Why Most Courses Fail Before Week 1

I'll let you in on a dirty secret: most "course creators" are actually content creators catfishing unsuspecting experts who have knowledge to sell.

Here's how it usually goes down. A professional expert, coach or consultatnt sits down with a course creator to build a course on a subject matter they’ve mastered over many years.

They start by listing topics: mindset, goal setting, action planning, etc. Next, they start filling out each week until they've put together 8 weeks of content: videos, random quizzes, and the proverbial multiple‑choice 'test' at the end to demonstrate 'knowledge'.

After a lot of fanfare, and thousands of dollars down the Meta Ads drain (helping pay for Zuck's horrifying choice in gold chains), the course doesn't do too well.

By Module 4, learners drop off faster than a free sample at Costco.

Billy is an experienced leadership consultant. One day he decides to turn his expertise into an online course. So he does what most experts do: he hires a freelance course creator, empties his brain into a camera and uploads it onto Udemy (the horror!).

Twelve hours of videos, three downloadable PDFs, two personality tests, and one inspirational TED Talk later, Billy has a course.

What Billy doesn't realise is that learners don't actually need access to his knowledge – they need a pathway to develop their own capability. Instead of designing a learning journey, Billy has created a Netflix series about leadership. Informative? Most likely. Transformative? Nope.

The problem is that Billy designed the course around what he wanted to say, not what learners needed to do with it. Instead of creating a clear pathway from novice to capable leader, he created a digital filing cabinet of leadership knowledge. Learners leave with pages of notes, a nice PDF certificate designed in Canva, and the vague feeling that they should probably be better leaders by now.

This isn't just a 'Billy the Consultant' issue either. Much of the online learning industry is built on the assumption that expertise automatically translates into effective learning. Unfortunately, knowing something and teaching it well are not the same thing. Designing meaningful learning experiences requires more than content – it requires intentional, authentic design.

Since I like to get nerdy (and you probably don't), I'll dive into the concept of Backward Design – one of the most important in the field of learning design. Education academics like Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe popularised this concept in their seminal 1998 book, Understanding by Design.

The idea is simple: effective course structure design begins with clarity about intended learning outcomes and what kind of evidence can demonstrate that such learning has occurred. Rather than "throwing content and activities at the wall," backward design starts with the intended destination (outcomes) first, and only then works backwards to determine what assessments and activities will prove learners have arrived at that destination.

Think of it like Back to the Future. Marty McFly doesn't just jump in the DeLorean and hope for the best – he knows where he's going before he hits 88 miles per hour. Backward design is the same: you set the destination first, then figure out how to get there. Except instead of a flux capacitor, you've got learning outcomes. (Less sci‑fi, but arguably more useful.)

So get your flux capacitors ready – we're going to jump through three stages of Backward Design.

The first step is to think about the intended learning objectives. What will students DO with the learning, and how will they USE it?

We define Learning Outcomes by deciding whether each addresses these things called “declarative” or “functioning knowledge” (I briefly covered this in my last post: declarative = explaining ideas back in their own words; functioning = actively putting knowledge to work).

Today's world, adult learners require more functioning knowledge to be transferred from educational contexts into real life.

So how do you define a learning objective anyway?

With verbs! Yes, those things your elementary teacher drilled into your head also come in handy in the learning and development world. Not just any old verb — these verbs need to be active, measurable action verbs that describe observable behaviours.

Examples include:

And for the love of god, avoid vague, immeasurable verbs that send learners on mental tailspins: "Know", "Understand", "Comprehend", "Learn", "Appreciate".

These are the learning equivalent of "good vibes only" – nice in theory, impossible to measure.

Identify what kind of assessment would allow learners to demonstrate knowledge and meaning‑making. The focus is not on covering content, but on what students should ultimately be able to do with that content.

Assessments should focus on understanding, application, and performance. Demonstrating understanding is more valuable than repeating information. Assessment should evaluate meaningful application of knowledge – not how well they can regurgitate your slides.

Think: "What would a successful graduate produce that proves they've achieved the outcome?"

Design the actual activities, lectures, and interactive tasks that directly support the desired outcomes – and help build towards achieving the 'evidence' or final assessment – while keeping students actively engaged.

This is where you finally get to create the content. But now you're building it with purpose, not just throwing everything you know into a video camera.

As Biggs & Tang state very eloquently:

Before you plan any module, answer this one question:

Write that sentence. Then reverse‑engineer everything from there:

That's it. That's the whole secret. No need to hire content creators (ahem: course creators), no more content dumps or Netflix‑style courses.

Just a clear pathway from novice to capable practitioner