Scripting Your Online Course

Learn how to script your online course! If you're having a tough time creating a script and outlining your online course, use this really simple method. Get a free account to create your own online courses at: http://thnk.cc/1Te2AjN

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Transcript: Yesterday I got a call from Anika in Wisconsin and Anika was asking about scripting her online course. We came up with some really good insights about how you can quickly and efficiently put together scripts for your online course without being too verbose at the end of the day.

Anika thought that she was going to write scripts that were probably going to be too long or too wordy and not be super efficient in how she was pulling together that information and delivering it to the students as an end product.

So what I suggested is that you look at it from the perspective of writing an outline and start with the question of why are you taking my course? And more so than why you taking my course but answer for the student, if you take my course, how will your life be different? So, I take your course, how is my life going to be different when I'm done taking that? Will I be better off financially? Will I be able to make money with a new skill? Will I have a new skill that I find fun? Will I be able to complete some new art project or I’ll be more fit and healthy and eat better? How is my life going to be different when that's done? And that's really what people are looking for and this is going to flow right into all of your marketing efforts. So, start from that question, how is my life going to be different when I finish your online course? And then work backwards in the steps that you're going to take to get there.

Now you come up with your five, ten steps that someone is going to take to arrive at that destination. So let's say my life is going to be different because I will be eating much healthier and I'm going to look and feel healthier everyday because of my new diet and you are going to show me ten steps to get there. So those are your ten high level steps, that's what you start with. So write those down; they should just be a couple of words each and once you've got that then within each of those steps, you're going to break it down into another hierarchy. So to accomplish that first step, what are the steps that you're going to accomplish to get there? What are the little pieces that you're going to work towards that goal?

So maybe the first one is to do an audit of your current eating habits and that’s step one of the big ten and then within that you are going to talk about okay here is your audit framework, this is the form that you're going to use to fill out that audit , this is what I want you to track your intake of the various calories that you are consuming and you're going to do this for a week and here are the sort of three or four or five or whatever number of steps that you’re going to take to achieve that first milestone, that big first step.

And you can continue doing this for each of those steps, you can break it down into another hierarchy. Generally, I find only two or three levels is ideal, so you’ve got your first set of say ten steps and then each one of those steps is broken down into a few more steps and then at most, each of those steps is broken down into a few more.

Now what you're looking for is when you get to the bottom of that hierarchy, each one of those items is a two to seven minute lesson and you can deliver that message in video, you can deliver that lesson in PowerPoint voiceover, but it’s going to be a two to seven minute lesson.

And now you’re right down to the individual lessons and you can start to work one by one on what you're going to teach people to achieve that goal. So it simplifies the whole process, because when you're writing your script you're not necessarily having to think about the huge structure of the course and working all the way to that endgame; you're writing your script from the perspective of this one little goal that you're going to achieve that’s going to work up that hierarchy and eventually down all of those steps and flow into that end result that you want.

So I think that's a great way to approach scriptwriting, a great way to approach actually coming up with that overall curriculum for your course, it's going to break it up into bite sized pieces and is going to mean you have a much better end result.

So give it a shot, I hope it works for you and thanks for watching. We're here to answer your questions so if you have more questions about creating and marketing and launching online courses, let us now, we'd be happy to help.