The Challenges of Online Course Delivery and How to Overcome Them

Humans love to learn. As the world has become increasingly online, so has the education industry.

Already a multibillion-dollar market, the eLearning market is expected to be worth over $1 trillion in 2032, with millions upon millions of learners. This means the market potential is high for those creating an online course. 

Yet, delivering an excellent online course is more complex than recording and posting some lessons. Not only does crafting an engaging and valuable online course take time – you will likely face many challenges along the way.

Challenges can’t always be avoided, but they can be overcome. By understanding what hurdles you might face before you begin, you can be better prepared to face them. If you’re looking to deliver a successful online course, you need a plan.

Here is everything you need to know about the challenges of delivering an online course and the best strategies to tackle them.

Common Challenges in Online Courses

Starting any new project always brings challenges. Three main challenges stand out as true hurdles to overcome when creating and delivering an online course. Good preparation and strategy will help you easily overcome all of these challenges.

Technical Issues

Covering everything from faulty Zoom calls to unoptimized payment streams, creating courses, and sharing knowledge exclusively online naturally involves technical issues.

Lots, and lots, of technical issues.

These can range from minor annoyances that slow you down, to significant disruptions that can derail your course, impact your students’ learning experience, and reduce your income.

Some of the most common technical difficulties include:

Audio/video Quality Issues

Whether on live tutoring calls or prerecorded video, buffering, corrupted, or otherwise poor audio or visual quality can make it extremely difficult for students to follow lectures, participate in discussions, and enjoy and learn from your course.

Connection Problems 

Faltering video connections or audio lag can significantly impact the success of live sessions, not to mention a complete connectivity outage. 

Data Security Challenges

As an online course provider, you will be responsible for the personal data your students share with you (such as their emails). This means even as a single-person operation, you must be extremely careful with handling data.

Poor Platform Navigation

Choosing a difficult or complicated platform can make using your learning management system (LMS) a pain. This leads to confusion and wasted time on both ends, so always choose the right platform for you.

Software Incompatibility

Using multiple platforms, software, and tools can run the risk of software incompatibility. This makes it difficult for students to access certain content or for the course to run smoothly.

Student Engagement

Gaining and maintaining student interest and participation is the biggest challenge when creating a course, and one of the most important ones to get right. Even for in-person education, this is a challenge. For online education? It’s even more problematic.

This is for many reasons, including:

1. Distractions: Your students likely won’t be in a school or a learning space – they’ll be at home. This brings plenty of distractions, adding to the challenge of engaging your students.
2. Ensuring student understanding: Without social cues or seeing students’ faces, it can be hard to know if they truly understand the topic they’ve just learned about. If too many lessons go by without understanding, your students may become disengaged.
3. Lack of interaction: A lack of in-person contact with tutors and peers can quickly make students feel isolated and disconnected from your course.
4. Challenge of self-motivation: Your students are choosing to take your course – they’re not in full-time education while being there. For some students, staying self-motivated enough to complete an optional online course can be challenging.

Course Content Delivery

Even after overcoming technical barriers and ensuring your students are engaged, one major problem is delivering the actual content. Before onboarding new students, here are the significant challenges in content delivery to overcome.

Balancing Learning Styles

Helping students learn at their own pace is essential, but it can be tricky to build a course that correctly balances live learning and self-study.

Ensuring Accessibility

Your course must be accessible to all kinds of learners. While this will increase your customer base, it is also challenging to ensure that your course caters to everyone, including those with visual or auditory disabilities.

Avoiding Overloading

The last thing you want to do is overwhelm your learners with information, as this will likely put them off your course entirely. Crafting a course content schedule that delivers information quickly and effectively without drowning your students in info is difficult, but vital.

Overcoming Technical Issues

There are several simple and effective ways you can quickly overcome any technical difficulties. While eliminating technology issues completely is impossible, these strategies and tools will help you massively reduce the challenge of technical issues.

Establishing Reliable Technology and Tools

Cutting corners can cost you in the long run, which is why investing in reliable technology from the beginning often pays off over time.

One of the most important aspects to get right is choosing your Learning Management System (LMS) or platform. Do not rush this decision; select an LMS that is user-friendly, compatible with other apps, platforms, and operating systems, and has all the features you need.

