Two crucial skills for course creators

I’ve been getting to grips with a new content creation tool recently.

It’s called Descript and it helps you record and edit your audio and video content.

This newsletter isn’t really about that tool, although it is a clever concept.

(Basically, it transcribes your speech into a text document, then allows you to edit the recording just by editing the text in the document!)

I’ve known about Descript for a while but I’ve only recently started exploring it properly.

And I like it, but it’s emblematic of an ongoing challenge with content creation…

There’s always a new tool promising to make things quicker and easier.

However, you can’t be on top of everything.

And waiting for the perfect tool is just another way to delay creating your course.

Individual tools come and go but I see mastery of these as surface skills.

Beneath those skills are two more fundamental skills that are crucial to being an effective course creator.

Scoping and outlining.

Scoping answers the question: “What’s in and what’s out?”

For instance, what will your course cover? How wide a net will it cast?

Scoping is vital at lower levels too:

What will this module cover? What will this lesson cover? Even, what will this diagram cover?

Without the ability to scope your course, you’ll deliver too much or too little. Or deliver the right stuff in wrong-sized chunks.

Outlining on the other hand answers the question: “How does this break down?”

For instance, how does this course break down into modules? How does this module break down into lessons? Even, how does this concept break down into bullet points?

So if you’re getting bogged down by all your content creation options, return to the fundamental skills of scoping and outlining.

You could scope and outline a course in a couple of hours.

You could scope and outline the first module in a couple more.

Once you’ve scoped and outlined a single lesson, then you have my permission to explore some tools for helping you turn your outline into a finished asset.

And when you get to that point, let me know. I’ll give you some quick feedback. 🙂

See you soon,

Glen