🗣️Transcript
Hello, and welcome back for your final lesson in this opening module, called: The Journey That Lies Ahead.
And I want to wrap things up with an overview of what to expect as you work your way through this programme.
So here’s what you’ll learn:
- The four main stages of the Build Your Best Course journey
- How the various course modules line up with each stage
- The specific milestones you’ll meet along the way
Let’s jump in.
Right now you’re here, at the end Module 01: Getting Your Bearings, which is about laying some of the conceptual groundwork for what’s to come.
After that the journey really divides into four stages.
First of all, we’re going to define your best course and there are three modules within that stage.
Module 02: Setting Your Trajectory is all about making sure you’re crystal clear on what type of course you’ll build (and why).
The milestones are a simple mission statement to set your intentions and a better understanding of your motivation for creating a course.
Module 03: Targeting Your Market helps you profile the people who’ll ultimately buy your course and make sure they’re actually reachable.
The milestones are a clear description of your target market plus a simple strategy for recruiting your first students when the time comes.
Module 04: Defining Your Destination is about creating a desirable end point for your students and articulating why your course is different to other options.
Your milestones are a vivid description of your course promise plus a simple positioning statement.
So that’s the first stage.
Next we’re going to design your best course.
Module 05: Mapping Your Territory is all about working out the ground students will need to cover to get to the destination you’ve promised to lead to.
The milestones are a list of essential achievements on the journey, and a breakdown of the work they’ll need to do along the way.
Module 06: Building Your Blueprint helps you decide what course elements like lessons and assignments will be needed to support students on their journey.
The milestone here is a blueprint (essentially a detailed curriculum) showing the content your course will ultimately need to be effective.
So that’s the second stage, Design.
After that we’ll start to develop your best course.
Module 07: Creating Your Content is where you’ll produce just enough content to be able to launch a basic, early version of your course which I call your prototype.
The milestone is your launch content, which can be just complete enough to get students started, giving you time to create the rest of the prototype as you go.
So that’s the third stage, Develop.
The final stage is delivering your best course.
Module 08: Running Your Beta leads you through the process of running a small group beta test of your course with paying students based around the prototype content.
The milestones here are completing that beta launch and gathering student feedback.
And this is where we start to iterate.
Armed with the feedback from your beta students, we go back to the develop stage via Module 09: Packaging Your Product. There you rework your content where necessary and get everything set up on your chosen platform, ready for a full launch.
The milestones are the creation of those final content assets and a configured course platform.
Finally, you return to delivery mode.
Module 10: Launching Your Course shows you how to create a simple sales pipeline for your course and start promoting it to bring in the next wave of students.
So that’s a quick overview of the whole process. But you actually have some flexibility in those last two stages.
If your course is fairly small or based on already proven content, you may want to cut to the chase by creating all of your content upfront and doing a full launch right out of the gate.
That means you can skip the prototype content and the beta test.
On the other hand, if your course is more complex and needs several rounds of revisions to get it right, you can run more betas until you’re ready for a full launch.
Either way, you can adapt this course to your needs.
And that’s it!
I hope you’ve enjoyed getting your bearings in this orientation module! Everything you’ve learned here sets the stage for what’s to come.
In the next module we’ll get some real clarity around why you want to create a course and what type of course you should build as a result.
Let’s get to work!