Today, I’m going to teach you how to make online classes that attract students like a magnet. Contrary to popular belief, the process of creating online courses doesn’t require a large chunk of money. If you know what you are doing, you can develop profitable online courses at no cost whatsoever.

While money can be used to speed up certain steps of online course creation, it’s not even close to a major determining factor for success. The truly crucial factors for success in designing courses are the ten steps listed in this article. As you will come to find out soon, “take out your credit card” is not listed as one of those steps.

Creating a best-selling online course requires time and effort, but not necessarily money. Above all else, researching your target audience and crafting a strong course outline will be your keys to success in the e-learning industry.

When you create an online course for the first time, make sure that you follow this guide closely. Don’t skip over any of the steps mentioned here, even if they seem unimportant or trivial at first sight. All ten of these steps are listed here for a reason.

Think of this article as a checklist for how to develop an online course for free. Once you’ve got most or all of this stuff figured out, you’ll be ready to actually start making your online course. We’ve also covered how to sell the online courses you create in another post.

Here’s how to create an online course for free in 10 steps:

Choose Your Course Topic
Identify the Target Audience
Gather and Structure Your Knowledge
Create an Online Course Outline
Choose Your Online Course Software or Platform
Create the Course Content
Make Sure Your Content is Engaging
Create a Community for Your Online Course
Gather Feedback for Your Online Course
Adapt, Improve and Update

Choose Your Course Topic

In all significant endeavors, you need to plan. Your plan for making an online course should begin with choosing the primary topic of focus. Making it up as you go along has a high chance of ending up with you flat on your face unless you’re dead sure you know what you’re doing. After all, you can’t just meander around a general breadth of a particular subject for your entire course. It would be a waste of time for both you and your students.

The course subject determines your audience, your method of teaching, and a lot more factors. It’s crucial that you decide on a specific course subject in the beginning phase of creating your online course.

Be as specific as possible. Don’t try to cover too wide of a topic in your first course. A common early misconception when creating online courses is that you should create one course per one topic. From a student’s standpoint – that’s a terrible idea. Students get overwhelmed by massive amounts of all-over-the-place information within a single course. And, from a profitability standpoint – that’s an even worse idea. Focusing on short courses rather than a single huge program enables you to sell larger volumes and to improve upon early iterations. When developing your first course, make sure to leave some room for the future.

These are some questions you should ask yourself when picking a topic for your course:

Are you an expert on the topic?
Is there enough demand for the topic?
How deep will you go into the topic?

Think through these initial steps very carefully. They will be the foundation for the online course you will be building. Without a solid foundation, you course is doomed to fail.

Are you an expert on the topic?

Ideally, you should have demonstrable expertise on the subject you are teaching. That could be either by education or practical knowledge on the subject. Having real qualifications to show to your students makes a big difference in establishing trustworthiness for yourself.

Now, I’m saying “ideally”, because being an expert on the topic is not always necessary. There are plenty of massively successful online courses out there that were created by course instructors with novice-level knowledge at best. I would never advise creating online training programs on subjects you know very little about. However, credibility and authority are something that can be developed – work on that.

Is there enough demand for the topic?

Earlier, I told you to be as specific as possible with your course topic. While I firmly stand by that statement, it’s also worth noting that you should not pick too narrow of a course subject.

Developing a course titled “The Ultimate Guide to Salmon Fishing in Akhiok, Alaska” might seem like a great idea at first. After all, you have decades of experience as a snow-covered, big-catchin’ Alaskan fisherman. There’s not a single soul who can match your prowess on the sea and you’re the definition of an expert on the subject.

However, even with your best efforts you will struggle to find students for this course, as very few people will ever search for this topic.

Here’s a tip: instead of trying to guess what students want, go straight to the data. Use tools such as Google Trends to see what type of courses people are searching for. Or, check MOOC websites such as Coursera, edX or FutureLearn to see what courses are already popular.

How deep will you go into the topic?

Depth also affects matters. To use our previous example of fishing: “Beginner’s Guide to Fishing” should be easier to grasp and should be aimed more for newcomers. Therefore, you should not go very deep into the advanced details in such a course. Above all else, you should focus on getting the basic points across to the students in such introductory courses.

