may 17


2023


revive your old online course

Expert Tips to Breathe New Life into Your Course Content

Are you struggling to keep students engaged with an old, stale course? Maybe you’ve received feedback that it’s outdated, hard to follow, or just plain boring. Don’t worry – you can resurrect your old course and breathe new life into it with a few simple solutions. In this post, we’ll provide some methods that might just perform a miracle, bringing a course on life support back to the land of the living.

Reshoot:  Your core curriculum/course content is pretty strong and doesn’t require major revisions but the live action footage just doesn’t cut it.  For instance, maybe the instructor no longer works for the organization or their performance is a snoozer. Your best bet in this situation is to reshoot all the live action content. I know this can sound expensive, but it’s a lot cheaper and faster than creating a new course from scratch. Plus, there are a lot of cost-saving production strategies that can work for most budgets.

Voice re-record:  Let’s say your course features graphics/animation or slides with voiceover, but the content itself is in dire need of updates.  In this case, the scripts need to be reworked and edited together with a fresh new voiceover.  Recording voiceover is much cheaper and faster than reshooting live action footage. There are many talented voiceover artists available and oftentimes they can deliver your recorded scripts within days.  

Update graphics and/or branding: Outdated graphics and branding can make your course feel stale. You can start by updating the fonts and logos to feature your current branding. Add new icons, images, and motion graphics to improve the overall learner experience and give your course a fresh look. If your course includes animations, then consider a refresh. This can include improving the quality or style of the animation, adding sound effects, or adding more movement to make the animations more dynamic.

Update the UI: Does your course feature a software or product? One of the most common complaints about old courses is that the user interface (UI) is outdated. This can make the course content seem unappealing and difficult for the learners to follow along. Fortunately, updating the UI can be a relatively easy fix. For example, you can screen capture the new UI while following most of the old scripts.  This solution is cheap and quick and should take an editor very little time to revise.

Your old course might need a combination of the solutions above, but updating an old course doesn’t need to be an expensive and time-consuming process. In fact, you can often get started more quickly than you would with a brand-new course because you don’t need to completely reconceive the curriculum.  As a bonus, you should already have a pretty good idea of the content that really connects with your learner. Now is the time to dive deep into your catalog and get ready to bring some of those courses back to life. 

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