Introducing Online Course Audits
Introducing High Tide Learning Studio’s new line of business - course audits for online experts. You’re probably thinking “what’s a course audit?” First, let me back up and explain how all of this started. As owners of a successful instructional design agency, we’re often exploring new approaches, tools and ideas to help our business grow. In order to do that, we often need new skills...and sometimes online courses are the best way to learn. We’ve bought courses on topics like leveraging LinkedIn, social media marketing, branding, mindset, entrepreneurship and more. The online course market is huge - there’s literally a course for everything.
It was through this journey as paying customers that we quickly realized that some courses were really great...and some were not. We joked that our instructional design skills could really be used to help some of these course creators improve their offerings. At first, we didn’t seriously consider going down the road of helping online course creators. After all, our market is primarily the corporate world - businesses, unions and government entities. It seemed crazy to go after a whole new market of individual course creators that we don’t know and don’t really understand. The more we thought about it though, the more it seemed like the right move.
After a lot of soul searching and some market research, High Tide Learning Studio - Online Course Audits was created. Through this division of our brand, Erin will work with existing course creators to bring their course to the next level. The audit will be customized based on the course creators needs, but could cover the following topics:
Is the course easy to follow or will your client get frustrated?
Does it appeal to clients with different learning styles? Is it based on learning theory?
Does the flow of the content make sense?
Is the content sequential (ie does something get mentioned in module 1 that isn’t explained until module 3)?
Is there too much or too little content?
Are there spelling/grammatical mistakes?
Is the user-interface clear?
And more.
We don’t just flag issues - we offer suggestions and solutions. In fact, we provide a full online course evaluation.
At the end of the day, online course creators are experts in their field - whether it’s a real estate coach, a parenting coach, an investing expert, a social media expert, or a business coach. They’re not usually learning experts. That’s what we bring to the table. We see ourselves almost like mystery shoppers for course creators - we go through it with a fine tooth comb and can see things that the creator doesn’t always see.
Ultimately, consider us your course creation coach.
One question we get asked a lot is where the word “audit” came from to describe this new line of work. Well, it just seemed to be the best fit. You could also call us curriculum consultants, course coaches, or course experts.
Another question we get asked is why we don’t work with new course creators. The simple answer is because there is so much more to being a successful course creator than having a great course. You can have the best course in the world but if it doesn’t meet your audience’s needs, or nobody knows it exists (it’s not marketed well), it’s not going to sell. We hope to work with those who have already figured out the other parts of the recipe - the marketing funnel, the client research, and more - to just focus on the course itself. That’s our superpower and zone of genius.
If you want to learn more or want to book a call to see if you’d be a good candidate for our course auditing service, check out our new website.