This Will Make You Rethink How You Make Your Money Online

When I started working on my online course project, I had to rethink the whole process of teaching, and in particular the elements and the learning activities that are included in the rather comprehensive work of creating an online course.

As a language and writing teacher for over 35 years, I was used to conveying content in the classroom, talking to a group of young people, writing with chalk on the blackboard, giving writing assignments and taking in the students' papers, reading and correcting the products and giving feedback to the writers.

For the last 13 years of my career, I worked as the head of an adult education center, and when after a few years I quit and retired, I was pleased to discover that the world of education was about to change tremendously. Distance learning and online courses began to come and presented brand new opportunities for a teacher and educator.

All in all, this is about this question:

What characterizes good learning?

Today we are facing a whole new and very different situation in teaching than we did just 20 years ago. In traditional classroom teaching learning is a social activity, learning was and still is something the students do in a classroom with others. It's an activity where a teacher is central and guides the learning processes. In earlier times, in many cases, there was a stronger focus on the teacher as a person than on the learning content.

Another requirement for learning in earlier times and at the present time is that learning must be of high quality. And when we first start talking about quality in the learning process and quality in teaching, then we are in another big field where there are many different opinions, points of view and theories: What is a good quality in learning?

This article does not intend to go into all of this and provide complete answers to all questions about quality in learning processes and quality in teaching, but let's just go over some key concepts.

In earlier times we often talked about curricula and curriculum goals, and the concept of 'curriculum goals' was central. Teaching was very focused on curriculum goals. We liked talking about goal management.

While we used to talk about how important it was to reach the curriculum goals, the focus has now turned to a new term, namely 'intended learning outcome' (ILO).

According to a summary of research done by Biggs and Tang (2011),

"We now think the term 'intended learning outcome' (ILO) is better because it emphasizes more than does 'objective' that we are referring to what the student has to learn rather than what the teacher has to teach. 'Intended learning out- come' clarifies what the student should be able to perform after teaching that couldn't be performed previously - and there may well be outcomes that are a positive outcome of teaching that weren't intended." (Biggs, J. and C. Tang (2011). Teaching for quality learning at university, McGraw-Hill International.)

How can we facilitate learning processes?

Dissemination is important, and several interesting related questions are worth looking into:

What makes students and other learners learn what they need to learn?

How should I, as a course holder, communicate the content of the course so that the students learn?

What is learning? - Should we say that learning is input and useful information or influence that leads to changes in behavior?

What features good learning?

When I started to prepare myself for creating my online courses, I had to ask myself some fundamental questions around the learning processes.

• How can I make sure the student does relevant learning activities?
• How can I give the students relevant formative feedback?
• How can I be sure students are properly motivated?
• How can I give the student a basic and related knowledge base?
• How can I make sure the student engages in reflective learning?

All in all these questions summarize to:

What features good learning?

In summary, we can thus say that it is important that the student can assess her own learning by reflecting on where she is in her own learning process in relation to the intended learning outcome (ILO).

Another important aspect is that relevant learning activities are involved, both inside and outside the classroom. When more senses are involved in the learning process we remember better.

Feedback is important in both ways, from teacher to student and from student to teacher. The feedback provides particularly good learning if the student dares to make mistakes and manages to learn from the mistakes to take a step closer to the intended learning outcome.

Feedback from the course instructor or the teacher to the students is different in distance learning than in classroom teaching. In online teaching, course creators shall facilitate the student to receive feedback from the course instructor on their submitted work. In addition, the student should have the opportunity to submit feedback to the course instructor. The course must be designed so that the student actually feels encouraged and welcome to provide feedback.

The system must be such that it encourages course participants to provide feedback in ways that allow students to actually take the initiative to provide feedback and to get feedback the other way. The system should encourage you in a way that makes students actually take some time so be there and ask for feedback or give feedback.

