How to start your online learning academy for your students?

Classrooms and workplaces have changed dramatically within the past few months, with many organizations moving from a physical to a distant work culture because of the pandemic. With more and more countries going under lockdown and with schools and colleges closed to prevent the spread of the virus, online teaching with online live course is getting increasingly popular among students and working professionals.

As a teacher, you can also live stream online classes, reach a wider audience by creating and selling courses online. Well, keeping that in mind, our goal here is to help you make an informed decision about choosing a platform that’s fully suitable for starting an e-Learning business or taking your coaching digital. Rather than feeling lost and wondering how to proceed, follow this step by step guide.

Step by step process on how to start online classes

Step 1: To start online classes, define your coaching and training goals

Firstly, make clear your purpose of launching your online learning platform. Think about who you’re creating this online live course for. Your own students or any student across the country? What are their demographics? What are the trends in the domain you want to launch courses? How much is deep assessment required? What tools or content types you need? Once you answer these questions, you’ll have an excellent foundation for your learner persona.

Next, determine the aim of your online live course or assessments: Is it to guide and prepare learners for particular competitive exams, school/board academics or to deliver non-academic skill programs and professional trainings? Is the aim to make a brief digital instructional course to market your brand and services? Is the program a one-off course or a series of learning paths? The purpose of your online course should also assist you to define your online education enterprise strategy you’d wish to impact together with your teaching expertise.

In short, you need

Business goals – Define your business goal like what you expect to bring out through your online live courses.

Training goals – Define the teaching goals behind the launch of your online live learning platform.

Learning goals – you would like to obviously define what your learners will achieve by the courses and content on your platform.

Step 2: Outline your online courses and assessments strategy

It may be easy for educators who are already delivering particular courses at their schools or coaching. They can easily replicate their courses on online learning platform. But for beginners it need to be outlined first to design effective and engaging learning environment in you online platform.

Firstly start with dividing your courses according to subjects, learning goals, into modules and sub-modules covering topics and sub-topics. But keep in mind the learning objective.

Replace yourself with learners and try to determine the flow of your course content. Plan out a combination of the form of content which would be more engaging. You should be able to build your course with variety of interactive contents like videos, live classes, quizzes, assignments, mock tests, study notes etc. Now establish a tentative delivery timeline for those content for creating and selling courses online.

Step 3: Build your online course content

This is the real time where implementation begins. Start creating online live course content at this step.

Put together all your resources and the information you have accumulated till the current date. Think thoroughly and gather the content you have already got developed. All form of content must be placed together like the PowerPoint presentations, notes in PDFs, training manuals, pre-recorded videos, question bank, exam tests/quizzes or the other. Select only those materials which are in alignment together with your learning objectives. Now that your content is organized, determine the content you’ll got to update or develop from scratch. Record video content from your home.

Build your learning courses, practice courses or mock tests series courses by uploading your content as per defined outline. It not always possible to have whole content ready at once, hence your platform must support launching a course in advance with scheduling lessons to be published later so that you can create your content on the go and your course selling wont stopped.

Step 4: Market your courses and enroll learners

Now that you are done with the substantial part of creating online live classes and creating & selling courses online, it’s time to deliver it to your target audience. You have to plan on the way to effectively deliver your course to your learners.

You can enroll your existing learner and conduct live sessions to guide them to use the platform and access the course content. If you are targeting to sell your courses to outside learners, you need to market it on different channels. The accessibility of your platform and courses is just as important as the content itself. If learners can’t access your course, they might never be ready to see the course content.

You can utilize social media marketing tools to start reaching your target audience. When you are ready to dwell in you can start SEO and other next level options. Simple communications through email, SMS or course previews and app links sharing can build the buzz around your online learning platform. You can manage your classes through coaching class management systems.

Step 5: Measure the engagement & performance metrics

Once the learners have purchased and started accessing the online courses, track their progress and activity metrics in your platform dashboard. Use different tools that provide full-fledged sales dashboard to instructors. You can analyze your progress through coaching class’s software.

You can also engage your learners on app with regular live doubt solving sessions, sending notifications and updates, conducting quizzes, tests and discussing progress reports with them.

You also include assessments and evaluations metrics in your courses for tracking the learning of students. This can be achieved by a coaching class management system. Provide feedback to learners with learning analytics which help them stay on track to achieve their goals.