Several years ago, in 2015, spring nearly started in catastrophe for my family and me. We almost saw fire engines and men with yellow helmets hosing us down in the water. What a way to start spring, going up in flames!

Fortunately, catastrophe was avoided before any damage was done, but it could have been a disastrous ending.

There is a lesson to be shared here, which will help you when designing and creating your online fashion courses. It’s a lesson about focus and the transformational energy it can produce.

A Lesson in Focus

Here’s what happened.

The fire alarm went off at home. I rushed upstairs to investigate and was greeted by the smell of smoke coming from the bathroom. I carefully opened the door to find the source of the smoke was smouldering on the window sill.

Nearby we had the usual bathroom paraphernalia items such as cosmetics, toothbrushes, aerosols, and a free-standing shaving mirror. It's one of those with two sides where you can flip it over to use a magnifying effect on one side to focus on your face as you apply your makeup or shave, or I guess for some to admire their good looks! Also on the windowsill was a small basket of colourful, dried potpourri, normally giving off a gentle smell of vanilla.

I'd never have foreseen the following incident happening, but on this particular day, it was a bright sunny morning around mid-day, and the sun was shining through the bathroom window. The mirror was angled in such a way that the sun was reflecting on the potpourri. But as it happened, the sun reflected off the mirror's magnification side and was being sharply focused on the mixture of scented dried flowers.

The focused rays from the sun caused the dried flowers to transform into a smouldering bundle of petals. Had I not been in the house or we hadn’t fitted smoke detectors, who knows where it might have ended.

Can you see the link with course design and creation and the transformations they are designed to deliver? No? Then, I will explain.

 Course Design v Course Creation

First, though let’s clear up some terminology, so we both understand each other and clarify the difference between course design and course creation.

Course design is the process of envisioning your course, of thinking through how your students' needs can be met. It involves the intellectual process of connecting the steps so that your student can go from where they are before the course to where they will be after completing it. In our methodology, it comes after the course planning phase.

Another way of looking at its course design is preparing to build the bridge that connects the before and after states. It’s where you think through how to bridge the gap.

Your course design is where you decide what to focus on and where to put your energies into to focus that energy and deliver the transformation the student is after. Consequently, focussing on specific needs becomes critical in the design phase.

Course creation, on the other hand, involves the mechanics of building the bridge. You use your course design output as the blueprint for your course creation process.

So in course creation, you will be dealing with the technology, defining your learning outcomes or goals, building your lesson plans, writing your activities, creating the downloads and other support resources, producing your audio or video, adding any interactions etc.

Online Fashion Courses Must Be Specific

OK, now that we’ve cleared that up, let me take you back to the point about focus, energy, and transformation.

Students want to be transformed in some way. They want the ability to do something or know something after your course that resolves their problem, pains or challenges.

Therefore our efforts need to go into focusing our energy on transforming them. That means offering solutions that are narrow and specific, not broad and general.

For example, take Abby, a senior pattern cutter responsible for a team of six people. She has a problem with improving the motivation in her team and needs to find ways to boost morale. In particular, she finds that her team meetings lack energy, and she rarely gets any useful feedback or contributions from attendees.

Abby may well benefit from a general course on motivation or how to run effective meetings. However, she has a real challenge around energy and getting feedback and involvement from her team during her meetings. Abby can’t afford to take 1-2 days off work for a classroom-based course. Nor does she want to spend several hours doing an online course that ends in certification.

She needs a short, sharp-focused course that resolves her issue that focuses on the specific challenges she faces. She doesn’t see the value in a longer course, either classroom or online.

But she would buy a short 35-minute online course geared toward her role, written by someone with experience of her job, using the language she connects with and activities she relates to. In other words,

a course created by a fashion subject expert that not only knows how to overcome her challenges but has experience of the fashion business.

She wants specifics. She wants focused learning. She wants a transformation, which is being able to run her team meetings in a way that generates a buzz and where everyone contributes. That’s why we need to understand our students better and create ideal student avatars during our course planning phase. You can download your FREE student avatar pack here.

Learning How to Create Your Own Online Fashion Courses

At We Teach Fashion, we are committed to helping you become famous for your courses. We know that all students come into the course creation arena with a different background, technology competence, training, teaching, and education background. That’s why we are developing different courses to meet your different needs. Start by looking at our current offers in the SHOP.

When you take our course on How to Use Your Fashion Expertise to Make Extra Income With Online Courses, you get everything you need to know to serve people like Abby and all the other hundreds of thousands of fashion employees and students worldwide world eager to learn more online.

Cheryl Gregory is the Founder of The Fashion Student Hub, a marketplace for selling online fashion courses. We Teach Fashion teaching fashion subject experts how to create and promote their own online courses, generate revenue and serve the growing need for online education in the fashion sector.