Your Complete Guide to Building a Course for your Community

WORKBOOK

Your Complete Guide to Building A COURSE FOR YOUR COMMUNITY

W W W.C OM M UNIT Y LEA D ER S I N S TI TUTE .C O M

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Creating interactive courses Most community leaders are experts in their field but the majority don’t have a background in teaching or lecturing, they come to course creation with the experience, skills and knowledge of their topic or sector and generally learn, over time, how to develop a course and how to deliver that knowledge successfully to students.

If you’re planning to deliver online courses within your community, and you don’t have experience of delivering educational content, you’ll find this worksheet helpful in creating some structure around what you’re delivering.

Getting interactive Students learn best when they’re engaged. If you’re delivering courses live, we strongly recommend you make your training interactive in order to keep your students focus and attention. Here are some ways to do that:

Ask Questions (frequently!)

We always start our sessions with an informal, easy question which gets attendees warmed-up and connected to each other. The question is usually about where the students are, right now, in their learning. It also helps our trainers get a feel for how much experience in this area the majority of attendees have – sometimes we send this question out in advance to help prepare the training material at the right level, but then ask it again at the start of the session so that the whole group can see where each other are at.

Use polls

Most streaming and webinar solutions have poll options, which enable you to prebuild a poll and launch when ready, it helps keep attention.

Show not tell

You learnt this in Writing class at school – and it stands, here. It’s much more effective to use visual examples to reinforce what you’re teaching than to try and explain everything. If you’re talking about what works and what doesn’t in a certain field – show examples of the good, bad and ugly for example. Even better, combine this with polls or questions to ask the audience which ones they think work best.

Structure your lessons to include homework

Our training sessions typically take place over the course of a few days or weeks, with space inbetween which facilitates student-completion. Allowing time for them to actually “do” what you’re teaching, where practical, gives them time to ask questions and clarify any uncertainty during the course.

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Consider the value of workshopping

This isn’t appropriate for all courses or material, but sometimes it can work quite well to put students into pairs or small groups to complete their “homework” or even during a live-call, to work through a particular task. You might invite one of the groups to submit their work which you can run through as a group in the next class, to give them invaluable feedback and teach students what works and what doesn’t. You might also have edited/adapted their work, if it could be improved, and share this with the class too.

Use stories

Case studies and stories give far more meaning to learning and help students see practical real-world examples of what can otherwise be too hypothetical and conceptual to make sense.

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Course Content Planning Start at the end To plan your course or masterclass, we always start at the end – which is to say, we always start with the outcome we want students to walk away with, and work backward from there. Identify a key over-arching outcome, and then break this down into smaller chunks of learning.

Consider the logical order of these smaller chunks – they’ll become the backbone of each module or session. Once you have them in the right order, drop them into the template below and add both the key learning from each lesson and 3 or 4 specific things students will learn within that session.

This exercise is useful not only for the course planning itself, to give you the structure you’ll need to deliver the course effectively – but also for marketing purposes. Both the key learnings and the specifics will be used in your marketing messaging.

We’ve used a 3 lesson structure here, because that’s the format our own training tends to take. You can replicate this template to reflect the structure of a single masterclass with more specifics, or a longer course.

There’s no single “right” way to chunk together your lessons – you’ll immediately feel a natural order to it once you start working through, but you might then prefer to do a series of 5 minute videos, one for each specific deliverable, or a 90 minute masterclass – it will depend entirely on both the nature of the content you’re delivering, and your audience.

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Course Structure Template Course Outcome:

Session Session 1

Key learning: Specifics:

• • • Homework/project/task:

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Session Session 2

Key learning: Specifics:

• • • Homework/project/task:

Session Session 3

Key learning: Specifics:

• • • Homework/project/task:

Homework Pro tip

For your homework/project we recommend creating a fillable PDF worksheet, so the student has a degree of structure and clarity around what’s expected. You might also want to include checklists, links to useful resources, scripts, case studies or examples.

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Lesson Planning Once you’ve identified the modules/sessions and the key learning objectives in each, its well worth your time to break down each session into what essentially is a lesson plan. This is particularly valuable in helping you manage the amount of content being covered. Again, it will depend whether you’re creating a 90 minute masterclass, or a series of shorter lessons.

Bear in mind that, once you allow 5 minutes to set the scene and outline what you’ll be teaching and how any homework tasks or workshopping etc will work, and 10 minutes at the end for questions, you will only have 30 minutes for delivery of the lesson itself.

Depending on your subject matter, that likely gives you the opportunity to talk through 3 or 4 key issues – linked to your specific deliverables already outlined. It’s not much time, so make sure you keep the session focused and moving forward.

Pro tip

New instructors often feel unnerved by the length of time and spend too long justifying why they’re the expert in their field and not enough time delivering value.

Time

Specific Deliverables

0-3 minutes

Introductions, housekeeping

3-5 minutes

Expectations, scene-setting, outcome clarification

Notes/powerpoint prompts

5-10 minutes 10-15 minutes 15-20 minutes 20-25 minutes 30-35 minutes 35-45 minutes

Q&A time

Use this workbook each time you create a course or training session, and consider sharing it with the experts you bring in to speak to your Community, so that your training has clarity and continuity. If you liked this resource, don’t forget to check out the other tools on CLI - and feel free to give us a “shout-out” on social media.

FOR MORE COMMUNITY BUILDING TOOLS AND RESOURCES, JOIN THE COMMUNITY LEADERS INSTITUTE TODAY – IT’S FREE www.communityleadersinstitute.com

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