How to make a project plan for an e-learning course

Let’s say you’ve been asked to create an online course. The course is for an NGO, and you’re planning to deliver the course to a wide audience through Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms. 

The topic may be about a positive mindset, emotional intelligence,.or time management. It can be any topic. The course will run for about three hours. The audience will be divided into three subgroups. 

At the outset, you’re given a list of desired learning outcomes and a simple description of the audience. 

What comes next in developing the course? And how can you develop the course in a structured and predictable way?

In this guide, we walk you through an online course creation project plan that can be used when planning e-learning projects 🤓

Summary

1. What is an online course creation project plan? 
2. Designing an e-learning course project plan: initial steps
   • Start with the project brief before you start planning e-learning projects
     • Starting point
     • Endpoint
     • Concept
     • Course delivery
     • Audience
     • Testing
     • External limitations
3. Tips for setting realistic timelines and budgets
4. E-learning development project plan: key considerations
   • Production stages
   • Team members
     • Responsibilities and ownership
   • Interconnections and project infrastructure
   • How to ensure quality
   • Evaluation mechanisms
5. Creating an e-learning project plan: final steps
   • Scope definition
   • Set milestones
   • Calculate velocity
   • Build timeline
   • Incorporate risks
6. Finalizing and implementing e-learning project plan
7. Consider “Blue Carrot” Your Trusted Partner

What is an online course creation project plan? 

Let’s start by ensuring we’re all on the same page regarding what an online course creation project plan is. An online course creation project plan guides the entire process of creating an online course. 

It is the roadmap that takes you from the very start of the creation process until the course is complete. The project plan outlines the steps, tasks, and resources needed to develop the course in a structured and predictable way.

Without a project plan, it’s easy to go astray when creating a course. You may end up missing steps or forgetting key items. A project plan keeps you focused each step of the way, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.

Designing an e-learning course project plan: initial steps 

Designing an e-learning course project plan is a complex endeavor. You need to follow multiple steps sequentially if you want things to work correctly with the project plan.  

Start with the project brief before you start planning e-learning projects

The client briefing is the starting point for an online training course project plan. 

Before you can think about what your course will look like, you need a clear understanding of your starting and ending points. You also need to be clear on the limitations you’re dealing with. 

Here’s how you can gather this information. 

✔️ Starting point

First, identify the assets available to you at the outset. In other words, what inputs do you have to tap into? Specifically, look at:

📌 Learning materials

• Do you have any learning materials about the topic in question?
• Are there any experts who can provide you with insights and validate the course content?
• Do you have thorough personas, including the knowledge of the intended audience?
• Are there interview subjects from the intended audience who can help identify knowledge gaps? Or do you need to recruit interview subjects?

📌 Outcomes

The next step in planning online course creation is to identify the course’s intended learning outcomes. In other words, you must know what you’re trying to accomplish through the course. You need to know:

• Do you have an exhaustive list of intended outcomes or do you need to work to determine what’s expected from the course?
• Do you have a firm system to help you evaluate whether learners have achieved the desired objectives, or do you need to develop one?

📌 Production

There are also a few practical details you need to take care of before you can move on to the next step of your e-learning development project plan. 

• If you’re doing videos, is there a specific person to do the shooting, or do you need to hire someone?
• Do you have a style guide to follow for the visuals and design of the course?

✔️ Endpoint

Now that you have clarity regarding the starting point for the course, you need to know where you’re headed. When creating an e-learning course design project plan, you need a thorough understanding of what you’re trying to achieve through the course.

✔️ Concept 

The course concept guides the entire process of creating an e-learning project plan. If you don’t have clarity on what the course is trying to teach, you will flounder. Consider the following:

• Do you have a clear picture of the intended solution or do you need to work with them to create one?
• Given that there are three subgroups, should there be a single course or three individual ones?
• Can the solution and goals be achieved in better ways other than an e-learning course?
• Is the concept set in stone or can it evolve and be developed as the course is built? 
  
  

✔️ Course delivery

When you create an e-learning project plan, you need to know how you will get the course into the hands of the audience. Make sure you know:

• How will the course(s) be delivered to the audience?
• What channels and software will be used?
• Will the entire course be delivered at one time or will it be broken down into steps?
• What deliverables are optional, and which ones are non-negotiable? 
  
  

✔️ Audience

To make the course most effective, you need clarity regarding the intended audience. You need to understand:

• How will the audience go through the course materials?
• Will the course be taken during the 9 – 5 workday or will it be taken in 5-minute snippets of time here and there?
• Will the audience take the course on their smartphones or desktop computers
• Are there any accessibility requirements? 
  
  

✔️ Testing

Ideally, you should have a testing phase in the course creation process. This serves as quality assurance and helps ensure everything is working correctly. You should know:

• Will you be testing the course once development is complete? 
• How many changes to the course are considered acceptable after the Alpha testing period (10%, 50%, etc.)?

It should be noted that it can be difficult to define the endpoint. Knowing the endpoint requires a complete understanding of the solution you will be developing. You may already have a clear vision of what you’re trying to accomplish. However, sometimes, you may not have a clearly defined vision. 