“Guide to Catching 1000-pound Bluefin Tunas”, on the other hand, may be a shorter, more concise course that can do with less hand-holding, as it’s intended for an advanced audience that already knows the basics of fishing. The ideal depth depends largely on the target audience you are developing the course for. Let’s explore target audiences and their role in a course development cycle in the upcoming step.

Identify the Target Audience

After choosing the topic for your online course, it’s now time to identify your target audience. The target audience is the group of people to whom you are writing your course.

Once again, be specific. Identifying that the target audience is “anyone interested in my course subject” is too general and non-actionable. Instead, try to identify the following key demographics of your target audience:

Age. The average age of online students is 34. Depending on your course topic, this number could be different. Adjust your writing and teaching styles accordingly.
Gender. On average, the gender make-up for MOOCs is 53% female and 47% male. However, in some subjects such as engineering courses, the ratio can shift heavily, with up to 85% of students being male.
Level of education. The majority of online course students are highly educated with a Bachelor’s degree or higher. Adjust the complexity of your course to match the educational level of your target audience.
Employment status. Is your course for training already employed professionals? Or, is it aimed at job-seekers who want to start a career in a new industry?

Identifying all these demographics is not always a simple process. If you’re having trouble, try using social media for target audience research.

Social media can be a goldmine of information during target audience research. Other platforms exist and can be used to the same effect, but nothing works so well in establishing contact as social media. Put up a post and measure the response. What defines a healthy response will depend on your field (British Tanks After World War 2 will have a different audience compared to How To Get More Instagram Followers), so adjust accordingly.

I will share you one excellent method of using social media for audience analysis:

Find Facebook groups in the topic area you are planning to teach.
Make a group post which describes your wish to make an online course
Ask the people who interact with your post for a one-on-one interview. Alternatively, you could setup an online course survey.
Gather data about the audience and their learning wishes
Analyze the data and try to find similarities between the answers from different people
Voila! You now know who is your target audience and what they want to learn.

Gather and Structure Your Knowledge

Once you’ve determined what you’re teaching, that you do have people to teach, and that you can teach them something useful, then you can get started on the course itself. Which means you need to get your knowledge together.

You’ll need to know enough that a newcomer to the topic can learn a good deal from you, plus a little bit more than that. There always will be those students quicker on the uptake than others, or those who need just a bit more of the picture to really understand the lesson. To help them out, you’ll need to have enough puzzle pieces on hand to give to them.

Knowledge alone is not enough. You also need to know how to deliver it in a way that makes sense to a student, in a manner that a student can understand. Just dumping facts doesn’t work for most people, otherwise, we wouldn’t need schools and teachers.

So, once you do have the right amount of knowledge and understanding, you’ll have to package it up. What should be learned at the beginning, and what should be saved for later? What logically connects one subject to another? At what point can a student be considered as having learned enough about the subject? These are all questions you have to consider while making your online course structure.

This is just as much for the student as for you. With proper structure and connections, you can teach with ease, and the student will have an equally easier time understanding what you’re trying to impart to them. The retrospective will also be much easier with more natural connections.

Create an Online Course Outline

So, you’ve got your knowledge all organized – fantastic! Now it’s time to think about how you’re going to deliver that knowledge to the students. Outlining, as Teachable explains, is similar to structuring, only this time, we’re going to start coloring in the blanks. You know what you’re going to teach, but now you need to decide how you’re going to teach it.

Put simply, this is how to create an outline for your online course:

Identify the primary learning outcome
List the skills necessary for achieving the primary learning outcome
Use the skill checklist to create course modules
Set learning goals for your course modules

If you’re struggling with creating an online course outline, then you might want to consider:

Brainstorming Ideas
Online Course Outline Templates

Identify the Primary Learning Outcome

Ask yourself this: “After my students complete this course, what will they have learned?” What can they demonstrate after having completed your course? What skills can they now apply? This dovetails with the above two; having chosen your topic and gauged your audience, you then have to ask, what sort of value can they derive from your course?

This helps both you and your students. For you, it’ll help with organizing your material, since you should be asking yourself at every step: Will this serve the outcome I want? Is it relevant to what they’re supposed to be learning? This is key to designing an online course, as direction and a definite endpoint are key.

For students, it’ll give them a concrete goal to work to, instead of just flailing around with new information in their heads and no purpose to put it toward. Plus, if they know how your course is going to help, they’re going to be more motivated to complete it.

