# 65 The Hidden Reason Teachers Join My Course Creation Program

Why do so many teachers, former teachers, and education specialists still seek support when creating an online course?

At first, it might seem surprising. After all, if anyone knows how to teach, it should be a teacher. But in this episode, Shannon explores why people with teaching backgrounds often understand something the online course world tends to overlook: good teaching, strong curriculum, and effective online course design are not the same thing.

A course is not just a collection of lessons. It is not simply your expertise divided into modules. And it is definitely not just content placed on a platform.

In this episode, Shannon unpacks the difference between sharing information and designing a learning experience someone can actually move through. She also shares why thoughtful course creators often feel stuck, not because they lack expertise, but because they can sense their course needs a clearer path, stronger structure, and more intentional decisions behind it.

If course creation has felt harder than expected, this episode will help you see that the issue may not be overthinking. It may be that you care about creating something that works.

Before you outline, record, or sell your course, download Shannon’s free Course Clarity Blueprint. This resource walks you through the three decisions every course creator needs to make before designing their course, so you can stop building from the middle and start with the clarity your course actually needs.

Download the Course Clarity Blueprint HERE.

Get started on your own course creation journey or learn how to make your existing course even better at The "Your Best Course" Build Lab, my interactive and supportive online community.

To get started creating your own online course, check out my new freebie that will take you through the steps of choosing a topic that will be profitable for YOU.

To book a call to discuss your options and see if working together makes sense.  Click here. 😊

Transcript

0:00

You might be surprised to hear that a noticeable number of the people who come into my course creation program are teachers, teaching specialists, and people who have spent a lot of time in education. And at first, that might seem a little counterintuitive because you would think, "Wouldn't teachers already know how to create courses?" But the more I've thought about it, the more I've realized that this is actually the least surprising thing in the world because teachers are often the people who understand most clearly that good teaching, good curriculum, and good course design are not all the same thing. They know there's more going on than what you can see on the surface. They know that a course is not just a collection of lessons, a curriculum is not just a list of topics, and teaching is not just explaining something you understand to something who d- to someone who doesn't understand it yet. And I think that is exactly why they are so often the people who are willing to say, "I want support with this because I can tell there's more to doing this well than just putting my ideas into modules."

Shannon Boyer 1:06

Welcome to The Art of Online Course Creation, the podcast dedicated to purpose-driven entrepreneurs like you who are passionate about creating impactful online courses. I'm your host, Shannon Boyer. As an experienced educator, I understand that craft. Exceptional online courses requires more than just mastering online marketing. It demands strategic planning, dedication, and a focus on delivering real value. Each week we dive into the essentials of high quality course creation, share inspiring. Success stories and provide practical tips to help you build courses that truly make a difference. Whether you're just starting out or looking to enhance your existing courses. This is your go-to resource for creating a digital course that leaves a lasting impact. Okay, two things before we start. First, grab your notebook and second, gather your in. Because we are going to create something special together. Your journey to developing transformative online courses starts now.

