Well hello and welcome back! So for this lesson we’re going to take a quick detour to talk about a way you can create your prototype with less work.
It’s like we’re taking a few minutes to explore an interesting side path before looping back onto the main road.
Let’s Quickly Recap
So, we just talked about the importance of building a prototype, and how your content only needs to be complete enough and good enough to get a few beta students onboard.
Having students means you can start getting some feedback, even as you’re creating the remaining content behind the scenes.
We also talked about keeping things simple with the help of three lesson formats that can be executed in an uncomplicated way: video, slides and text.
Does that all sound familiar? Excellent!
The Unspoken Assumption Behind Our Approach So Far
Everything in this module so far has been based on an unspoken assumption:
Whatever content format you choose, and however simple your approach, the output is a bunch of digital assets you can upload somewhere online.
This is the place where students will go to study your content, which they can do whenever it suits them (at least within the constraints of your beta schedule.)
The technical name for this is asynchronous delivery by the way. It just means that the instructor and the students don’t have to be together at the same time for the learning to happen.
And if you’ve joined this programme, that’s the type of course I’m assuming you ultimately want to build.
Because without that asynchronous delivery, some of the benefits that attract people to courses, like your income being less dependent on your time and availability, start to disappear.
The Other Way to Prototype Your Course
However, there’s also a synchronous approach to prototyping that deserves a mention. It won’t be right for everyone, but it gives you a way to do less work upfront and beta-launch your course sooner.
It involves delivering at least some of your content, usually your lessons, live.
In other words, getting together with students over Zoom or Google Meet or something similar and presenting your lessons in real-time.
The main advantage of doing this is that you don’t have to do as much work on your content before it’s ready to deliver.
Example: Live Delivery for a Slide-Based Prototype
So let’s take the example where you’re leaning towards slide-based lessons.
Instead of planning and building your slide decks, then recording and editing your narration, then uploading those recordings somewhere that students can access them, you can just do the first part: creating the decks.
Then, maybe once a week, you can get on a call with your students, fire up your slides, share your screen and present your lessons live.
Usually that’ll mean compiling several lessons into a single live session – in fact, ideally a whole module’s worth of material. After that you can answer any questions that come up before setting any homework (i.e., exercises and assignments) to be completed before the next group call.
The Advantages of This Approach
And here’s the cool part. You can record the session and upload it somewhere for attendees to review and absentees to catch-up.
Doing it this way, you still get to road-test your content, you still get feedback, and your students still get a shot at the result you promised them. All with less upfront content creation.
And when it’s all over you can review the feedback, revise your materials then run another live beta or turn your revised content into standalone assets.
If no big changes are needed, you could even create a basic version of your final course just by chopping the recordings into their separate lessons and using those as-is.
So Why Wouldn’t You Do It This Way?
With all these advantages, you might wonder why you wouldn’t always do things this way. Well, synchronous delivery has some disadvantages too.
Let’s explore them now.
1. Organising your content around a fixed slot can be hard
Running a regular (e.g., weekly) live session means coordinating the schedules of all of your beta students. This is easiest if you meet for a set amount of time on a certain day of the week.
However, delivering your course within those constraints can be challenging. Your course content won’t always fit neatly into a series of, for example, one-hour slots.
2. You may need to break up the natural order of your content
Live delivery works better for lessons than for exercises and assignments. That kind of “doing” work is best done in students’ own time.
However, that could mean running lessons together that were designed to have exercises or assignments between them. So you’re compromising the order of your training to accommodate the delivery.
3. There’s more pressure on you to perform
If you’re not used to presenting live, you may feel more pressure to perform. After all, when you’re live you don’t have the luxury of editing out any mistakes!
Also, you need to keep one eye on the clock because you can’t cut material for length either. Over-running can mean you don’t cover everything you need, or running later than you promised.
4. You’re delaying the acquisition of valuable skills
One of your reasons for enrolling in this programme may be to gain the full range of content creation skills and get a real taste of what it’s like to create a course.
Delivering your prototype content live saves time upfront, but it means you’re not getting that broader experience until later in your journey.
5. It doesn’t suit a text-based course
Lastly, if you’ve already decided your course will be text-based, there’s not a natural way to deliver that type of course live. And not much time is saved either.
It’s better to let students study the content at their convenience and use any live meetups to give people extra support.
Ready to Move On?
Okay, that’s the end of our little detour. You now have another way to approach your prototype content and a sense of the trade-offs involved.