In this post, you will learn about the top 10 features great online fashion courses have in common so that you can develop yours with these in mind. You're also going to learn about how to accommodate the different learning styles that your students have. And later in the post, I'll give you a straightforward way to remember the key things you need to focus on.

But before we get to that, there's something I want to address upfront. The course design myth.

There's a myth that online courses need to be developed by a team of people, including a coder, subject expert, video and audio guy (or gal), graphic artist, instructional designer, project manager and more.

This may be true in the corporate sector, where account executives sell large learning management systems (LMS) and huge repositories of e-learning content to large organizations and multi-nationals. Thankfully, it's not true for the most popular type of courses.

The Most Popular Type of Online Course

These are the courses that individuals like you and me make.

We are subject experts in our field with years of knowledge and experience of many topics, and at this moment in history, collectively, we are making thousands of courses each year.

Some people develop their courses based upon their hobbies and personal experiences that have nothing to do with their roles as employee or business owners. Others approach course development using their professional experience and expertise as their subject.

Either way, the development, promotion, and selling of online courses and other digital products are no longer the commercial enterprises' domain. It's rapidly being seized by private individuals with the expertise to share and now the tools to create and sell courses with.

Course creation platforms have made it as easy to create an online course and publish it to the world to create a LinkedIn profile, set up a Facebook account, create a slide presentation in PowerPoint, or write a Word report.

In other words, the need for coders to develop your course has now evaporated as course creation platforms are now commonplace and affordable, with many offering free versions to get you started.

So with that in mind, I'm sharing with you a compilation of the top ten features that make a great online course so that you can be mindful of these as you start to develop your own online fashion course. In no particular order of priority, here they are:

1. Learning Feels Natural

This means developing your content and the flow of the lessons in a way that feels natural and logical to a student. If the lessons connect the dots between one lesson and another with natural progression and an easy to follow the path, where what comes next is what the student would expect, then learning feels natural. This increases the completion rates, and you'll find students enjoy taking your course more.

2. Bite-Sized Input

Be mindful of the amount of content you put into any lesson. It's better to chunk things down into smaller bite-sized lessons and inputs than having lengthy lessons and fewer of them. Todays' learners use digital devices that provide a constant stream of new, interesting and bit-sized input. So try and keep your video lengths to less than 10 minutes long. Splitting longer videos into shorted chunks makes sense. Here's a handy post that talks further about course length.

3. Students Feel a Sense of Community

We all share a common human need to have social contact, whether that's at work, at school or college, at home, or in our communities. Over the past decade, a whole new industry has been spawned, creating revolutionary online platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, enabling us to connect to others within groups and online communities.

The best online courses ensure that they provide a community place where students can connect with their tutor and other students. These could be forums, Facebook groups, or Twitter chats etc., dedicated to the course or course content.

But these places are only part of the community building task. Tutors also need to ensure their courses offer a warm, friendly and welcoming atmosphere when students join their courses. This allows students to relax and feel comfortable seeking support when needed, and this process starts with your welcome message and enrolment emails.

4. Appeals to All Learning Styles

A great course will accommodate the different learning styles that students have. This means creating content, activities and any assignments that take into account the nine bits of intelligence referenced in work by researcher Howard Gardner. 

Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences provides a unique view of how people learn. His multiple intelligence theory, which he first published in 1983, offers us nine unique bits of intelligence that we all share but to differing degrees.

1. Linguistic Intelligence
2. Logical-mathematical Intelligence
3. Spatial Intelligence
4. Kinesthetic Intelligence
5. Musical Intelligence
6. Interpersonal Intelligence
7. Intrapersonal Intelligence
8. Naturalist Intelligence
9. Existential Intelligence

Everyone has a unique combination of these bits of intelligence which have evolved based on our own culture and experience.

Our goal as fashion course creators is to develop a course that appeals to a variety of intelligences. We can do this by ensuring our students are able to understand our content in a way that is meaningful to them.

It will be difficult for you to build a course that appeals to every intelligence equal measure, so don't try to. But you can be mindful of your student audience, which is where student avatars come into play and try to incorporate lesson design to appeal to this intelligence when you have the opportunity. We have a free student avatar tool you can download here.

That way, your students are more likely to become engaged in the learning activity, and the course completion rate will increase. That in itself will increase the likelihood that your course's transformation is designed to achieve for the student actually takes place.