2:13

Welcome back to the Art of Online Course Creation. My name is Shannon Boyer, and I'm so glad that you're here. Today, I want to talk about something I've been noticing inside Your Best Course Experience, my program for course creators, because it has come up enough times now that I don't think it's just a coincidence. A meaningful number of my students and clients have teaching backgrounds. Of course, that's not true for everyone I work with. I work with coaches, consultants, service providers, wellness professionals, creatives, and all kinds of experts who are taking what they know and turning it into courses, programs, and learning experiences. But there has been this interesting pattern where quite a few people who are drawn to this work are teachers, former teachers, professors, teaching specialists, or even people who consult with teachers in schools. And every time I notice it, I come back to the same question, which is, why would someone who already teaches and who already understands education come into a program to learn how to create a course? Because from the outside, I think a lot of people would assume that teachers would be the very last people who would need help with this. They might think, "Well, if anyone knows how to create a course, surely it's a teacher." But actually, I think teachers come into this work because they know enough to know that course creation is not as simple as it looks. They have had enough experience with learning to understand that good learning experiences don't happen by accident, and they often have enough discernment to look at a first draft or a first outline or a first attempt at organizing their ideas and think, "This is not quite doing what I want it to yet." And that discernment is such an important skill. I think it's one of the things that separates people who are simply trying to package information from people who are genuinely trying to create a transformation for their learners. Because there is a very big difference between content and curriculum. You've heard me say it before. Content is what you know. It's your expertise, your ideas, your frameworks, your examples, your stories, your processes, your tools, your experience, your perspective. And of course, content matters. Your course needs substance and value. It needs your actual knowledge and insight. But curriculum is something different. Curriculum is where you start thinking about what the learner needs to understand first in order for the next thing to make sense. It asks you to look at the assumptions you might be making about what they already know, where they are likely to get confused, which steps feel obvious to you only because you've done them so many times, and where the learner might need an example, a pause, a reflection, or a chance to apply something before you keep moving. Those are design questions, not just content questions. And once you move from curriculum into online course creation, there is another layer again, because now you have to think about how the learning experience works when you're not necessarily in the room with your learner. You have to consider how someone will stay oriented when they're moving through the material on their own time, in their own context, with their own distractions, and often while balancing a business, a family, a job, or all the other very real things that happen in their life. That is where so many course creators get stuck, and I don't think it's usually because they don't know enough. Very often, it's because they know a lot. They have so much knowledge, so much experience, and so many things they could say that the challenge becomes figuring out what the learner actually needs, in what order, and for what purpose. And this is where I think teachers often see the issue more clearly than other people do because teachers have seen what happens when learning is not designed well. They have seen people get lost because the leap between one idea and the next is too big. They've seen what happens when instructions make sense to the person giving them, but not to the person receiving them. They understand that too much information without enough structure can be just as frustrating as not enough information. And they know that learning does not automatically happen just because the content is technically available. That is something the online course world sometimes forgets. A lot of online course advice makes course creation sound like a content packaging exercise. You take what you know, divide it into modules, record some videos, add some worksheets, put it on a platform, and now you have a course, right? And technically, yes, you might have something that looks like a course. But looking like a course and functioning as a learning experience are not the same thing. A course can have modules and lessons and videos and worksheets and still not really move the learner. It can be full of valuable information and still feel confusing. It can be beautifully organized from the expert's perspective and still not make sense to the person who is actually trying to move through it. And I think teachers understand that because, not that they're magically better at online course creation, but because they have enough experience with learning to know that the design of the path matters. When I worked at the college, one of the things that would happen sometimes is that teachers would be given time away from teaching to work on curriculum development projects. And I always found that interesting because these were not necessarily full-time development projects, and they were not always about building an entire course from scratch. Usually, the project was focused specifically on curriculum development within a course, which is its own kind of work. And I remember working s- with some very seasoned, very capable teachers who absolutely did not want to take on these projects. They were brilliant teachers. They cared deeply about their students, they had strong ideas, and they were very good about with what they did in the classroom. But they also understood that curriculum development required a different set of skills than teaching live. They knew that standing in front of a room and helping people understand something in real time is one skill, while stepping back and designing the learning pathway is another. That's a distinction that really matters. Because when you're teaching live, whether it's