Okay, so here we are at the point of planning out the specific content that you’re going to include in your online course, as according to the sections and the lessons that you plotted out in the last lesson.
And this one is actually quite short and sweet to understand the what and the why.
This is all about something called lesson planning.
And you might think, well, hang on, Ginette, I’m not a teacher, what do I know about lesson planning?
Don’t panic, don’t worry, this is just about giving you a easy way if you like to look at what you’re going to include in each of your lessons.
And to that end, there’s a two step process in this, you want to think about something called your lesson objectives.
And then you want to think about your lesson structure.
So your objectives are the what your learner’s going to achieve at the end of each of the lessons. And then your structure is something of a template, if you like for how you’re going to construct each of your lessons, and what sort of information you’re going to include.
In the How To lessons the How To videos of this lesson, I will take you through how to do both of those things if you’re not quite sure.
But if you’re already competent at sorting out your lesson plans and sorting out learning objectives and have a structure or a template already set up then you go ahead, get all of that sorted and I’ll see you in the next lesson.
Otherwise, see you in the How To!

Okay, welcome to the first How To video for your specific content.
And this is another How To that I’ve split into two different videos, because there’s a fair amount to go through, as you can probably already see by some of the stuff that’s on the flipchart behind me.
So we’re going to go through the importance of starting to really test out your content that you want to include in each of your lessons and thinking about what you are specifically going to be including. And it’s a two step process.
So the first process is to think about what the objectives are for each of the lessons that you’re proposing to include. And this is a real stress test for whether or not it really is essential information to include.
So if you find out that at this point, there’s something that you think actually it doesn’t pass muster, don’t worry, only fossils are set in stone, you can always go back through a few of the stages that we’ve looked at in this section, just to re re go over, re go over?!
Go over the information that you’ve put together just to see if there’s anything in there that needs adjusting. So that’s all that this section is about, really, this entire section, all of the lessons is about getting to the point where you’re absolutely 100% crystal clear on all the information you are going to include, and all the information perhaps more importantly, that you’re not going to be including.
Alright, so the first step is to think about the objectives for each of the lessons. And so really, this is about asking yourself, by the end of this lesson, the learner will what? And one of the most important things to keep front and center really, is this idea of What’s In It For Me, otherwise known by the cheeky acronym, W double I F M, What’s In It For Me.
And this is a reminder to keep front and center that your learners are going to be looking at each video thinking okay, yeah, but how does this help me? How does this move me forward? How is this telling me something that I really need to know, in order to get where I’m going? So you have to think about each video that you’re including from that point of view.
So in order to write a learning objective, think about by the end of this lesson, the learner will what for the sections, what’s the point of the section, what’s it there for, and then for each of the lessons, what’s in it for me.
So I’ve given you an example here, which you are totally welcome to lift because it’s quite generic for the introductory sort of videos that you might have in any online course really. And your first sort of section is going to be covering help the learner to know like, and trust me, inspire them. And that’s really the sort of the the top line of what you want the entire section to be about.
This is your introductory section that I’ve written it for. So it’s for the perfect toast making course, but really, it could be for any course, helping learners to know like, and trust me, know, like, and trust is essential for them to have that connection with you.
We will talk in the next lesson about the delivery types, the ways in which you can get your information across. And I would strongly suggest that at the very least, your introductory section needs to be you on camera, so that you can really deepen that connection with your learners. But the overall point of an introduction section is to help the learner to know, like and trust the instructor, and to inspire them for what’s to come in the course.
So that’s your overall objective for the section as a whole. We’ve got two lessons in this section.
The first is your welcome and specific introduction to you as the instructor.
So what you probably want to get out of that is to reinforce that they’ve made a good buying decision, even after they’ve paid money. If this is a paid for course that you are offering people, you still want to reinforce they’ve made a good buying decision. Because people can still buy something, it all goes through and then they get the first few videos and they think, oh, you know what, I’m not sure this is for me.
So you’re still in reinforcing mode at this point. So reinforce that they’ve made a good buying decision. And again, reinforcing the connection by being friendly and relatable. So like I was saying, being on camera really goes a long way to helping with that.
And then in the second lesson, what they get in this course, the sort of information that you’re going to want to include in this one is something along the lines of inspiration for the learning that’s to come and reinforcing the desired outcome.
So yes, you’re going over exactly what they’re going to get in the course. So a bit of a run through of the curriculum, if you will. But your purpose really, your objective for this lesson is to make them inspired about the learning that they’re going to receive.
And also to reinforce the desired outcome that you’ve already identified is something that they really, really want to have as a result of taking this course, remember all the buying decisions, the reasons why we buy, all of that information.
Well, that’s where you reinforce it in here. So what you want to do is go through all of your sections and all of your lessons and just write one or two sentences, just some bullet points, some words just to start to get you focused on the What’s In It For Me for each of the lessons, and what’s the point of each of the sections.

