Understanding the WHY

The first step in designing and developing any learning experience is to understand your why. Why are you devoting your time, money and effort in building and delivering a digital learning experience? The basis of the edupreneur / entrepreneurial spirit suggests that impact and profit are going to be two of those factors. As an edupreneur if you want to create an impact, it’s important to understand why. What are the messages that you want to provide?  Obviously, yes, you want to build a course that’s going to be profitable, that is going to provide an income stream or revenue for your business. But there’s probably many other reasons for building the course.  It is important to really have a good clear understanding of what these reasons are. Because building a course is not a simple, easy, “Let’s build it in 30 days and be making a six figure income”. The building of a superb course that provides true value and impact to your learners requires a clear understanding of the strategy.  Some questions to consider:

• Do you want to scale your business? Maybe you already deliver training, and you want to scale it from face to face model into an online model that is going to be able to reach a much wider audience.
• Do you want to position yourself as someone of credibility in the industry? Do you want to showcase that you have that level of credibility and extend your influence through the online course? 
• Do you want to have greater visibility in your market by delivering an online course? \
• Do you want to create an impact in the world, making the lives of others better through the knowledge you are sharing?
• Do you just simply want to make money? If this is your primary goal, without any consideration of scalability, visibility or credibility, then the what you design and deliver will be vastly different. Your involvement will probably be less and more would be spent on promoting your course than designing and developing it.

So a couple of different reasons here to consider as part of that, understanding the why. And that’s a clear importance because if we do not have a good understanding of the why, then we struggle to work through the other elements, including the what, the where, the when and the who.