining how your learners will experience the courses and what learning and teaching principles your courses will follow.
• Set the outcomes - 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.
• Use backwards design - Using the 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.

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.