05-14 Outline Your Course Roadmap - SCAI002

So you have your learning objectives, the end points for your learners in place. The next step in designing an effective course is to plan the order in which you'll introduce your content. This step is really important. You need to make sure the information you present to your audience is presented in a logical way, like topics are grouped together and any dependencies are taken care of. In my course about creating TikTok content, for example, I wouldn't want to start right off by listing a bunch of relevant TikTok trends that my audience might want to use as inspiration to make their own content. There are a lot of other important steps they need first that will help them be successful. Creating an outline will ensure your content is easy to follow. So let's take it into chat, GPT, and get to work. Act as an expert instructional designer. Create an outline for a course about, insert your topic. The information in the course should lead to the learner being able to now insert your learning objective or objectives. The outline should have headings for different lessons with a list of topics that needs to be covered in each lesson. Link each lesson to the objective type piece above. Now, before we take a closer look at my results for my TikTok course, I want to remind you that this chat GPT output is meant to save you time and give you a headstart on your course. The key to getting a truly valuable course out of this is going to require that you add the human element back in and craft the output to work for your audience and make sure it's allowing your expertise to shine. With that in mind, my outline that I've got here is a great start. Chat GPT gave me four lessons and then a conclusion, a wrap-up lesson. It gave me new objectives within each lesson that helped build towards that larger outcome that I put in my prompt. This is key with a course that's going to be around an hour in length. You usually want each lesson to scaffold up to your course objective. You're not going to meet your course objective in the first five minutes of an hour long course. And you can see this outline also has the topics that need to fall within each lesson in order to scaffold all that content and make sure that you end with your outcome, your main course objective being met by your audience. Now, depending on what your outline looks like, you have some work to do. Grab the chat GPT output and edit it for yourself. Remove anything that you don't want to be a focus or add in content that you think is necessary if it meets your learning objective. Now, if you want to do a little bit more work in chat GPT before you edit this yourself, or if you weren't pleased with what chat GPT gave you, you can follow up before you do your editing. So here are some ideas. Use whichever prompts you need and feel free to edit them based on your individual needs. Rewrite the above outline, but ensure there's more of a focus on topic. Rewrite the above outline, but make it longer, more concise, or whatever other adjective. Rewrite the above outline, but focus only on, insert learning objective. Rewrite the above outline to be more relevant to, insert audience. Rewrite the above outline to be, number of lessons in length or timeline. Now, before you move on to your next step, make sure you have this outline finalized. I know I started this video stressing how important this step is for you, but I'm going to say it again. As an instructional designer, I partner with subject matter experts like you all the time. The main reason it's challenging for these experts to create their own courses without my help is because of their depth of knowledge. Experts tend to want to include way more information than is necessary for their learning objectives, and it makes sense. When you're that knowledgeable about something, you want to share your knowledge with the audience. But I'm here to tell you to save it. Having this outline and sticking to it will help keep your audience focused only on what's essential to reaching that main objective of your course. Keep your other knowledge and those other topics for future courses or bonus videos. Once you have that outline set, you're ready to start building in all the information you need for your course, and we will do that in the next video.