If you are not familiar with these nine bits of intelligence, here's a summary and a brief explanation of how we can address these in our courses, regardless of the fashion subjects we teach.

1) Linguistic Intelligence

People with strengths in this area are good with words, phrases, and text. They enjoy learning through reading articles, texts, and material that requires them to process words. They also enjoy words games such as scrabble and the challenge of flashcards and word-based quizzes.

So by building sufficient word-oriented content and activities into our courses, we appeal to this intelligence. Make sure your courses include some text to read, articles to review or assignments that involve some reading and writing. Try including word-oriented quizzes, assessments or puzzles too.

2) Logical-mathematical Intelligence

People with a strength in this intelligence are good with numbers, equations, and logic. They enjoy coming up with solutions to logical problems and figuring things out, and have the ability to identify principles or structures within a system.

Aim to include graphs, Venn diagrams, charts, or tables, as well as critical thinking in your lessons and numbered lists when organizing your material. Fashion careers linked to this intelligence could be in accountancy, research, trends, and logistics, for example.

3) Spatial Intelligence

This intelligence includes thinking in three-dimensions, visualising objects and rotating, transforming, and manipulating them.  People with strength in this intelligence excel at mentally manipulating objects, enjoy drawing or art, design or build things, enjoy puzzles and excel at mazes. So designers are likely to have a high degree of spatial intelligence.

When you design your courses, you can appeal to your students and enhance and strengthen their spatial intelligence by:

• Asking them to practice using visualization techniques.
• Including artwork, photography or drawing in their assignments or lessons.
• Use puzzles to solve problems and uncover solutions.
• Ask students to explain how to do something using step-by-step instructions or directions in their assignments or projects.
• Using flow charts, process maps and other visual aids as downloads the student can refer to.
• Use mind maps as a way to communicate your key messages or lesson outlines.

4) Kinesthetic Intelligence

People with kinesthetic intelligence work well with their hands. They also generally enjoy a physical activity such as exercise, sports, and outdoor work. They will have strong abilities in controlling their body's motion and how skillfully they handle and manipulate objects.

Clearly, if you have a student in your live classroom setting, it's much easier to design activities to appeal to them. Doing the same online is more challenging but can be achieved with a little creativity and persistence.

It would help if you considered creating online lesson activities that appeal to kinesthetic intelligence using activities that enable some form of physical interaction with your learning materials. For example:

• Drag-and-drop exercises.
• Fill in the blanks.
• Matching activities.
• Quizzes that provide immediate feedback.
• Activities for stunts to download and complete offline.
• Assignments where the student needs to create something with their hands.
• A lesson where the student follows your steps as you create an item.
• Asking the student to film how they perform a task.

5) Musical Intelligence

Gardner says that those with high musical intelligence learn well by using rhythm or music, enjoy listening to and/or creating music, enjoy rhythmic poetry and often study better with music in the background. This might account for why some many lessons in my university days, we'd have music playing in the room, and that always seemed to make things flow better!

Therefore as you design your course and create the lesson activities and materials, consider the following suggestions that will help you appeal to those with a higher level of musical intelligence.

• Use introductory music to set the theme of the course, module or lesson the student is taking. For example, if you teach the history of costume, you could use music from different periods in history as background music during certain lessons.
• Use sounds used to reinforce correct performance in quizzes. This can replace or be in addition to any on-screen feedback the student gets.
• Connecting music to a lesson, such as talking about what music was popular during historical periods. So if you were teaching someone about visual merchandising and used examples from the 1960s to illustrate a point, it would be appropriate to have a clip of music from the era playing within the lesson or introduce it.
• Allow students to include music for projects. It may not add any value to the actual outcome you are looking for in their assignment, but they will be more engaged in carrying out the assignment themselves when they are free to add music to it. For example, if their assignment is to create a tech pack for an item of clothing and an explanatory screencast of their work describing what they have created, including supportive music.

6) Interpersonal Intelligence

This intelligence is the ability to recognize and understand other people's feelings, intentions, desires, and motivations. This has a big impact on our ability to work effectively with others which is one of the needs that we recently discovered that recent graduates lack when joining the workforce, the ability to collaborate.

Interpersonal learners really enjoy learning by collaborating, interacting, and building relationships with their peers, so the best way to appeal to them is through social learning.

This means your role is to encourage them to exchange ideas and share their concerns in online discussions. 

There are lots of online tools that give you the ability to take advantage of interpersonal intelligence. Here are some tips for addressing the needs of your interpersonal intelligence learners.