Create a Skill Checklist

In order to create an effective online course outline, you need to start by determining which skills are the most crucial for your students. Here’s where the previously determined learning outcome comes in handy. If you haven’t decided on a learning outcome yet, then take a moment to think – what is the main skill you want your students to take away from your course?

Once you have set the learning outcome for your online course, continue by asking yourself the following question:

What skills are necessary for achieving the learning outcome?

Answer this question by creating a checklist. A checklist which covers ALL of the skills, knowledge and competences which the student needs to have by the end of the course.

Use the Skill Checklist to Create Course Modules

After you have created a checklist of the skills necessary for achieving your desired learning outcome, you can start making online class modules.

Continue by grouping closely related skills in the checklist together, as this will enable you to create more effective modules within your course. Also, try to avoid bloating your course with more content than is necessary. When compiling the checklist, keep asking yourself which skills are truly necessary for achieving the desired learning outcome.

Then, rearrange this checklist according to the complexity of the skills. Keep the basic skills in the very beginning, and leave the advanced skills towards the end. Keep grouping closely related skills together, and what you should end up with is groups of skills which act as steps towards an end goal – the final learning outcome.

Once you have done all this, you will have created a basic modular outline for your online course. Great job!

Set Learning Goals for Your Course Modules

One of the most important components of creating an online course is setting a learning goal for the course. However, there’s more to it. Every online course consists of various sections, and each individual section also needs to have a clear learning goal.

Try to view sections and lessons for an online course in a similar way as you would look at modules inside a university degree. For example, a degree in Medicine might contain modules on Biology, Chemistry, Nursing – all of which have specific learning goals. Online courses should be structured in a similar way, with each section having an individual learning outcome for the student.

Each course section in your online course should transform the student in some way. Some transformations will inevitably be smaller than others, but even small transformations can make or break a student’s desire to continue through with your course. Make the sections of your course progress in a natural way, with each section building on top of the previously learned materials.

Brainstorming Ideas

When struggling with creating an online course outline, try to answer the following questions:

What underpins your subject?
What’s an introductory lesson that shapes the rest of the course?
How do you follow up from there?
Where does your course end?

Think about these questions, and see how they shape each of your lesson plans. Remember to keep your end goal in mind. You need to put in just the right amount of lessons to impart the outcome you’re aiming for. Too few lessons and you end up with students who haven’t learned enough; too many, and you risk putting irrelevant info, or worse, fatiguing your students.

Online Course Outline Templates

Below is a list of some excellent online course outline templates which are available for free.

Online course outline templates:

University course outline templates: (while these outlines were not designed specifically for online courses, they can still serve as an excellent foundation to build on)

Choose Your Online Course Software or Platform

Where are you going to put your stuff? On a website of your own? Or on an existing platform like Udemy? Each choice has its own ups and downs, and considering your platform is part of how to set up an online course.

Your own portal means you have total control: of your site, of your brand, your pricing. Of course, you also have to deal with the headaches of marketing, getting the word out, attracting students, dealing with payments, and a dozen other matters.

An existing platform has a different set of headaches. A marketplace will happily offer your course right next to a competitor, and its pricing options will be a lot more restrictive. You’re limited by the platform’s own capabilities. Even Udemy provides a unique problem; with so many successful online courses in its database and so many students already on it, it’s entirely possible you could fade into the mass of courses available, and never get another look.

We cover the appropriate software in the next section, but you do have a multitude of options available, especially now that online courses are an established phenomenon.

Online Course Software

There is fantastic software available that can help you get up and running with your online course business quicker than ever. But, contrary to a popular saying – the best things in life aren’t always free. You will have to spend some money to get your hands on the top software in this field.

But, let’s remember that there’s another popular saying – “time is money”. If you consider this true, then spending some money on high-quality online course software becomes a no-brainer. After all, why waste hundreds of hours on creating the back-end for your course by yourself, while you could do it in minutes with the help of tried-and-tested software?

As for our favorites, we already have a separate full-sized article on the best online course software, so we’ll just give you a short overview of our #1 favorite in this article.

In short, we recommend iSpring Suite as your course authoring software if you have a Windows operating system. The iSpring Suite is a course authoring toolkit based on Microsoft PowerPoint and it has an intuitive interface, a nearly non-existent learning curve, a one-of-a-kind support team, and last but not least: a very cost-effective price.