Here we are at the student role or the student role, and the ideal that many teachers had in earlier times, and which was traditionally emphasized in the teaching, namely the slogan AFEL (Norwegian: "Ansvar For Eiga Læring" - "Responsibility For Own Learning"). In following this ideal, the exemplary student / learner should actively take responsibility for his or her learning work.

In the new educational course world with online courses, we have a whole new student role or student role that still assumes that the student has a large part of the responsibility: the student himself has a reason to start the study.

He or she wants to learn something and searches the web for many suitable courses that can help him / her towards the goal.

The ideal online student takes full responsibility for all parts of the process. This includes formulating the goals of the learning process and searching the web for relevant courses, assessing different course offerings according to their own needs, selecting relevant courses, contact with course providers and requesting more information about the content of the course as well as terms and prices.

He or she then, finally, buys the course and starts working on the course.

It goes without saying that when a student embarks on such a project, she has a more active and positive relationship with the project than a young student in school who may hate to go to school and is compelled to do so.

The online course is the student's own project. The project and the learning work are firmly rooted in the person who bought the course, and in this way a very good foundation has been laid for the implementation of the learning project.

The learner is the center of focus

A summary of research done by Biggs and Tang (2011) shows that good learning situations are characterized by the following aspects:

Against this background, we can say that it is important for the student to assess her own learning by reflecting on where she is in her own learning process in relation to the learning objectives. It is also important that the student participates in relevant learning activities, both inside and outside the classroom. When multiple senses are involved in the learning process, we remember better.

Feedback both ways is also important, from teacher to student and from student to teacher. If the student dares to make mistakes and is able to process the mistakes in order to take a step closer to the learning goal, the feedback proves to be particularly good learning.

Student motivation can be strengthened by helping students see how learning work brings them closer to the learning goal. Furthermore, it is important to talk about success in a way that makes students feel that they can reach their goals, on condition that they put in enough effort.

Together with the students we can build the knowledge base, by restructuring new knowledge and by helping the students to see the structures in the subject and how it relates to other subjects the students take.

Social contexts are obviously important in learning. Giving students the opportunity to collaborate and discuss each other's views opens an arena for reflection and to expand their own understanding.

It is also very important how the teacher organizes the teaching. Variation and tempo are important, and one should not try to cover "everything" in the subject.

You should rather spend more time on what is most important for overall understanding, and make sure students have understanding before continuing.

One final point that is important is having "contracts" with students about what is covered by the online course and what they need to read on their own.

Thoughts after completing my first online course as a course creator

When I decided to create online courses my intention was to create a creative writing course for students who had a little writing experience, a course that could be of use to new, upcoming writers.

I started this project with the intention that the course could be of interest for people who used to write a bit and who want to write more. I wanted to reach a wide audience and help people reach many readers.

With regard to target group and language to write in, I decided to offer the course to students across the world and to use English as a working language. I chose English as a working language because this language is one of the most widely used languages ​​in the world.

When I started working on the project I did so on the basis of being an experienced Norwegian lecturer who has taught writing and Norwegian, German and French languages to students in upper secondary school for over 35 years. Many of the teaching hours in Norwegian and partly of French and German teaching revolved around writing education.

I myself have written and published books, both fiction and non-fiction. In addition, I also write and publish articles, essays, experimental texts, short prose and poems on medium.com. Many of my articles on medium.com are about writing and I found I could use parts of this material as a background for writing lessons for my online course.

The work on the course has been an exciting and interesting journey that has given me a lot of new knowledge in several fields.

Lessons learned

There have of course been both ups and downs and it has been very educational, so here I will try to summarize my lessons learned.

In connection with the work on this course, I had to learn many different things about online courses and about writing. One thing is the course content itself, the structure of the course and how to build the course so that it becomes interesting for those who are going to take the course. Here it is about choice of topic, angles in relation to different topics and whether the course should specialize in preferences, ie what special topics the course should focus on. A very important point has been to create an online course with content that can be of top interest to the students.

