Hello and welcome back to I’m Learning Out Loud!

I got stuck at a crossroad this week. From my last update, I was debating between two potential course ideas:

1. Soft skills for novice graphic designers

2. Learning experience (LX) design skills for course creators

Two very different courses. But I’ve come to a decision I’m pretty stoked about. Here’s what went down:

Decisions, decisions

I did some poking around in online communities and reviewed existing courses in these fields. I was still seeing potential in both ideas.

Plus, the results from my subscriber survey was a 60-40% split in favour of the LX design skills course. (Thanks to all of you who voted!)

It almost came down to eeny, meeny, miny, moe. But I thought I’d give something a bit more systematic a try. I came across this article about The 5 Elements of a Niche. Let’s see what happens if we put my two ideas to the test:

Clearly, LX design is the winner.

While it would be fun and fulfilling to help novice designers develop soft skills, there’s already a lot of great courses and resources out there on this topic.

Course creators are the more underserved audience. And as online learning prevails, more people need to care about how learning experiences are designed.

When you take a course, you’re making an investment in yourself to improve your skills, career, and life. As a course creator, I should ensure your time and money isn’t wasted.

Bridging the gap

Once I settled my niche and audience, I started investigating the knowledge and skills gap. This involved comparing my audience’s current and ideal state.

We also want to look for what’s causing the gap and other factors at play. Then we can brainstorm how to bring learners from point A to B.

In instructional design, this is called a needs analysis. I’m writing a blog article to explain this more in-depth. Now that I’ve settled my niche, I’m kicking-off content marketing and will be publishing more articles about LX design.

Content marketing is a priority right now because it’ll help build my credibility and audience in this space. So that when it comes time to launch, I’ve already garnered some interest.

Thanks for reading :)

My next update will be Progress Report 4: Content Marketing + Audience Building.

I must admit, things are feeling a bit meta. I’m writing this newsletter about creating a course, which will be about designing courses. I’ll try my best to keep things easy to follow 😅

Thanks again for staying along for the ride!

Laraine