And it might help you to think by the end of this lesson the learner will what, what will they know, what will they have? What will they do? What will they be? What will they show? Whatever is relevant for you.
Alright, that’s this How To, I’ll see you in the next one.

Okay, so having completed the step of making sure you have an objective for all of the lessons in your online course, now you get to plot out specifically what information you’re going to include in each of those lessons. And you’ve probably already got a good idea of what sort of things you definitely want to include. And you might have even got to the step of writing out some slides or that kind of thing, if those are what you’re going to include in your course.

But this step is really important so that as soon as you turn on the camera, or as soon as you start recording your lesson, you’ve got a really good idea of how you’re going to lead into the lesson. And also how you’re going to close the lesson off, not to mention all the important bits that go in between, this is not as simple as it sounds. So if I was to say to you just give me a quick couple of minutes on whatever a particular topic might be for your online course, you would soon realize that starting a lesson, and finishing a lesson can actually sometimes be some of the hardest things to do. So what I suggest you have is a template for each of your lessons.

And that makes it really easy for you to plot out exactly what you’re going to say, how you lead in, what you’re going to talk about in the meat, if you like of your lesson, how long it’s going to take you so that you can keep to that five minutes, and then how you’re going to close the lesson off. So when I say a template, it literally is as simple as that. So you want to start each of your lessons with the what, as in, what is the lesson all about? So you’re saying, Hi, this lesson is about what.

The very next thing is why? And that’s all about what’s in it for me. So why is it important to have that information. So what it is why it’s important to have that particular piece of information, then you go into your knowledge delivery. And you can have I would suggest, I think I’ve already said probably you’re aiming for one concept per video lesson, you can have up to three if they’re really simple and short. But this is your knowledge. So this is the meat of the lesson. This is the purpose of the lesson, what you wrote your lesson objective about. And then you want to close it out by recapping the information that they’ve learned.

So a recap of the what information, and then you might want to tease what’s coming next. And this might play out as in this lesson, we are going to discuss XYZ. This is important because it will deliver ABC. Here’s some information about X, here’s some information about Y. Here’s some information about Z. In this lesson, you’ve just learned all about XYZ, and its importance to ABC. Coming up next, we’ve got 123. And it’s as simple as that. And it makes it nice and easy for you to not have to worry about how you’re going to introduce and close off every lesson and how you’re going to introduce the knowledge that you want to talk about.

Alright, the next thing to do once you’ve got all of this and once you’ve decided what information you’re going to put in each. So up here is the what as in the content. Can’t write small with these pens. So you’ve got whatever that information might be, then what you want to do is just plot out how long you think you’re going to take. Now the more you do this, the more you will understand how long it takes you to do things like this is what this lesson is about. And this is why this lesson is important.

So you will end up knowing that for example, you can take maybe 10 seconds to do that. And then perhaps your why might take 20 seconds, you probably want to spend at least two minutes on the knowledge delivery two or three minutes. Your recap might take 20 seconds, and then your introduction of what’s coming next might take another 10 seconds. So all of that is to three minutes long.

Okay, I would imagine that you’re almost certainly going to be playing around with this bit. So that can be anything from between two to four minutes if you’re trying to stick to the five minute barrier. And this way, it really helps you understand just how much time you’ve got to talk about the information that you want to deliver in the lesson. And then also what this does helps you understand whether or not you actually want to perhaps divide lessons into two or maybe even three so that you can make sure that you’re not overwhelming people with too much knowledge.

Okay, so that’s where we get to with plotting out all your specific information. The very next step is to understand how you’re going to deliver that information to your learners. And that’s exactly what the next lesson in this section is all about. I’ll see you there.