Online Course Delivery: 5 Ways To Do It

By Dr. Jeanette Cates

The last thing you want is a surprise when it comes time to deliver your online course. But that’s exactly what will happen if you don’t consider your delivery options as early as the design phase. After all, the way you are going to deliver your course dictates the technology you need and the pacing and types of materials you will deliver.

Here are five delivery models that give you a wide range of choices in delivering your online course.

(1) Autoresponder Course

An autoresponder course is probably the easiest to set up, since you don’t even need a website. All you need is an autoresponder service, such as Aweber or GetResponse.

When you offer an autoresponder course, you set it up once, spacing the emails out to be delivered over time. Once those are set up, you’re ready to advertise the course!

If you’ve ever offered an email sequence from an optin page, then you have all of the skills you need. It’s an easy way to get started in delivering an online course.

(2) PDF Course

An autoresponder course is great, as long as your topic can be taught with text. But when those emails start to get too long or require visuals, then you probably want to use a PDF document.

Using a PDF to deliver the content, you can use a variety of fonts, images, and design aspects. You can make each “lesson” as long as you want.

And the best part is, you can easily deliver your PDF documents via an autoresponder. You often see this combination in Fixed Term Membership (FTM) courses. Students pay over time. And each week or each month they receive an email with the link to the PDF.

Again, this is a good way for anyone to deliver a course, regardless of your technical skill level. You can attach the PDF to your autoresponder email, but that is not recommended as it may be caught in the email filters.

The preferred approach is to create a download page for each PDF. Creating a download page can be done with your blog, using the robots meta plugin to “hide” the download page (set it to noindex, nofollow so the search engines don’t find it.)

The major drawback to this approach is that you need a separate download page for each PDF so that the students don’t download all of it at once. At the same time, since it’s delivered over time, you also want to provide links to all prior lesson PDFs on each download page – to cut down on your customer service questions.

(3) Download Page

The most traditional method for delivering a course online has been with a download page. The student pays for the course, then is taken to a download page. There they find all of the materials that they need for the course.

As the course creator, you just need a single download page where all of the materials are linked. You can do this with a blog or an html site. Or you can use a digital delivery engine, such as 1ShoppingCart or eJunkie to deliver everything in a zip file.

The main drawback to this approach is that there is a single trip to the download page. So you don’t have a lot of reasons to contact them after the initial sale. And if you offer unannounced bonuses or updates later, you have to create an additional download page for each.

(4) Third-Party Delivery Systems

There is a growing number of third-party systems that allow you to deliver your course through their platform. Some are free and others carry costs. They provide the website and the means to deliver the materials. You provide the content.

The main advantage is that you don’t need to even set up a website. You sell it from their site using their payment system. You upload and deliver your materials from their site. They maintain the technology with updates and improvements. They register the students and handle customer service. It’s like teaching a course at the local community college.

The major drawback is that you don’t have control of everything. Plus you must share the revenue with the delivery system. Most importantly you don’t own the customer. Your students are customers of the host site and you rarely have the ability to market anything else to them.

So while it’s attractive and can be a good lead generator, you don’t want to depend solely on third party systems.

(5) Membership Site You Host

By far the most powerful and flexible delivery system is a password-protected membership site, hosted on your own domain. You can do virtually anything you want with this type of site.

You can easily deliver all types of materials – written, audio, video. You can add a discussion forum or answer questions from the students.

Since it’s your site, you can brand it to reinforce your image in the marketplace. Plus you own the customer relationship, so you can market related materials to your students.

With a hosted membership site you can “drip” the content out over time, providing updates on a pre-scheduled basis. This is particularly important when your students are making multiple payments. You want to be able to deliver new material on an ongoing basis for as long as they pay.

Summary

When deciding how to deliver your online course, you need to consider your technical skills, your audience’s skills, and the standards of your topic area. Keeping those things in mind any of the five models above will work!

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Dr. Jeanette Cates is an Internet Strategist who works with experts and small business owners who are ready to leverage their expertise into Online Success. As an Instructional Designer, Jeanette was a pioneer in the Online Learning field. Her ability to apply her experience and education to individual situations shows in the variety of case studies included in her premiere course on Online Course Design.

Let Jeanette help you Design Your Online Course!