The Three Types of Values Your Course Needs (And the One Most Creators Miss)

A colleague asked me to review an online course she was struggling with.

The course looked stunning—professional lighting, crisp audio, beautiful slides. The instructor knew her stuff and taught genuinely useful strategies for creating short Instagram videos.

But my colleague couldn’t follow it.

Not because she wasn’t smart enough or didn’t want to learn. The instruction itself was creating barriers at every turn.

Halfway through a lesson, the instructor would casually mention, “Oh, and you’ll need to have this other thing prepared before you do this step.” Wait—you’re telling me NOW? And this kept happening, lesson after lesson, forcing students to constantly pause, prep, and try to keep track of a growing mental checklist.

That’s when it hit me: this course had great production values and solid content values, but it was missing something critical—instructional values.

Let me break down what I mean.

The Three Types of Values Every Course Needs

1. Production Values

This is how your course looks and sounds.

For video courses: Does it have clean audio? Professional slides? Good lighting?

For text-based courses: Are you using beautiful layouts? Clear, readable fonts? Well-designed images and graphics?

Production values make you look credible and professional. It signals to students that you take your work seriously.

But here’s the thing: production values alone don’t teach anyone anything.

You can have a beautifully shot video course with perfect lighting—or a gorgeously designed PDF with stunning visuals—and still leave your students confused and frustrated.

2. Content Values

This is about whether you’re actually teaching something useful.

Are you sharing strategies that work? Are you covering topics that aren’t obvious? Are you giving people insights they can’t easily find elsewhere?

Content values are about having something worth teaching in the first place.

A lot of course creators stop here. They think, “I’ve got great content and it looks professional—I’m done.”

But they’re missing the third piece.

3. Instructional Values

This is where most course creators fall short.

Instructional values are about how well your instruction is organized and structured so that students can actually learn from it—with minimum frustration.

It’s not enough to know your stuff. It’s not enough to present it beautifully. You have to design the learning experience so that someone can go from Point A to Point B without hitting unnecessary roadblocks.

That Instagram course I mentioned? Beautiful production. Solid content. But poor instructional design made it unnecessarily hard to follow.

Why Instructional Values Gets Overlooked

Here’s why so many course creators miss this:

They don’t have good examples to learn from.

Most online courses focus on looking professional and delivering content. Very few are designed with true instructional excellence in mind.

They assume student struggles are about motivation.

When students don’t complete a course or don’t get results, creators often think, “They just weren’t action takers.” But the real issue? The instruction created barriers that didn’t need to be there.

They don’t test their own instructions strictly.

Experts can fill in gaps automatically. They don’t realize when they’ve skipped a step or assumed prior knowledge because it’s second nature to them.

What Happens When Instructional Values Are Missing?

Students don’t complete your course.

They don’t get results.

And here’s the worst part: they blame themselves.

I’ve seen students rave about instructors even when the course was hard to follow—because they assume any struggle is their own fault. They’ll even create their own checklists and reorganize the material just to make it work.

That’s not a sign of success. That’s a sign your instruction is making them work harder than they should.

A Real Example: The Daily Email Course

I took another course recently—this one about writing daily emails—because I thought it might help the same colleague who was struggling with the Instagram course.

The content was good. It showed lots of examples of great emails. It gave ideas for what to write about.

But it didn’t teach a writing process.

I knew immediately this wouldn’t work for her. She struggled with writing and needed step-by-step guidance on HOW to actually write, not just examples of what good writing looks like.

For someone who already knows how to write, seeing examples is enough. But for someone who struggles with writing? Just showing them good examples and saying “now go write one” is like showing someone a finished painting and saying “just paint like this.”

That’s poor instructional value.

The One Thing You Need to Understand About Instructional Values

If you teach live—even once—you’ll learn more about instructional design than you ever will from just creating content in isolation.

Here’s the mindset shift:

Assume every struggle a student has is something you could have designed better.

Not every struggle, of course. Some people genuinely won’t follow through. But if you default to taking responsibility for student confusion, you’ll become a better teacher fast.

Because you’ll figure out the solutions. Your students usually won’t. But you can—if you’re paying attention.

The Simple Test for Instructional Values

Want to know if your course has strong instructional values?

Try following your own instructions—strictly.

Don’t fill in gaps. Don’t add steps you forgot to write down. Just follow what you actually wrote, word for word.

If you can’t complete the task by following your own instructions exactly as written, your students won’t be able to either.

I did this when creating my storytelling workshop on problem stories. I wrote the instructions. They looked good. Then I tried following them.

I couldn’t do it.

So I rewrote them. Tried again. Still didn’t work.

I went through five or six iterations before I found an approach that worked consistently—one I could follow strictly without having to improvise or fill in blanks.

When I finally taught the workshop live, it worked. Students got results. Not because I’m a genius, but because I took responsibility for making the instruction clear.

What This Means for You

You can have the most beautifully produced course in the world.

You can teach genuinely valuable strategies that transform lives.

But if your instruction creates unnecessary barriers, students will struggle, blame themselves, and not get the results they came for.

The good news? Instructional values are learnable.

Teach live when you can. Watch where students stumble. Listen when they say, “This doesn’t work.” Then iterate until it does.

That’s how you build a course that doesn’t just look good or sound smart—but actually teaches.

Want to Create Courses That Students Can Actually Follow?

The Atomic Course Blueprint gives you a simple, repeatable system to create courses that are clear, structured, and easy for students to follow—no overwhelm, no guesswork.

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Still here? I love that.

One thing you can do for me is reply to this email and tell me:

What’s one course you’ve taken that was hard to follow—and what made it confusing?

Your answer might inspire a future article.