BM084: How to Make Your Book an Awesome Online Course

Want to know how to convert your book into an online course to add credibility and profit? Join Dr. Kelly Edmonds, expert online course designer, as she generously shares many of her insider secrets.

Dr. Kelly Edmonds has years of experience in the teaching and instructional design field. She has three degrees in Education with focuses on adult and online learning. She helps entrepreneurs and corporations create, design and teach online courses. A leader in the e-learning field, she’s won seven educational awards and presented at nearly 30 education conferences while helping thousands of people learn better through research-based instructional design. She’s deeply inspired by the impact that effective instructional design can have on individuals and institutions, and her aim is to further students’ knowledge and help them feel supported as they embark on a new educational territory.

Excerpt from this week’s podcast “How to Make Your Book an Awesome Online Course”

Q: Kelly, what does it take to convert a book into an online course or program?

A: It takes quite a bit and I’ll be honest about that. There’s a lot of marketing ploys out there like, “Take my program and I’ll teach you how to whip up a course,” and it takes quite a bit. It takes as much to create a course as it does to write a book. So a lot of thought needs to go into it, a lot of organization. You have to get the right tone. You have to worry about how much content you put in. Too little, people won’t get enough information; too much, they’ll become bored or overwhelmed. So to design a course, you need to figure out what, first of all, the experience you want to take people through. That’s what courses need to be. They are one step away from just that one-way communication and information providing of a book to engaging.

So now they can engage a little bit more with the content. They can engage with other people in the course including the instructor if it’s facilitated. You can almost make your book come alive a little bit. When I design courses with my clients, like a five-week course, let’s say, for example, it takes us close to three months to create it. It’s not so much putting together the platform to put the content up into it. It’s massaging that content and creating the right activities and getting the visuals and maybe doing an audio piece or video piece. So it takes a lot to actually create the content that goes into it, a dynamic and engaging online course.

[tweetthis]“It takes as much to create a course as it does to write a book.”[/tweetthis]

To contact Dr. Kelly Edmonds for more information about her services.

Download the transcript from this week’s podcast interview “How to Make Your Book an Awesome Online Course”