A platform such as Tevello, for example, provides reliable hosting for your course, alongside useful tools for community building and course content management.

Alongside your primary platform, make sure to choose tools that are reliable for other aspects, such as using Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams for video calling, or Google Drive and Dropbox to provide 24/7 access to cloud-based storage. 

Technical Support and Training

Whether you have outside help or provide it yourself, providing technical support is an important aspect of delivering a successful course. 

To help alleviate the need for real-time support, you can create detailed user guides on how to use your online course, and what to do when things go wrong. It is also worth providing training, especially if you employ tutors for your course. This ensures tutors can use your course tools more effectively, as well as solve issues swiftly without your intervention.

Enhancing Student Engagement

When it comes to online learning, you need a splash of creativity and a whole lot of effort to effectively keep your students engaged. While it might feel overwhelming at times, it’s not impossible, so long as you have the right strategies in place.

Interactive Content

Creating different types of interactive content is easily one of the top ways to keep your students engaged.

Try to include different learning elements such as:

• Gamification: Utilize game-like elements such as leaderboards, points for answering questions, and badges to add more fun and make learning more competitive and engaging.
• Use case studies: Always try to relate course material to real-life examples to demonstrate relevance and keep things fresh.
• Interactive Presentations: Try to build more interactive presentations into your courses, incorporating quizzes, polls, and other activities to keep students engaged and alert.

Regular Feedback and Communication

Make sure to provide regular, on-time feedback on any assessments or tests so learners can better understand their progress. To help you out, you can implement automated check-in messages, hold regular “office hours”, and encourage peer feedback to help keep your students engaged and on-track.

Community Building

A thriving community can be the difference between a vibrant, successful online course and a slow decline in student numbers.

Since your online course will lack the natural in-person interaction of standard education, it’s vital that you grow and support an active community that surrounds your course. This means facilitating online discussions, creating study groups, and encouraging your students to take the initiative in collaborating together.

Using a good LMS is the perfect way to do this.

An online courses platform such as Tevello gives you the technical base needed to create forums and discussion boards, spark conversations, and encourage engagement outside of the lessons.

Effective Course Content Delivery

Even with the best technology, apps, and engagement strategies, the most important element of your course is the actual content. Besides just sharing your knowledge, there are a few key strategies when it comes to designing your course content that can help you overcome challenges and set yourself up for success.

Clear and Structured Content

Always ensure that your content is well-structured. This means making it easy to follow, with a logical timeline, typically starting with easier topics or base knowledge, and building up to more complicated content.

Try to break down complex topics into smaller, more manageable chunks, and always provide clear instructions for any tasks you set students. Using visual organizers such as mind maps, flowcharts, or infographics can help students more easily follow the plan of your course.

Multimedia Integration

Everyone learns differently, which means the more varied learning styles you can employ, the better.

Add varied media content such as videos (recorded and live), podcasts, interactive infographics, and even virtual reality if possible to really mix up your course. This will help keep learners engaged, allowing them to learn faster and enjoy the course even more.

Adaptive Learning Techniques

There’s a reason one-on-one tutoring is popular: tailored learning is often more effective. While one-to-one learning isn’t always possible, there are steps you can take to make your course more personalized for each student, helping them learn more effectively.

Try offering multiple content formats for the same information so that students can choose their preferred learning style. You can also use AI-powered tutoring systems to provide personalized assistance, or even offer flexible learning paths that allow students to choose the order in which they take certain modules.

Conclusion

Delivering an online course is often harder than many people think. Many unseen challenges await, and it can be a long road to success. But with the right strategies and preparation, you can sidestep technical difficulties, craft courses that engages your students, and build content that is truly helpful for learners.

Rarely will one tool will help you overcome all these challenges. Yet that’s exactly what Tevello Courses for Shopify stores does.

With 24/7 developer support, technical issues are quickly fixed, and with a range of tools to help you craft the content, communities, and courses you want, Tevello helps you reach new levels of success.

Start your free trial today to see how Tevello can help you sell courses, digital products, physical products, and build communities on your Shopify store.