Five questions to answer before creating an online course

I see a pattern among many friends and colleagues. The idea of creating an online course seems intoxicating. Develop content … post it as online training … promote it on Facebook … and watch the money flow in!

Except that in most cases, the money does NOT flow in. I am seeing that, with few exceptions, these courses are failing and that all that hard work is being abandoned.

There are common patterns in the failures and I thought it might be worthy exploring these issues. There are a lot of people on the web promoting online classes as an easy path to success. And creating your own online course could indeed be a wonderful opportunity. But before you make the leap, perhaps you should go through this checklist:

1. Do the numbers make sense?

Here is a rule of thumb: It takes 20 hours of preparation to make one hour of original presentation content. This means that for a 10-module class, it would take 200 hours of work … just to develop the basic content. On top of that, there is time and expense needed for the course promotion and extra things like workbooks, tests, awards, etc.

Also, you need to account for the time and expense of the supporting technology. Some of my friends have been crushed by the complexity of setting up…