An iSpring Suite subscription includes software for creating quizzes, simulating dialogue trees, recording and editing audio-video, and more. If you spend a little extra, you even get access to a cloud service and 100 daily downloads in iSpring’s massive content library. This library includes tens of thousands of online course authoring assets, including pre-made presentation templates, characters, backgrounds, and more.

If you’d like to try iSpring Suite risk-free, either use their 100% free version or take advantage of their free, no credit card required 30-day trial. As long as you can get access to Microsoft PowerPoint, you’ll love the way this software gets you to produce large quantities of high-quality course content quickly and efficiently. Creating an online class has never been easier.

Don’t forget to read our in-depth review of iSpring to find out more about our experiences with the software.

Create the Course Content

Congratulations! With the structure out of the way, you’re all set to start building your online course! This section covers the nitty-gritty of the actual creation of the course.

In order to design an awesome online course, you need to focus on:

Choosing the types of online course content you’ll be using
Writing, recording and editing your content
Establishing grading & assessment methods

Types of Online Course Content

That is, how will you present your lessons? You’ve got a lot of means to choose from, each with their own ups and downs. There’s a wealth of options at your disposal, and how you want to do it is entirely up to you.
Here’s a little pro tip, though: If you want to create a truly engaging and effective online course, then you should try using more than one type of online course content.
Here are the three primary types of online course content you can create:

Text content
Video & Image content
Screencasting content

Combinations of text, video, images, and screencasting make for the most engaging online courses. Screencasting content might not be necessary, though, depending on your course subject.

Now, let’s have a closer look at each type of online course content.

Text Content

There’s always classic lectures, which consist of text. The least effort possible would simply be to deliver a series of text-only lectures, ideally leavened with a set of recommendations for further reading.

Of course, this would be terribly boring; you’ve basically just written a book, or a series of blog posts (and can do it just as effectively if you went that way).

Not to say that you should avoid text entirely – text content is a crucial part of most online courses. However, you should add more types into the mix. Not because text content is boring, but because learning by reading alone isn’t particularly effective. To accompany the bread of text, we need other ways to add essential nutrients to our diet of learning.

Video & Image Content

An easy way to make online courses more engaging is to stimulate the student visually. This means pictures and videos. The simplest method of using picture and videos in an online course would be constructing your online class more like a PowerPoint presentation:

Toss in some relevant videos (or even better – create your own)
Add relevant images to accompany blocks of text
Talk through each “slide” with a good microphone and solid articulation

If you do all this, you’ve got the beginnings of something solid. Of course, the above treats the internet and an online course as a book. Which is valid, but it’s not taking full advantage of the capabilities you have on hand. While presentations are arguably more captivating than plain text, they still remind students of boring school classrooms.

Video is an integral part of how to design an online course, and these days, a half-decent camera and good-enough video editing software won’t set you back too much. Thus, you can film your own lectures and add your own voice to your visual element. With text, video, and the literal voice of a teacher guiding them, you can really begin to replicate the feeling of a personalized lecture. How to make a good video can take up an article of its own, like this one. Video-based online classes are some of the most popular types currently out there, and it’s for good reason. They are easy to follow and captivating. Plus, they allow teachers to form a stronger connection with the students.

Screencasting Content

And, of course, since you do have a computer of your own, you’ve got another option. Screencasting is still considered video, but this time it’s not video of yourself, but rather your computer screen. You can optionally have a second camera focusing on you if you have physical material you’d like to show the students as well. In this case, you will show your computer screen to the students while leaving a small window to show the teacher. We have found that combinations of screencasting and “teacher cams” work wonders for student engagement. Give it a try.

Screencasting works particularly well for courses dealing with online matters (How To Get More Instagram Followers, for instance), as you can demonstrate exactly what it is you’re lecturing about in real-time. You really can’t overlook screencasting when you’re thinking about how to make an online video course.

Writing, Recording and Editing Your Content

Once you’ve determined how you want to deliver your knowledge, you’re finally ready to start creating the lessons!

Strictly speaking, you don’t need to have the entire course material ready before you go live. Some teachers finish creating their course while running it for their first batch of students—basically, they put together a structure, and just improvise from there. This can be risky; if you seem apprehensive about your direction, your students may become dissatisfied. Some may drop out entirely if they’re not confident that you actually know what you’re talking about.

