What has to change is the order, not the material
You already have the material. It's in the handouts you have rewritten six times, in the answers you give on the way out of the room, in the sequence you take a nervous beginner through without thinking about it. None of that is missing.
A course is a route through what you know. It is not a map of all of it, and the gap between those two things is where most people lose two years.
So there are three decisions. Who is standing at the start. What one thing they can do at the end that they can't do now. And what you're going to cut, out of all the material you love, because it doesn't sit on the line between the two.
That last one is the hard decision and it's the one that makes the course. Give it a few evenings, and expect to feel like you're throwing away good work, because you are. What you have at the end of it is a built course and not an audience for it, and finding the first few students is a separate job with its own weeks in it. This page is only about the first part.
Knowing too much is what stops you
Here's the thing nobody says to the expert. The reason you can't start is not that you know too little about your subject. It is that you know too much, and everything in it connects to everything else, so wherever you try to put the first lesson there are four things it depends on and you have to explain those first, and each of those has its own four. Depth is a lovely quality in a practitioner and a genuine obstacle to a curriculum. Somebody who has been teaching this for six months writes the course in a fortnight, because they only know six months of it and the order looks obvious from there. You know where every exception lives, which is why you're worth learning from, and it's also why you have three abandoned attempts in a folder.
You don't fix this by knowing less. You fix it by letting the first version be incomplete on purpose.
Pick one person, and one thing they can do at the end
Think of somebody real. Not a market and not an ideal customer, an actual person who came to you eighteen months ago knowing nothing at all. Now finish this sentence about them: by the end of this course, they can do this one thing.
If you can't fill that in, you have a subject rather than a course. That's fixable, but it's a different piece of work, and choosing what to teach in the first place has its own traps worth reading about before you build anything.
If you can fill it in, you've just written your syllabus. The lessons are whatever stands between that person and that sentence, in the order they need them. Everything else goes into a second course, or into nothing at all, and the sooner you accept the second option the sooner the first one exists.
An opinion that helps nobody: I have never much liked the word passion. The people who are best at this almost never use it about themselves. Ask them why they do it and you get a shrug and "it's just what I do", which describes twenty years more accurately than any word with an exclamation mark behind it.
The empty form asks what you have been avoiding
Describe what you teach in a sentence. Say how many sections you want and how many lessons in each. Say who it is for. The builder writes the first draft from that: the sections, the lesson titles, and the words inside them. It takes about ninety seconds.
The draft matters less than the shape it arrives in. What you get back is an order, laid out in a list, and an order you disagree with is a thousand times easier to work with than an empty page. Arguing is a different activity from inventing. Anybody who has sat in front of a blinking cursor for two years knows exactly how different.
So you move things. You throw out a section. You discover that lesson six is really lesson two, which you knew all along and could not see until the fifteen of them were sitting in a list in front of you.
The order is what they're paying for
Once the sections are right, the rest is filling them in. A lesson can be text, video, audio, a PDF, a quiz, or an assignment you mark by hand, and you choose per lesson instead of committing the whole course to one format. The breathing exercise is audio. The thing with six steps is a PDF they can put on the floor beside them. Five minutes of you explaining why step three matters is video, and it doesn't have to be good video.
You can release lessons over time rather than handing the whole thing over on day one. A course delivered all at once asks the student to invent their own schedule; one lesson a week gives them an appointment instead.
Everything in your course exists somewhere on the internet already, free, in pieces, out of sequence and contradicted by the next result down the page. The order is the part they cannot get from a search engine. When a student logs in they see your name, your colours and your brand, with no sign of us anywhere, which is the correct arrangement for something you spent twenty years learning.
Where they stop is where the order is wrong
Hand it to somebody you already teach before you hand it to strangers. Add them as a client, tick what they should have, and they get an email with a login. Then leave it alone and look at what happened a week later.
You can see which lessons someone finished and which one they stopped at. The useful part is knowing what to do with that, and the lesson somebody stops at is rarely the bad lesson. It's usually the one straight after a lesson that assumed too much, so they arrive without something they needed and the wall goes up one lesson late. That is an ordering fault and it takes an afternoon to fix. People dropping out partway through is a whole subject on its own, and most of it comes back to sequence.
Four passions that should stay in the room
- The improvising is the good part. If your teaching works because you say it differently every time, depending on who is in front of you, a fixed order takes away the thing that works. Teach it live, and record only the parts that never change.
- Nobody can do anything new at the end. If you can't name the one thing, what you have is a talk. A good talk is worth giving as a talk, and building a fifteen-lesson course around one is how you end up with fifteen lessons nobody finishes.
- Your field moves every few months. Research, regulation, the guidance from your association. A recorded course is maintenance from the day it goes out, and if lesson nine has to be re-recorded every spring, count that in before you start.
- You want it done this week. The writing is fast now. The decisions are not, and no software will make them for you.
One price, and no tiers to read
One plan, $47 a month. Unlimited courses and products, 1,000 active students, hosted video with 1TB of bandwidth a month, the AI course builder, the AI assistant at 1,500 messages a month, communities, chat, a sales page, coupons, graded assignments and a certificate on completion. Nothing sits behind a higher tier, because there isn't one to read.
We take 0% of what you sell. You connect your own Stripe account and keep everything except Stripe's own 2.9% plus 30 cents, which everybody pays everywhere.
The trial runs 30 days and doesn't ask for a card, and there's a 30-day money-back guarantee after it. That is long enough to make the three decisions, build the fifteen lessons and watch one real person walk through them.
Take the sentence you cannot stop yourself explaining, and go and see what it looks like as a course.