• Establishing forums or online communities that support instruction.
• Enable students to share thoughts and ideas with other learners.
• Use Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups; Twitter chats, group Skype calls, live webinars and forums.
• Group collaboration is also an excellent tool to encourage learners to exchange ideas and build relationships to foster learning. For example, you could ask students to buddy up in groups of three or four to complete a group assignment or support others in specific areas of the course or give peer review on assignments.

7) Intrapersonal Intelligence

People who excel in this intelligence typically are introspective and can use this knowledge to solve personal problems. Psychologists, writers, philosophers, and poets are among those that Gardner sees as having high intrapersonal intelligence. No designers here, but you may well have some students that are high on the intrapersonal intelligence scale, so it's wise to prepare content that will appeal to them.

Here's what you should consider in your course design:

1. Assigning independent projects.
2. Asking students to write in a daily or weekly journal and sharing this with you and other students.
3. Incorporating mind maps as summaries of content.
4. Asking students to write reflections on topics studied in the lesson before moving on to another lesson.
5. Asking students to stand in the shoes of another person and comment based upon that position. For example, your lesson is about retail store design, and you ask students to stand in the customer's shoes and comment on how the customer might feel experiencing a certain feature of the store's design.

By asking students to think introspectively and reflect on their feelings, what they have learned or how they might act in different situations will help them increase their intrapersonal intelligence and appeal to people who like this type of learning.

8) Naturalist Intelligence

As the name suggests, people with a high degree of naturalist intelligence are interested in conservation and recycling, enjoy gardening, very often like animals, enjoy being outside, are interested in the weather and feel a real connection to the planet. 

So it's likely that any of your students working in or studying ethical and sustainable fashion may well have a strong naturalist intelligence.

 Here's what you should consider in your course design:

• Getting students to organize material in categories and subcategories or asking them to select the items that aren't a good match.
• Using mind maps to connect the information in branches so students can see the relationships between information.
• Film your lessons outside.
• Use nature within a lesson if there's an opportunity. For example, if you teach how to do fashion design research and need an activity as part of the work, then use something from nature that will have a higher appeal to the naturalist intelligence learner than taking something from technology. Or, if you are teaching surface pattern techniques, you could use an activity that asks students to look at their local foliage as part of their learning.

9) Existential Intelligence

Existential intelligence involves an individual's ability to use collective values and intuition to understand others and the world around them. People who excel in this intelligence typically can see the bigger picture.

According to Gardner, philosophers, theologians, and life coaches are among those that have high existential intelligence. It's quite possible, therefore, that those proponents and champions of ethical and sustainable fashion have seen the bigger picture and are making the connections between the way the fashion industry has evolved and to the damage, it's causing the planet, partly perhaps because of a significantly higher existential intelligence than those that have caused the damage in the first place. But that's a debate for another day.

In his 2006 book, "Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons in Theory and Practice," Gardner gives the hypothetical example of "Jane," who runs a company called Hardwick/Davis. Here's a passage I want to share from the book to illustrate the bigger picture.

"Whereas her managers deal more with the day-to-day operational problems, Jane's job is to steer the whole ship. She must maintain a longer-term outlook, take into account the conditions of the marketplace, set a general direction, align her resources and inspire her employees and customers to stay on board."

So Jane has to have the bigger picture to be successful in her role as the owner of her business, which requires her to either have or develop her existential intelligence.

What we are concerned with here is appealing to those with this intelligence. Here are some tips:

• In your lessons, make connections between what students are learning and the world outside.
• Provide students with overviews to support their desire to see the big picture.
• Ask students to look at a topic from different points of view. For example, if you teach about pricing garments, you could ask them to consider the price point from the customer, retailer, wholesaler, manufacturer, and the impact each person's view will have on the other's.
• Ask students to summarise the key messages learned in each lesson or module.

OK, that was a big but necessary portion of this blog post. Let's move on to look at the other features that make great online courses because we've only covered the first four so far!

5. Technology That Works

The best online courses run on the best technology that rarely ever causes your students a problem. This means beautiful design, great interfaces that are simple, easy to work with and don't hinder the learning in any way. When students pay for a course out of their own pocket, they expect the technology to make learning easy and enjoyable, not difficult and tiresome.

6. Multimedia That Adds Value

Technology allows us to create great video through the latest smartphones and cameras. Most computers come with basic video editing software, and if not, there are free and paid-for programs that you can soon get to grips with to edit your own video and audio.