I have also learned a lot about how one can reach potential buyers of the course and I have learned a little about advertising on Facebook and on Google. I shall not go into this topic here, but I can say I have not at least learned that it costs a lot to build and sell online courses.

Tools and software for online courses

In order to be able to offer courses you need a good deal of tools, and these can partly be achieved as free software. But if one is to offer courses that are quite extensive and which require a lot from the course holder when it comes to assistive technology and to convey complicated content, then tools that cost a bit of money may be necessary and then it is better to take the necessary costs.

I have also myself participated in a course on creating online courses, and that was perhaps what made me able to start creating an online course myself, without too much curl. The course on building online courses was a costly course but it has actually given me a great deal of value back in terms of knowledge of making online courses.

Some of what I have learned, after all, is that nothing is free either when it comes to money or when it comes to labor.

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If you want to create online courses, there are several things that are important to consider:

A good course idea. What are people in need of? Define the course topic and the audience. You need to have a course topic that people want to learn about, such as a new language or a new skill or how to make it work in a couple relationship.

Dissemination is important, that is, the way you give the course participants the content.

The course must have appeal in the way it is sold. The course must appear as something the customer needs. It must be more than something that is nice to have.

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When I started doing online courses, I had no experience with exactly that. But I had experience teaching from the classroom, and I had many thoughts on how to make a course online.

There are major differences between teaching in the classroom and teaching through online courses. While standing face-to-face with the students in the classroom and observing if they have understood and acquired what you say, you have to rely on the web that students learn what they are expected to learn without the direct contact and observation of student learning you can get in the classroom.

The communication on the web is first and foremost visual and auditory. The web tutor delivers text and image lessons, and can link audio files, videos, podcasts, and PDF files with explanations and supplemental content to the lessons. All the content must be well worked out and of top quality, and it will be available unlimitedly to anyone who has purchased the course. This also applies to explanations, supplementary material and real-time guidance, which are exceptionally provided in the form of extra support, coaching or one-to-one service.

The teacher in the classroom has the advantage that she can observe the students in the learning work, and she can thus capture special needs that the individual student has.

While in a classroom, the teacher must teach so that she reaches everyone. It is not always unproblematic. Maybe the teacher has presented the teaching material too difficult or too easy, so that individual pupils fail either because they do not understand what is taught in the teaching or they lose interest.

In teaching online, in principle, all the content must be so structured and formulated that the websites address all questions that may arise. This is how it rarely works in practice, and therefore online courses must also have help pages and other channels for direct contact with the web teacher. Email is often the most widely used channel for this latter.

In online education, students by definition have a more active role than students in the classroom. The online student has purchased a course and is therefore in a slightly different way eager to complete the course successfully.

The great thing about online teaching is that you get the opportunity to give the students what they want, because you get students who have actively chosen the course and who are therefore interested. The big challenge is to get enough students interested in the courses. There are maybe only two ways to do it - to create very good courses, and to be very good at marketing so that many enough mature students realize that the course exists.

Creating a new online course can be very inspiring because you are completely free in terms of when you want to create the course and how you would present the content and material. You can completely determine the extent of the course, and you can decide how to disseminate, design web pages and lessons, use of audio files, podcasts and videos, etc.

If you decide to create a course and you have all the resources yourself, then it is very easy to do the creative work on the course. You can combine oral and written communication, and you can add up to a wide variety of ways of communicating and you can decide the theme, scope, pace and time of completion and publication.

In order to create online courses, you need - in addition to professional and educational competence - a number of tools. First and foremost, you need good writing tools, and then a PC or computer is important, and a smartphone. In addition, it may be a good idea to have an iPad, so you can work with two screens at once.

To gather ideas and develop ideas, you need at least two of these, at least your smartphone and your computer. The idea phase is very important. You should always have mobile, computer or notepad available so you can always write down course ideas.

You can also use the dictation function on your mobile phone, and you can, for example, use the function to write new e-mail, where you click on the microphone symbol to let the mail program write down for you what you want to remember.