in a classroom, a workshop, a training session, or even a coaching call, you get to respond to what is happening in front of you. You can read the room, notice when something has not landed, listen to the kinds of questions people are asking, pause when you realize you moved too quickly, offer a different example, change the language, or go back and fill in a missing piece. There's a responsiveness in live teaching that can cover a lot of gaps in the design because you're there to notice those gaps and respond to them in the moment. But when you are creating an online course, especially one that has recorded lessons or self-paced components, you have to anticipate much more of that ahead of time. You have to think about the learner's experience before they're actually inside of it. You have to design the places where they're likely to get stuck before they actually get stuck. And again, I really am not saying this to make it sound intimidating. I don't want you to listen to this and think, "Well, if trained teachers find curriculum development challenging, how could I possibly create a good course?" That's not the point at all. Actually, the point is the opposite. You absolutely can create a strong, thoughtful, effective online course if you've never been a teacher and even if you don't have a background in education. You don't need to become a curriculum expert. You don't need a curri- a teaching degree. You don't need to know every academic term or read a stack of instructional design textbooks before you're allowed to create something valuable. But you do need frameworks, guidance, and decision-making tools because when you don't have those things, what tends to happen is that you start building the course from the middle You start with the modules, the lessons, the slide decks, the platform, or the question of what you could possibly teach. And although those things do matter eventually, they're actually not the best place to begin because they can lead you into creating a course that is organized around your knowledge, instead of around the learner's journey. I think this is one of the biggest reasons people lose confidence in their course before they ever launch it. They're not unsure about their expertise. Often, they know what they're talking about. They know they can help people. They know they have something meaningful to teach, but they're not c- fully confident that the course they've built is the right expression of that expertise. They look at the outline and wonder whether it's enough, whether it's too much, whether it's in the right order, whether people will actually get the re- result, if they're skipping something important, if they're over-explaining something that does not need as much attention, or whether the whole thing is clear to someone who does not already think the way they think. When those questions are floating around in the background, it becomes very hard to put the course out into the world with confidence, and that means it becomes hard to sell. It becomes hard to talk about it clearly, and it becomes hard to invite people in because it's not that you don't believe in the value of what you know, but you're not completely sure that the structure of the course is going to support the result you want people to get. One of my students is actually a consultant for teachers. Schools hire her to come in and support teachers, so she's not new to education, and she's not, certainly not new to thinking about how people learn. But when it came to creating her own course, she'd been trying to do it on her own, and the thing that kept coming up was a lack of confidence in what she was creating. She knew the topic matter. She absolutely knew she had expertise. She even knew there were people who needed what she had to offer, but she wasn't fully confident that the course itself was teaching what she wanted it to teach in the way she wanted to teach it so that people could actually get the result And because she was not confident in the design of her course, she was hesitating to put it out into the world. But once she had the systems, the frameworks, and the step-by-step process inside Your Best Course Experience, that started to change. Because she was no longer trying to guess what should go where or relying only on instinct to decide whether the course made sense. She could see the path clearly, she understood, stood the role that each piece was playing, and she was able then to make decisions with a lot more confidence. So instead of looking at the course and wondering whether it was working, she could look at it and understand why each piece was there, why it came at that point in the process, and how it supported the learner. That kind of confidence is very different from just trying to hype yourself up. It is not the kind of confidence that comes from telling yourself, "Just believe in yourself and launch it anyway." It's the kind of confidence that comes from knowing you've made thoughtful decisions and that the course has been designed with the learner's result in mind. So when she did put the course out into the world, she immediately made sales, including sales from people she didn't already know. Of course, there are always multiple reasons why someone makes sales, and I never wanna ope- oversimplify that. But I do think part of what changed was that she trusted what she had built. And when you trust what you've built and you know with certainty that it provides value, you communicate about it differently. You explain it differently, you invite people into it differently, you stand behind it differently. That confidence that you have comes through. Um, and this pattern has continued to show up. Just yesterday, I had three calls with three new clients, and two of them were teachers. That's actually kind of what inspired this show. One had experience teaching at the college level, and another was a teaching specialist. So again, these were not people who lacked knowledge or who were brand new to thinking about how learning works. What stood out to me, though, was that they both recognized that teaching in person and teaching in online are not the same thing. You cannot simply take what you do live, turn it into videos or written lessons, and assume that the learning experience will translate perfectly As we've said before, that live teaching experience is so much more relational, and the pacing is different. The support is