E-learning
| 6 minutes reading

How to go From Your First Online Course to a Full-Fledged Online Academy

By Cursum

Have you published your first online course? If yes, congratulations! Your journey towards a full-fledged online academy has now begun. Moving forward, there are a few things you should keep in mind to make your journey as smooth as possible.

In this blog post, we’ll give you our best advise on how to scale your knowledge business and create a full-fledged online course platform. Let’s get started.

Build a feedback loop

Just because you’ve published your online course, doesn’t mean you can’t go back and edit it. You can always optimize your courses. That’s why digital learning is so amazing. Simply make sure to always collect feedback from your course participants, and it’ll be clear if and what you need to optimize on in you online course.

Set up a feedback loop, but remember to keep your feedback questions simple and short. Very few people want to spend more than a few minutes providing feedback. So, focus on the most important questions that can help you in optimizing your online course.

Once you’ve established the most important questions and set up your feedback form, you’re well on your way. But how will you distribute the feedback form? If you decide to manually send out the feedback form to each course participant upon completing your course, you’ll end up spending a lot of time on this task. Instead, consider automating your feedback loop.

With an automated feedback loop, you can decide exactly when your course participants will receive the feedback form. Do you want them to fill out the form halfway through your online course or when they’ve completed it? Save time without loosing control by automating this important task.

Accept help

Going from a single online course to a full-fledged online course platform can be challenging. When you have only one online course, you can easily mange it manually. But as you add more courses to your online academy, management quickly becomes overwhelming. Therefore, it’s important that you seek help.

Above we briefly talked about automating your feedback loop. That is just one of many tasks you can automate to free up more time on your daily schedule.

For example, consider automating as many of your marketing activities as possible. Both your e-mail marketing and social media posts can be automated and planned in advance. This will give you more time to focus on the increasing number of tasks that comes with scaling an online course platform.

Tell the world about your online learning

Whether you’ve just built a single online course or many online courses, it’s important that your target audience know about your online learning. If they don’t know about it, your online academy won’t gain any new course participants.

So, identify which channels make sense to market your online academy via and start promoting the content of your online course platform.

Create content internally or externally

When you go from your first online course to a full-fledged online academy, there’s one thing you can’t avoid. You need content to fill your learning platform.

If you decide to create all content yourself, you’ll have full control over both the content and the creative process of creating the content. But doing every thing yourself isn’t always an option. And the more your knowledge business grows, the more help you need.

As you’re scaling your online academy, it can be advantageous to bring in external resources. External resources can be, for example, freelancers or business partners who are interested in collaborating on topics for your digital learning.

In another blog post we’ve written in detail about the different ways to create e-learning content for your online academy.

Get yourself an online learning platform

As you take your online academy from one to more courses, you need to make sure your software can keep up. In this case, having a scalable online academy such as a Learning Management system – often just referred to as an LMS – is an advantage.

An LMS makes it easier for you to build course content as well as manage and store your online courses.

When buying an LMS, it’s sometimes possible to add ready-made online courses to your own platform. These courses go under many different names including off-the-shelf e-learning, pre-packaged content, or ready-to-use courses. Adding these courses to your online academy is a quick way to load your learning platform with content. Plus it helps you offer a more diverse selection of online learning without having to create every single course from scratch.

Fully-Online-Academy

Are you ready to speed up your online academy journey?

Now that you’ve read our advise on how to move from your first online course to a full-fledged online course platform, we hope you’re ready to scale your knowledge business.

If you want more information, we’ve written a guide on how to get started with an online academy.

But if you’re ready to get started today, book a free demo below and together we’ll get started building your new learning universe.