Prerequisites for your Online Course?

Imagine you’re getting ready for your dream trip to Paris. You’ve mastered the basics of the French language. You’re ready for more. You’re ready to, you know, actually have a conversation in French rather than just point out all the random objects in the room that you know how to say.

So you sign up for a Basic Conversational French class, and you walk in the first day, baret hat and all (because when in French class…). To your grave disappointment, you realize half way through that the majority of your class knows no French at all. Zero.

Which means you’re not going to get what you want out of the class until it’s halfway over. Ah non!

Now let’s flip that story. Let’s say you’ve never spoken a word of French in your life (a la carte doesn’t count!). So you sign up for your first ever French class, a class called Basic Conversational French. You show up the first day (yes, you’re rocking the beret in this case too) and discover that everyone else knows MUCH more French than your pitiful “a la carte” and “boutique.” You’d be confused and overwhelmed, right?

So what went wrong here? In both cases you signed up for Basic Conversational French, so what was different?

The difference was the students’ background. Both situations could have been prevented by communicating one little detail- prerequisites. Prerequisites communicate to students what they need to know before starting the class to be successful.

Don’t think your course requires prerequisites? Think about that carefully.

We’ll use an example I’ve used before in a previous post. Let’s say you want to create a course about launching an Etsy shop. Does your course require students to already have an Etsy account? Do your students know that it does?

Or maybe you want to start a course called, “Be Smart with your Money.” What are your expectations here? Are you teaching to students with thousands of dollars of credit card debt? (Sure, you might not be comfortable saying “Requirement: copious amounts of debt”, but you need to find a way to communicate that that is, in essence, your requirement.)

Maybe you teach something even more abstract like “How to Create your Dream Life”. Think carefully about the content of your course. Is there material in there that requires some background knowledge, like The Law of Attraction, or some other concept that your students should be familiar with already? Make sure you clearly communicate it!

We seem to get the idea of prerequisites when it comes to learning something like French, but with idea based courses, we tend to dismiss the idea. This is a mistake! We want our learners to be successful. As instructors it is our job to make that as simple for them as possible, and that includes figuring out exactly what state of expertise or development we expect them to be at when starting our course.

Remember, prerequisites aren’t about shutting out certain students. It’s about setting your students up for success before they even start your course.