Do You Need to turn a lecture, presentation, or ebook into an online course? Here's where to begin.

A significant number of our tips for creating online courses start from the suspicion that you're creating your course without any preparation. You've gotten an idea for your course, you've researched it, you've created an outline, and now you need to populate your outline with the content that will frame the greater part of your course.

However, for some online educators, especially those who are attempting to move in-person lectures into an online organization, the circumstance is different. These educators already have content, yet they're searching for an approach to progress it into workable online lessons.

Fortunately, long-structure content provides an excellent backbone for e-learning. With a little idea and some extra research, you can expand the content you've already created from lectures and written papers into valuable online courses. Here's where to begin.

1. Review your content to determine what is suitable for online lessons.

To begin, read through your content and search for any areas that probably won't be suitable for online lessons. On the off chance that you've devoted piece of your lecture to an in-class action, or on the off chance that you've included several long interviews in your written documents, they may not translate well into an online course.

Consider how you may replace these segments with something more interactive. Your in-class action could become an interactive test or a gathering project. Or then again you film new interviews with the goal that you have more diverse learning material.

Remember that the original material was not intended for online delivery, as was designed with the advantages and confinements of its original organization flawless. In making an interpretation of it to e-learning material, you're attempting to use the new online medium to its fullest advantage.

2. Determine your learning objectives.

Take a glance at your long-structure content piece. When you created it, what purpose was it intended to satisfy? Commonly, these content pieces are designed as informative reference pieces. The supposition that will be that whoever is reading the content or attending the lecture will have access to other content, for example, a textbook, or will be utilizing their source as a reference as they take a shot at a project.

For an online course, the learning ought to be more vigorous. The course should make a promise in advance about what learners ought to achieve from taking the course, and afterward the materials and references inside the course should work toward those learning objectives.

3. Set your assessment criteria.

With your learning objectives set, you next need to determine how you will see if learners have achieved them or not. To put it plainly, you need to create quizzes and assignments to measure learner retention and basic reasoning.

In this way, you may have written an ebook about becoming a copywriter to offer some advice to freelancers, expecting them to seek out more data elsewhere. In any case, the content of your course ought to include quizzes, practice sessions, and extra example content to help the learner master the techniques.

Additionally, you may have used a series of geology lectures to create online course, yet each lecture ought to have test questions so learners can test their knowledge.

4. Break your content into manageable lumps.

Next, take a gander at your content and locate the normal breaks and pauses. In case you're working with very long content, it is more than likely that you have already divided it into subtopics. An ebook may have several chapters, or a lecture may be a piece of a series. Even inside a chapter or a lecture there are sections and header breaks.

These translate well into lessons and subjects inside your course. A chapter would be one lesson, and the headers inside that chapter would shape the themes. In the event that your chapters don't contain headers, or on the off chance that you are working from a lecture that generally takes forty-five minutes to deliver yet doesn't have any section breaks, discover places to include them in. You need to create segments that can be completed inside five to fifteen minutes, with the goal that learners have more flexibility to fit them into their schedule.

5. Discover places where your content could be turned into visual or sound content.

Next, search for approaches to include rich content—as opposed to just text content. Are there focuses where you can transform something into an infographic? Shouldn't something be said about a video? Rich content gives learners more approaches to move toward your material, and can help them remain engaged and retain data.

In case you're offering a "how-to" course for some sort of expertise, this may be the time to include videos, or some pictures of each step of the process. In case you're giving a lecture on a point, search for maps, representations, or even animated videos to add interest to your course.

6. Include new resources that back your original content.

At last, an online course gives you the space to add new resources to the content as you discover ones that you think will be valuable to your learners. Did you discover a Ted Talk somewhere that touches on your subject? Include that. Even better, discover two Ted Talks that cover different viewpoints on the same issue, and use that as a sparkle point for class conversation.

This supplementary foundation content can help you create a richer online course while expanding your long-structure content into a complete learning experience.

Long-structure content makes for great e-learning material, yet generally, it can't be posted with no guarantees.

There is one way you can rapidly turn long-structure content (an e-book, a lecture series, etc.) into an online, course, and that is to offer it as a single purchase download. However, this does nothing for your learners in terms of real instructional design. Your learners won't get quizzes to measure their mastery of the material, and they won't have any extra materials to expand their understanding of the subject matter.

Clearly, breaking your long-structure content separated into meaningful lessons includes a great deal of value for your learners. Long-structure content additionally serves as an excellent base for arranging a longer course. So don't let the content you've already developed go to waste. Instead, take the time to expand it into rich lesson material, and you will see better results for your learners, and have a better online course to sell in your list.

Author's Bio: 

James T. is an online blogger who love to write about latest insights in elearning industry