Teach What You Know and Love Part Two
Welcome to Living Authentically After 55. I'm Karen Crowell and I'm your host. This week's episode is part two of Teach What You Know and Love, and our motivation for momentum is about creating your course outline and producing your materials.
Before starting your outline, you'll want to remind yourself of why someone would take your course. What are the potential goals the student may have? What struggles might the student have in their work or personal life that they'll overcome by taking your course? Try to summarize your answers to these questions into one statement. For instance, if your course teaches advanced techniques in photography that will produce high-quality photos that businesses will want to buy, your statement could be - this course is great for anyone who wants to have high-quality, professional grade photographs that can be used commercially. Next, you want to look at your student's starting point. In other words, what expertise or knowledge should the student already possess in order to succeed in your class? Is this a beginning course or more advanced? Here's a sample. In order to succeed in this course, students should have a basic understanding of the various settings on a digital camera, how to change those settings, and how to apply filters. Consider what skills you want your students to possess after taking your course and write another statement that summarizes what they will accomplish. For example, after completing this course, you will be able to turn color photos into black-and-white, remove unwanted objects from photos, and add textures to backgrounds. You will also know which companies will pay the most for your photos.
Next, make a list of your learning objectives and the specific skills you're going to help your student learn and note any special knowledge or equipment the student will need to complete those learning objectives. For instance, you will need a digital camera and a PC or Mac in order to take this course.
Now it's time to outline your actual course. Basically, there are four components that you'll incorporate into your course. You'll have sections, lectures, resources, and the discussion area. I'll use one of my grammar courses for an example. My sections are divided up by different elements of grammar. For instance, one section is titled Nouns and Pronouns, another section is verbs, and another is determiners, and so on. You get the idea. Within the Nouns and Pronouns section, I have one lecture that's on the different functions and types of nouns and a quiz for a reinforcement resource. Then I have a lecture on the function and categories of pronouns and a quiz. I've also included handouts and worksheets for more resources. The discussion area can be used for students to ask questions or for the instructor to pose a question or communicate to the class. Once you've developed your outline, you'll want to decide what type of media you'll use. You may want some lectures that are animated videos, some talking head videos which are where you appear on camera, some PDFs, and some that are just audio lectures. You don't have to use all the different types of media. You could do all animated videos or all talking head videos. That's the fun of putting the course together. You get to choose and be as creative as you want.

This brings us to the second stage of teaching an online course and that's producing the content. You'll want to decide if you're going to work off of a script and use a teleprompter or if you're just going to improvise. I personally always write my scripts out and use a teleprompter.
Right about now, you may be thinking that this is going to take a lot of equipment and be very expensive to put together, but it's actually very simple and can be done very inexpensively. If you own a smartphone or digital camera that can record, you pretty much have all you need. If you want, you can buy an external microphone. It will give you be