In the first case, you need to get a detailed understanding of what’s required. In the second case, you will need to create a concept of the solution that considers all the identified specifics and limits. Then, you need the primary stakeholder’s approval on that concept. Only then can you determine exactly what your endpoint will be. 

✔️ External limitations

In addition to the start and endpoint, you also need to identify any external limitations that will impact the course development. You should work with the client to determine:

🔹 What is the available budget?
🔹 How much time do you have to complete the course? 
🔹 Is the deadline strict or is there wiggle room?
🔹 Do you have any specific expectations that aren’t necessarily technical requirements (think client preferences)?
🔹 What tools will you need to use to develop the course? 

Tips for setting realistic timelines and budgets

Once you know the deadline for delivering the course and the budget expectations, you can move ahead in two ways. You can create the course in a linear fashion, starting at stage one and only move to stage two once you’re fully satisfied with stage one. 

Or you can work backward from the end date based on the deadline and the budget. You know that you must deliver certain elements of the course by certain times if you’re going to meet the deadline. This forces you to keep moving forward and keeps you from being a perfectionist.

E-learning development project plan: key considerations

At this point, you should understand where you are, the assets that will be available to you at the beginning, and the expected outcomes. With this information in hand, you can begin to connect the points. You do this by identifying the production stages a project will go through. 

Production stages are the steps you must go through to go from the starting point to the endpoint. Think of the steps as a roadmap guiding you on the road you need to take to produce the course, from step A to step B. 

With the image of a roadmap in mind, let’s travel through the production stages of the project. 

Production stages

So, let’s see what our “roadmap” looks like. The project will include the following production stages:

1. Team allocation/recruitment and process collaboration design
2. Gap analysis and persona description
3. Design the methods used to identify and validate the existence of a knowledge gap
4. Design the learning outcomes evaluation methods
5. Design the learning objectives and curriculum
6. Content development (scripts, blueprints)
7. Media development (videos, PDFs, images, interactive elements)
8. Test the course with an audience
9. Make corrections
10. Integrate the course with a hosting platform
    
    

Team members

To accomplish each stage, you need to identify team members responsible for the tasks within each stage. Let’s assume that in your case you have:

✔️ Project manager;
✔️ Product owner;
✔️ Instructional designer;
✔️ 2 SMEs;
✔️ Graphic designer;
✔️ Illustrator;
✔️ Motion graphics designer;
✔️Storyline developer;
✔️ QA officer;
✔️ Sociologist.

There may be other people required for the project, including script writers, shooting crew, art director, editors, and translators if the course is going to be localized.

👉 Responsibilities and ownership

When it comes to building your course, you’re going to need to answer two important questions:

1. Who is responsible for the end result?
2. Who decides which SMEs to hire? 

Both of these things will have a direct impact on the final course. The SMEs are responsible for providing the content and expertise needed to create a high-quality course. 

The product owner, on the other hand, is the person who has ultimate authority over the final product. They are responsible for making key decisions about what content is included in the course, how it is presented, and how it aligns with the overall goals of the project.

With these things in mind, it’s essential you decide who the product owner will be. Then, you need to select SMEs with the necessary knowledge and experience to create a successful course.

Finally, you need to determine what project acceptance will look like. This means setting clear expectations and goals for the course and determining how success will be measured.

Interconnections and project infrastructure

Before you can move on to the actual production of the course, you also need to think through the interconnections between stages and the input and output requirements for each stage.

Start from the endpoint and move backward. At each stage, define the requirements to produce the specified outputs. Then ask teams what input they need to do their job effectively.

Once you’ve defined the inputs, break them down into deliverables. Spread these deliverables across other teams. Make it clear that these deliverables are necessary to get the proper outputs at different stages.

How to ensure quality

So, how can you ensure that you create a course of the highest quality? Does it depend on how much money you spend? The use of popular media formats? Or how well-known the SMEs are? 

Possibly. However, it does depend on what your criteria are when creating the course. This is why you need to be very precise when describing what you are trying to achieve with your course. Your course will be successful when it meets all of your specified criteria and not a minute before.

So, for example: 

🔹 Do the visual materials align with your style guide? 
🔹 Are all the learning outcomes achieved? 
🔹 Is the number of translation mistakes below the agreed-upon threshold? 
🔹 Does the course function according to the requirements? 
🔹 Does the course meet a certain accessibility standard?
🔹 Is the course produced in line with modern graphic design trends? 
🔹 If you can answer “Yes” to all of the above questions, then there’s a good chance that you have produced a high-quality course.
🔹 The bottom line is that you know your course is high-quality when it meets all of your specified acceptance criteria.

Evaluation mechanisms

To determine whether your course meets the specific acceptance criteria, you need to have some evaluation mechanisms in place. Some of the most common mechanisms include:

• QA Officer: This individual is responsible for checking every piece of content to ensure that it’s in line with the developed standards and for catching any mistakes in the course content.
• In-depth interviews and social surveys: These are qualitative and quantitative techniques that can be used to gain insight into how various pieces of information are perceived and determine whether the audience understands the content as you intended.
• Dynamic Quality Evaluation Process (DQEP): This is a specifically designed process that evaluates the quality of the translation. You need to design the translation process so that the quality is guaranteed by the process itself.

