The Hidden Prep Work Nobody Warns You About
Online course preparation
I once had a client send me “everything ready to go” for a course build. Three folders, one spreadsheet, and a Word document called Untitled1.
Untitled1 was the whole course. Every module. Every quiz. Every image.
There were no headings. There were no page breaks. There was one sentence, buried halfway down page four, that said “add a quiz here I guess.” I read that sentence about six times trying to work out if “here” meant this paragraph, the last one, or the one after.
It did not say.
What I have learnt is that nearly everyone starting an online course has been handed the same checklist. Define your structure. Gather your content. Plan your assessments. Design for engagement. Prepare your multimedia. It’s a good list. It’s also, frankly, everywhere. You could find it in about four minutes with a basic Google search.
But is it enough?
Not really.
The checklist tells you what boxes to tick. It doesn’t tell you why half of those boxes get ticked wrong the first time. It doesn’t tell you that “plan your navigation” actually means someone needs to decide, in writing, whether your learner can skip ahead or whether every module is locked behind the last one. It doesn’t tell you that “prepare multimedia” means nothing until you’ve actually written down which video goes on which page, in which format, hosted where.
The gap between “the checklist” and “the course that actually builds smoothly” is where most of the pain lives. And it’s exactly the gap almost nobody writes about, because it’s not glamorous. Nobody wants to read three pages on file naming conventions. But I promise you, the person building your course does.
I think about it a bit like recording an album. Everyone knows the basic steps. Write songs, book a studio, hit record. But the difference between a demo that sounds like a demo and a track that sounds like it belongs on the radio isn’t the basic steps. It’s the fifty small decisions nobody talks about. Mic placement. Reference tracks. Whether you double the vocal on the chorus.
Course building is the same. The basics get you in the studio. The details get you a course that actually works.
So that’s what I did. I took the standard checklist, the one you’ve probably already seen, and I went through it line by line and wrote down what’s really required. Not the theory. The practical, “here’s what actually happens when you skip this” version.
It covers brand consistency, choosing colours that won’t fight each other, structuring your master content document so your developer doesn’t have to guess, using interactive tools like H5P without overcomplicating things, sourcing and recording your images and video properly, and building assessments that don’t collapse the moment a student asks a question you didn’t plan for.
It’s free. It’s the guide I wish someone had handed me before that first Untitled1 landed in my inbox.
Prepare properly, and the build becomes the easy part. The journey never ends, but this bit of it doesn’t have to be painful.
Download the free guide: The Hidden Prep Work No One Tells You About
Online course preparation