A great course only uses multimedia to add value to the learning experience. It doesn't just add it because it can.  So avoid adding a poorly filmed video with bad lighting and poor sound. Your video lessons don't need to be perfect or filmed or edited by a professional, but there must be a minimum standard acceptable by the paying student.

Use video and audio deliberately. This means choosing it because it enhances the learning experience for that particular lesson.

7. Intuitive Navigation

Anything that distracts from a great learning experience is a waste of student effort, and navigation is an area that has a big impact on this. So when choosing your course hosting platform, make sure that you choose one with simple, intuitive navigation that feels right to you. If you don't "just get it" within a few minutes of working with the platform, the chances are your students will not either.

8. Self-Directed Learning Opportunities

Great online courses also offer the student the chance to choose which paths to follow, which assignments to take and which support forums to join in personalizing their learning. Obviously, if you offer a course that only lasts 30 minutes, then there's probably not much scope for this. But if your course lasts several weeks, has dozens of modules and lessons with many assignments, then there's every chance that you could incorporate options.

Wherever you can try to avoid forcing students to work through the content linearly and give them the freedom to explore the material in whatever way they choose, they do this with books, magazines, online videos, their TV channels and film streaming, so why should your course be any different? Treat them like the adults they are and allow the freedom to dip in and out of the content at will.

9. Additional Complimentary Resources

Another feature of great online courses is offering students additional and complementary resources that the student can review outside of the course itself. These can be links to deeper reading materials, YouTube or TED videos, podcasts, webinars, case studies, news reports etc.

By offering these additional materials, you can avoid copyright issues by linking to the outside of your paid course. You also avoid any overwhelm, the student might feel if these resources formed part of the actual course design itself. So be imaginative and creative when offering additional material. Many students may not even bother to review them, but it shows you care and adds value to your core offer for those that do.

10. Going Above and Beyond

Products and services that get raved about delighting their customers or clients, and the same principle applies when teaching students. Great courses always offer something different, which is above and beyond what the student had expected. This doesn't mean adding everything you know on a subject so that the student gets more than they paid for, but it does mean being creative and finding ways to wow your students.

It could be as simple as how you respond to student feedback, how quickly you react to their questions, providing free resources that relate to a student's questions etc. 

There is no quick fix to this. It's simply about applying the principle of AOK, which I have written about in this post.

11. Quality Content

Finally, we come to the last of our features that you'll find in any great online fashion course, quality content. What does this mean? Well, first off, it doesn't mean creating videos as if you worked for SKY, the BBC or CNN. Although clearly, if your production values are that good, then it helps. It's fine to have far less quality in your production values. It just depends.

Ultimately great content is about helping students achieve the transformation they seek. Whether that's within a 30-minute mini-course or a 30-week masterclass. Students want content that makes the difference in their lives, and ultimately that comes down to your expertise and your course design to help them bridge that gap between where they are before taking the course and where they need to get to afterwards.

Great content comes from what you add to a well-designed course. And a well-designed course starts with thorough planning. It's also about your personality and finding a way to present your content that feels natural to you and that draws students in, motivating them to want to finish the course and apply what they have learned. We'll cover this in another post so keep a lookout.

Summary

I want to leave you with a way to remember what you need to be to develop a great online fashion course. Remember that D.O.E.Rs create great courses.

Here's what D.O.E.Rs do:

Different - they develop their own unique style, of course, branding. They allow their personality to shine through their courses, not to mimic others but to bring their own story and expertise to the world in a unique, different and personal way.

Outcomes Focussed - they focus on the transformation their students seek. They harness the planning, design and creation techniques of course development to ensure that transformation can be achieved to deliver the outcomes students need and are paying for.

Engaging - they build courses that employ the latest learning design tools and technology to engage and interact with their students and between students to be motivated to complete their course, support others and achieve their goals.

Relationship Builder - they treat students as valued customers and serve with the expectation that if they serve them well, students will return again and again to purchase further courses. At the heart of this is an authentic desire to build a relationship that lasts.

Actions to Take

1. Wherever you are on your course development journey, please take these 10 factors into account and be famous for your courses.
2. If you first need to understand more about your ideal students, download this free template and instruction pack for your ideal student avatar.
3. If you need to begin planning your course, then take our short course, How to PLAN Your Online Fashion Course Effectively.
4. If you'd like further support, please contact [email protected] or visit our SHOP.

Mark 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.