How to brainstorm your online course content

Are you ready to brainstorm your online course content? Sometimes it’s easy enough to get your ideas out of your head and into a course outline and sometimes it’s a little harder. In this post I’ll share a couple of methods that I’ve found work for me.

Here’s my draft outline for my next course:

A photo posted by Helen Lindop (@totallycourses) on Jan 19, 2017 at 3:06am PST

I’m now at the editing stage, but this is where I was a couple of weeks ago when I shared the draft outline on Instagram.

This was an easy outline for me because I’ve owned blogs for a few years now and I’ve written a lot about blogging over that time. The information was pretty much already in my head – I knew the steps and I didn’t need to do much research.  Also, this is a short, focused course, which helps a lot. But it’s not always that easy. (I wish it was!)

Often, I have loads of ideas for what might go into my course whirling around my mind and it’s not easy to get them down in a nice, tidy list. When that happens I pull out my big roll of paper, my felt pens and I do this…

That was how I began my last course on content marketing for small businesses, by the way.

If you’d like to give this a go, any large sheet of paper will do including flipchart paper or the back of an old roll of wallpaper. I use a roll of kids’ drawing paper from Ikea.  Once I’ve downloaded all of the ideas from my brain, I can write an orderly outline like the one at the top of this page!

So if you struggle to get your course ideas out of your head and into a list that you can actually work with, you might like to try this method of brainstorming your online course content. Let me know how it goes!

Or if you’d like to see my range of done-for-you courses, please take a look here!