Creating an e-learning project plan: final steps

Okay, so far we’ve discussed:

✔️ Starting point;
✔️ Endpoint;
✔️ Roadmap;
✔️ Team members; 
✔️ Interconnections, processes, and pitfalls.

These components are integral parts of a project as a whole and vital for its success. However, with proper planning, a project will be accomplished on time and on budget, which makes a project plan another critical factor to a project’s success.

Scope definition

Once you thoroughly the project concept and production stages, you can create a list of the deliverables that need to be created.

In our case that would be:

• Gap analysis report.
• Evaluation methods report.
• Style-frames and visual prototypes. 
• Curriculum map and supporting content.
• 3 individual blueprints for each course describing how the content will be presented to the audience.
• About 100 different illustrations.
• 3 storyline courses of about 150 slides each. 
• 5 in-depth interviews.
• Corrections.
• Courses delivery.

Remember, you can start putting production dependencies on a project plan. You’ll end up with something like this:

Set milestones

Depending on the nature of the project, there can be one or many milestones. A milestone represents a significant event in the project that matters to a stakeholder. Milestones are subgoals and intermediate deliverables on the project roadmap.

The first and most important milestone is the delivery of the project. 

In our case we can add 2 more milestones

🔹 SubCourse 1 delivery;
🔹 SubCourse 2 delivery. 

Let’s put these on our project plan:

At this point, we’re not necessarily thinking about the duration of each deliverable. That is something we’ll worry about at later stages. For now, we’re just adding the components to start visualizing everything.

Calculate velocity

Velocity is a measure of the amount of work a team can tackle during a single sprint (© by scruminc).

We need to consider how much work is needed to complete any of the individual activities listed above. You can calculate this information by working with your team to determine the required amount of time, or you can use previous data from other projects to make the calculations. 

In our case, after analyzing the amount of work needed to be done in each activity, we ended up with the following numbers: 

Here’s what it can look like after we update all the durations:

Build timeline

At this stage, we need to think about which activities must be done sequentially, with the outputs of one activity serving as the inputs of another, and which can be done in parallel. Let’s review the list of activities and build the connections.

Take the blueprints, for example. To create a blueprint, we need to have a curriculum map and content finalized. So, those activities are sequential. 

The blueprints could be created in parallel if we had more than one instructional designer. For our case, let’s assume we only have one designer, meaning all three activities will also be done sequentially.

Here’s another example:

Here, we have an activity that represents creating all 100 illustrations needed in the project. 

However, to move on to developing Storyline Course 1, we only need to have ⅓ of those illustrations. We can divide that activity into three parts and make corresponding connections that look something like this:

Once all the interconnections are identified, we’ll see the actual timeline of the project:

Now we see a problem with the plan. Initially, we wanted to deliver each course separately. However, we’re doing interviews only at the end of the three-course development. This means that the first two courses will be waiting for course three to be done. 

While not the fastest process, this is most effective in terms of budget use. However, if we need to deliver the courses one and two earlier, we could do something like this:

At this point, we need to evaluate the initial deadline to see whether it matches the timeline we created. If it does, great. If not, we need to make some optimizations:

👉 Restructure the production process;

OR

👉 Get faster feedback at each stage;

OR

👉 Arrange for some overtime from the production team to reduce the overall turnaround time.

In every project, there’s something called the “critical path”. The critical path is the longest path from the start of the project to its completion. It’s the longest sequence of tasks. The critical path determines the minimum time needed to complete the project. 

In our project, it looks like this:

Tasks not involved in the path can be moved around a bit, giving more breathing room wherever it’s needed.

In our case, we can move the blueprint design and illustrations around to fit the timeline better.

Moving these items around gives the ID and the illustrator more time to do their work. It also gives you more time to review style frames and visual prototypes before you proceed with production. 

Incorporate risks

When creating a project timeline, it’s essential to consider potential risks. For example:

• What happens if a vendor gets sick?
• What happens if an SME has less time available than required?
• What if you don’t like your original prototypes and need to create two or three versions?

Once you’ve identified all the risks, you need to test them against your timeline to ensure that if one becomes a reality, you can still meet the same deadline. 

If you can, great; if not, you’ll need to add some spare time blocks and probably restructure the production process a bit. You only solidify the timeline once you’re 100% sure everything will go as planned. 

Finalizing and implementing e-learning project plan

The last step in the process is to finalize the project plan and begin the implementation process. This involves considering the timeline and risk assessment and making necessary adjustments to ensure a successful project completion.

Consider “Blue Carrot” your trusted partner

Need support creating an e-learning course? If that’s the case, we’ve got you covered. 

Our custom online course creation services can help you develop your desired robust learning experiences. You don’t need to stress about missing any steps or falling behind in your project plan. Nor worry about whether you will hit your milestones on time. 

We have every step covered, from curriculum to translation to course release. 

We’ve helped 300+ businesses and organizations create online courses, including the University of Southern California, Takeda, and the United Nations.

Contact us today to learn how we can help your business thrive through online courses. 🥕