Teach One Thing with a Lesson

Quick reference

• 00:04 Now, before we continue a quick word about what I mean by a lesson.
• 00:10 A lesson is a short instructional piece that provides
• 00:14 enough information to help a student learn one thing.
• 00:18 How do I create a new account on this website?
• 00:21 How do I create a box and whisker plot using a set of data?
• 00:26 What was the War of 1812 and what was its impact?
• 00:30 Well, for any of these topics, you can imagine them being
• 00:33 contained within a lesson, and that lesson would be part of a larger course.
• 00:38 So what is a short instructional piece?
• 00:41 Well, consider this.
• 00:42 How long does it take to provide an introduction to a specific topic,
• 00:47 an explanation of its benefits or features, a step-by-step look at
• 00:52 how it works, and an example to reinforce what you've explained?
• 00:56 A great target to shoot for is usually 5 minutes or less.
• 01:01 Regardless of the subject.
• 01:03 Many topics can be introduced and explained with a bite-sized lesson.
• 01:08 Whether it's a 5-minute long video or
• 01:10 500 words on a page that take you 5 minutes to read.
• 01:14 Any longer than that, and you may want to consider shortening the material or
• 01:20 splitting up the lesson into two.
• 01:22 So each lesson you create does not have to be a huge production.
• 01:27 And with that in mind,
• 01:29 I hope the idea of building a course is starting to feel a bit easier.
• 01:34 I know it can be intimidating to consider all the things that you need to include,
• 01:40 but if you take things one lesson at a time or five minutes at a time,
• 01:45 you can see that focusing on one step makes the next step logical.
• 01:50 Each subsequent step comes into focus, and before you know it,
• 01:54 all those individual steps lead to a completed course.
• 02:00 But let's back up.
• 02:01 Why not just say,
• 02:02 record an hour-long presentation that someone at your company gives.
• 02:07 Present that as a video to your learners and call that a course.
• 02:13 Well, you can call these things whatever you want.
• 02:16 Courses, workshops, master classes, learning modules,
• 02:19 I've heard every term that there is.
• 02:22 You should be focused on presenting all the materials in ways that
• 02:27 make learning easier and memorable.
• 02:30 Building an easy-to-follow structure and dividing your material
• 02:35 into short focused lessons provides many benefits for the learner.
• 02:41 Number 1, concentrating on teaching one thing in a lesson
• 02:45 forces the material to be focused.
• 02:49 Secondly, visualizing your content into sections and
• 02:52 lessons can help you organize the material in logical ways.
• 02:56 If you know how to teach one part of a larger course, for example,
• 03:01 it often helps you figure out how to teach all the other parts.
• 03:06 And third, limiting a lesson to roughly five minutes provides natural breaks for
• 03:11 your learners.
• 03:13 They can absorb the material, and then think about it, and
• 03:16 then maybe practice it with an exercise or quiz.
• 03:19 You can't really do that if you present an hour of material all at once.
• 03:26 As always, every course is unique.
• 03:29 So you may find that the concepts you teach in certain lessons
• 03:33 require a bit more time and effort and that's perfectly fine.
• 03:36 Take as much time as it takes to properly explain what you need.
• 03:41 Just remember to provide natural breaks and activities.
• 03:45 Like we've said before, your course outline is a bit of a blueprint,
• 03:50 but it's not the finished product.
• 03:52 So in the next lesson, we'll dig into how to build your course materials
• 03:58 before we step into a real-life course builder interface and
• 04:02 start putting things together.

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