That being said, you don’t need to create all of the content for your online course before you start selling it. It’s always better to start off with a smaller batch of content, as this will allow you to take in feedback from your students and make improvements accordingly. All too often, we have seen cases where course teachers create dozens of hours of content, only to find out that their camera lighting was set too low, or their voice was too quiet during the video creation process. Start off small, and make improvements as you go. It’s easier to remake 3 hours of lecture content, rather than 30 hours of content.

Just as important, though – don’t procrastinate content writing! Some teachers get too hung up in course structures and outlines that they never leave enough time for planning the lessons individually. Your content writing can make or break your course, so you need to put a good amount of effort into its creation. It’s hard work, and it’s not something that’s just going to ‘come to you’.

Establishing Grading & Assessment Methods

Grades in typical schools rely a lot on tests because that’s how the schooling system measures how much you’ve learned. If you’ve been paying attention, a pop-quiz is a breeze; if not, then you’ve been slacking and need to pick up the pace. Assessments can take many forms, from a quick pop-quiz right after you finish the lesson, to the final project that determines your grade at the end.

What sort of assessment you choose to employ should depend on what subject you’re teaching, and how you would like your students to prove their knowledge. If you’re teaching a history subject that’s mostly about facts, then a by-the-books multiple choice quiz might be all you need. But if you’re teaching English literature, you might need to create something a little more engaging and demanding.

Of course, assessments are optional, and whether you choose to employ them depends entirely on your teaching style, but keep in mind that a little sense of accomplishment early on can keep a student engaged.

Make Sure Your Content is Engaging

Engaging the students who enroll in your online course is absolutely crucial if you want to become successful in the e-learning industry. In order to make create engaging online course content, make sure that you:

Focus on what’s important
Provide early results
Set measurable goals
Increase retention rates

Focus on What’s Important

Remember, teaching is more than just imparting knowledge. Never in human history has so much knowledge been so accessible to anyone with such a low barrier for entry. Just on your phone, you can bring up a wealth of information about Nuclear Physics with just a few keystrokes. Fifty years ago, you’d have to break out an encyclopedia or a book dedicated to the subject, and it’d be just as much work to get another point of view on the same topic.

With enough effort and discipline, a person can self-teach, but not everyone has the time or will to do that. Your job as a teacher is not just to bring knowledge to your students: it’s to distill all the raw knowledge gathered from that very wealth of information and deliver it in a concise, structured manner to your students. Your value is that you know the good stuff from the bad, you’ve already sorted the wheat from the chaff, you know what works and what doesn’t. A complete understanding of the subject is the key to being an effective teacher.

Provide Early Results

The thing with online courses is that it’s a lot easier to drop out of them: you just stop, and there’s no consequences at all, nothing to bite you for not completing. This understandably damages completion rates. A study examining sixteen online courses offered by the University of Pennsylvania revealed that the average completion rate was 4%.

Now, that doesn’t paint the whole picture, but it’s a pretty grim reminder that you have to keep your students engaged if you want to create a successful course. One way to keep your students engaged is to provide an early return on their investment. If a student feels they’ve learned something just from the first module alone, they’re a lot more likely to stick around. Nothing gets someone down faster than them feeling stupid or unproductive, which is very easy to do in a learning environment. Give them feedback, and an ongoing sense of accomplishment, and they’ll stick around.

Set Measurable Goals

This relates to the last point. A student must be able to measure their progress so that they can feel they’ve learned something and not just wasted their time. Remember our point about structuring knowledge? This is why. Breaking down your body of knowledge into individual, learnable pieces means that students can look back and see actual progress. It’s also the reason quizzes and tests are a useful tool: they help to measure learning and improvement.

Plus, this helps in structuring lessons. Each lesson should be about teaching one skill, or about discussing one particular aspect of the topic. At the end of the lesson, a student should have learned something useful. Always remember to keep adhering to your online course outline.

Increase Retention Rates

Retention rates for online courses have been a subject of heated debate for many years now. A study by Techcrunch found that about 6.5% of students who enrolled in massively open online courses (MOOCs) actually ended up finishing the curriculum. A study by Katy Jordan sparked a little more optimism, with the average rate of online course completion hovering around 15%.