different. How you're able to pivot and respond is different. One of these clients told me that when she did her beta launch, she had this moment where she realized that the learner was not picking up what she was putting down in quite the way she'd expected. And I think that's such a familiar course creator moment. You think you've explained something clearly, and from your side of the table, the connection between the idea and the next feels obvious. Then someone actually moves through the material and suddenly you realize there's a gap you didn't see. There's a step you did not break down. There's a piece of context you assumed they had. There's a smaller skill underneath that bigger skill that needs to be taught first. That's not failure, and that's not proof that the idea is bad, and it's definitely not a sign that you should give up on the course. That's the work of course design. That's what happens when you move from knowing your material to designing a learning experience for someone else. And that brings me to the bold idea I want to offer you today. The people who take course creation seriously are not overcomplicating it. They are respecting the learner. I really believe that because, yes, it's possible to put information into modules and call it a course. It's possible to copy the format of something you have seen before and create something that looks like a course from the outside. But if your goal is to help someone move, change, understand something differently, take action, build a skill, or experience a real transformation, then the design of the learning path matters. And I wanna be very clear that this does not mean that your course needs to be perfect. Let me say that again. This does not mean that your course needs to be perfect in order to be high quality or to have value. I don't believe in perfect courses. There are no perfect courses. Mine is not perfect, and so perfection is not the goal. Courses evolve. They get better over time. You learn from your students. You notice where people get stuck, and you refine the examples, the order, the explanations, and the support as you go. That is all a part of the process, and it needs to be expected. But there is a very big difference between a refining a course that was thoughtfully designed and constantly trying to fix a course that was built without clear decisions in the first place. That's why I care so much about the beginning of the process. Before you start designing lessons, before you start planning modules, and definitely before you start worrying about slides or videos or platforms, there are a few critical decisions that need to be made because those decisions set the parameters for everything that comes after. They help you understand who the course is really for, what result the course is designed to create, and what kind of learning experience will actually support that result. Once those decisions are clear, everything else becomes easier to evaluate. You can make better choices about what belongs in the course and what does not. You can decide how deep to go, what needs to come first, where the li- learner might need support, and whether the thing you are building actually matches the promise you want to make. And that's exactly why I created the Course Clarity Blueprint. It's a new free resource that walks you through the three decisions every course creator needs to make before they design, plan, or sell their course. And I created it because most people are skipping this step. It's not difficult to do. It seems really obvious once you know about it, but people aren't doing it because no one has ever told them to. So instead of starting with the foundational decisions, what's happening is they're jumping straight into the visible pieces of course creation: outlining modules, bri- brainstorming lessons, making lists of everything they could teach, looking at what other people have included in their courses, and trying to reverse engineer a structure from the outside. Sound familiar? But when those deeper decisions are missing, the whole process becomes way harder than it needs to be. The course is harder to design, the offer is harder to explain, the marketing is harder to write, the sales process feels less clear, and the creator often feels less confident even when they have plenty of expertise. So if this episode is making you realize that maybe you've been trying to build your course from the middle, I would love for you to grab the new Course Clarity Blueprint because it will help you start in the right place. It will help you begin with the three decisions that give your course its shape instead of starting with random content, a blank outline, or someone else's course structure. And I want to leave you with this. If course creation has felt harder than you expected, that does not mean that you're not cut out for it, and it does not mean that you are overthinking it in some, some unhelpful way. It may simply mean that you care about doing it well. It might mean that like so many of the thoughtful teachers and experts I work with, that you can sense that there's something different between putting information out into the world and designing a learning experience that someone can actually move through. That discernment, like I've said, is a good thing. The problem is not that you're noticing the complexity. The problem is trying to navigate all those decisions without a clear process. Next time, we are going to keep building on this idea by talking about coaching and curriculum, and specifically how strong coursework can support your coaching, make your client experience more consistent, and help you stop repeating the same things over and over again without losing the personal human support that makes coaching so valuable. So make sure you come back for that one. It won't be the next episode, but it will be coming up very soon. And in the meantime, go grab the Course Clarity Blueprint and start with the three decisions that will make everything else about your course easier and clearer. Thanks so much for listening to The Art of Online Course Creation. I appreciate you being here. If you've found value, please consider giving us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps the show to get in front of more purpose-driven entrepreneurs like you who can benefit from the information here. Until next time, keep learning, keep growing, and keep asking questions.