Getting Started Writing Continuing Education Courses

Online continuing education courses have been gaining popularity among licensed professionals in recent years, primarily because of their affordability and convenience. There are literally hundreds of thousands of state-licensed professionals across the country who must undergo continuing professional development to renew their licenses. This creates an equally important market for continuing education course material authors.

In a previous article, Become an author in continuing education and earn money for your mailbox !, I described the benefits for licensed professionals, such as architects, engineers, land surveyors, interior designers and landscape architects, to share their expertise and experience by becoming an author of continuing education courses. In this article, I will explain in more detail how to go about it.

First, select a topic that interests you and has experience. It is much easier to write about something that interests you and about which you have experience than something outside of your interests and experience. Be sure to choose a subject that is neither too broad nor too specific. Your course should be wide enough to attract a large audience, but specific enough to provide useful information.

For example, if you are an architect specializing in interior design in malls, you probably have a lot of experience with the Tennant Property Management Coordinator, who reviews and approves your designs. A course covering the general process of compliance with technical requirements and submission of the owner, with concrete examples of common pitfalls and solutions, could be of interest to many other architects and interior designers who are also working on projects in centers. commercial.

Once you have a topic in mind, prepare a brief overview of the issues you want to address. This does not have to be a formal schema, but just enough so that your basic ideas are on paper. You can then begin to develop each element.

At this point, you should consider writing what are called “learning objectives”. The learning objectives are essentially what the student can expect to learn by taking the course. Almost all state licensing boards require that learning objectives be clearly and concisely stated at the beginning of a continuing education course. There should be at least three learning objectives for each credit hour of the course. Thus, a one-hour course should have at least three, and a three-hour course, at least nine. Learning objectives should not be longer than one or two sentences.

With your basic plan and learning objectives in hand, you can now begin to divide the main titles into subtitles and develop them further. Your plan and course must flow naturally and logically from the larger subject to more detailed details and examples.

You should consider including images, drawings, diagrams, or graphics as visual aids to explain your arguments. Asking a student to read one paragraph after another, page after page, without graphical help to reinforce and separate the text is not a good idea. Use only non-copyrighted graphics and never plagiarize someone else’s work. You should also use major and minor headings in your text and nice combinations of bold and italic text to further dissociate and reinforce the concepts you are explaining. And be sure to reread your course for spelling and syntax errors before submitting.

The last step in creating your course is to prepare a test. The tests must be in the form of true / false and multiple choice questions. Both types can be used, however, True / False questions should not represent more than 50% of the questions. Multiple choice questions must not contain less than three and not more than six choices. The test questions can be part of the course document or be a separate document. You will also be asked to provide the course provider you are submitting a copy of the test with the correct answers, underlined in one way or another.