However, retention rates should never be the primary indicators for measuring the effectiveness of an online course. A study by HarvardX has shown that only around 58% of students actually intended to finish their online courses and earn a certificate.

Online course student’s enrollment intention factors are further demonstrated on this infographic on online course completion rates by HarvardX:

As this infographic demonstrates, many students who sign up for an online course don’t have the intention of finishing the entire course. Instead, many students enroll in an online course with the intention of completing only very specific modules. Therefore, don’t become demotivated when you see that your courses don’t have very high retention rates.

With that being said, there are still many strategies to increase online student retention which are worth considering.

Create a Community for Your Online Course

Humans are social animals. There’s no overlooking that in a learning environment; even introverts need their social time. This is where technology steps in once again. Whether it’s a Facebook group, a Discord channel, Udemy discussion group, or whatever other means you can think up, you should establish a community for your students.

What purpose does this serve? A lot. A community beyond your lectures and modules gives the students a platform, and that is a huge advantage. Building a solid community is an important part of how to create an online class.

For instance, let’s say you’ve got a student who didn’t quite understand the last lesson. He’s got a few ways to solve that, but most are problematic. They might be hesitant about approaching you, the teacher, for a dozen reasons. Self-study has its risks, as he or she might not have the motivation to go ahead and re-teach themselves. But if you give this lost student a place to interact with fellow students, they can ask their peers to help them out with the gaps in their knowledge, and before you know it they are back on track.

Another reason is feedback. With a social platform, you can gauge how your students are doing. Check out who seems to be always lagging behind; you can see at a glance which student might need a bit of extra help. If there seems to be a lot of complaints about one particular lesson, maybe you should ask them what they found difficult and change it up. Everyone is learning, even the teacher.

Gather Feedback for Your Online Course

Teaching is a two-way street, and to properly gauge how effective you are, you need the means to check that your students are understanding your lessons correctly. Good feedback is an integral element of how to design an effective online course.

When you’re dealing in a field where you’re an expert, it can be hard to recall the times when you were still new to the subject. What’s obvious and easy to an expert might not be the same to a new learner. This is why you should check with others. Ideally, you’d want two different people to look at it: First, a fellow subject matter expert, who can examine your material and comment on your approach; check if you’re missing anything, if you’ve accidentally provided incorrect information, that sort of thing.

The other should be someone who matches your intended audience. In fact, you could well do a trial run with a small crop of interested testers. Finding Facebook groups in your topic area is an excellent way of finding testers for your online course. However small or large you want this stage of checking to be, you need the student’s point of view to be sure that you’re transmitting your knowledge correctly.

It’s Okay to Be Unpolished

Like the title says – it’s totally fine to be unpolished – especially for your first run of things! What you need to be on the first go is feature-complete: everything important is there and it roughly looks like it’ll fit. You will want to change things up here and there, and respond to anything your pilot class tells you. Leaving it unpolished means that there’s more room to make changes, and the less there is set in stone, the better it will be for your efforts.

Besides, if you’re inexperienced in creating content, going through the stressful early stages is the only way you have of getting the seasoning you need. Don’t worry about it, just make sure you do take note of any criticism and recommendations for improvement.

Adapt, Improve and Update

Creating an online course takes a great deal of time and effort, and it requires a lot of flexibility. You’ll constantly be adjusting your methods depending on a multitude of factors. But if you’re willing to put in the effort, to pour your skill and your soul into your work, then building online courses is a great way to dip your foot into the world of teaching.

Getting everything perfect on the very first online course you create is practically impossible. Therefore, your workflow as an online course instructor should always include listening to the feedback of your students and improving your product based on that feedback.

Don’t take negative feedback personally – even if your face is on all of the video material in the courses. When students leave reviews for your course, you should always try to make the most of it. Successful course teachers take all feedback into consideration, and they are able to adapt to the needs of the students. Negative feedback is an unpleasant but necessary part of improving your online courses.

It should also be noted that no course will stay relevant forever. The learning needs of students change constantly, and so does the competition from other teachers. This means that course instructors can’t just put out one high-quality course and expect it to perform well for 10 years without making any changes to the material.

Being ready to adapt, improve, and update your online courses on a regular basis is the single most valuable ability you can have as a teacher. Don’t take your students for granted!

How to Create an Online Course for Free