It's time to outline your course, which we're going to walk through together in three phases. In phase one, we'll identify your course's major milestones, or the sections that students will need to go through in order to achieve your final outcome. In phase two, we'll break those milestones down into smaller bite-sized sections, or lectures. Finally in phase three we'll talk about which types of content, like PDFs or videos, are most appropriate for each of your lessons.

If you took Choose Your Online Course Topic and Build Your Audience, you've already done some of this work, and probably have a draft of your course outline. If that's the case, work through this lesson to make sure you didn't miss anything, or catch any changes!

Back to the 3 phases of outlining. First up are your course milestones. Think about your milestones as the major sections of your course. They should be directly tied to your course transformation, so another way to think about your milestones is to ask yourself, "What are the major steps that students will need to take in order to get from start to finish on their transformation?" Importantly, milestones should be bigger than just tasks. They're concepts or skills your students need to master. If it helps to think about it this way, these milestones will become the sections in your Teachable course.

One big question we always get is about course length. Students want to know, "How many milestones - or sections - should my course have?" The answer is: "it depends." ::Dramatic sigh:: It's true! It depends on how complex your transformation is, and how long it will take students to achieve your outcome. As a general rule of thumb, we recommend between 5-10 milestones, but there can be exceptions. Mini courses, in contrast, should typically only include 1-2 milestones, and we know that some topics really do require more than 10 milestones. That said, we do want to offer this piece of advice; if your course has more than 10 milestones, ask yourself why. Is it because your topic is truly that extensive, or is there a chance that your course might be better off broken down into multiple courses with smaller transformations? Are you accidentally creating an overly ambitious course? ::cough flagship course:: If so, go back to Choose Your Online Course Topic to refine your idea.

At Teachable, we actually learned this lesson the hard way. As some of you may remember, we used to have a really extensive course called The Profitable Teacher. The transformation was massive—by the end of our course, students would be 100% up and running with their Teachable school, including creating their school, creating their course, building their audience, and preparing their sales materials. We had over a dozen milestones in this course, and we heard your feedback loud and clear: despite our best intentions to give you a ton of great information, you were all completely overwhelmed. The Profitable Teacher taught us a valuable lesson. We learned that more isn't necessarily more, and what you all really wanted was for us to break down the phases of building your online course business into more manageable chunks. The transformation from "just getting started" to "ready to make my first sale" was too big. Instead, we now offer a series of courses that address smaller transformations along the way. With that advice in mind, it's time for you to identify your own course milestones. These don't need to be perfect or set in stone, and they shouldn't take you more than a few minutes.