Why Most Online Courses Overwhelm Instead of Teach (And How to Fix It)
A flawed model for creating courses that wastes everyone's time
Most online courses follow a flawed model: content-first.
The idea is simple: to create a valuable course, just provide a ton of great information. If you want to increase the value? Add even more content. And if you want to improve the course further? You guessed it—more content.
This is why many premium courses (often priced at $2,000 or more) come loaded with dozens of hours of video or hundreds of pages of text. Course creators believe that by stacking more information into the course, they’re increasing its value.
But this approach actually makes learning harder. Information alone is not teaching. You haven’t truly taught your students anything unless they can apply it.
Instead of focusing on how much content a course provides, we should focus on what outcome it delivers
A great course should not measure its success by the amount of content, but by the number of students who actually implement what they learn.
Let’s say you want to teach participants how to write great headlines. A content-first course might give them 100 examples of high-performing headlines and break them down into categories.
What happens next?
Most students will either skim the list or try to analyze every example in detail. But knowing what a great headline looks like doesn’t mean they can create one themselves.
Instead, an outcome-first approach would look like this:
Teach one simple technique for writing a great headline (e.g., starting with “How to”).
Have students practice writing 10 headlines using that technique.
Introduce another technique (e.g., using curiosity-driven contrast).
Have students practice again, alternating between the two styles.
Layer in another skill (e.g., handling objections in a headline: “How to do X without Y”).
Keep stacking skills only after previous ones are mastered.
Instead of passively consuming content, students are actively practicing and developing a portable skill—one they don’t need notes to recall.
If students need to constantly refer back to the course to implement what they learned, they haven’t truly learned it. Real teaching means they internalize the skill and take it with them.
Think about how people learn to drive
Imagine if before ever getting behind the wheel, they had to watch 20 hours of driving tutorials and read a 300-page textbook on road rules.
How effective would they be at actually driving? Not very.
Instead, real driver training looks like this:
Learn where the gas and brake pedals are.
Start the car.
Practice turning it off and on.
Drive in a straight line.
Make a turn.
Learn to parallel park.
Layer in more advanced driving skills over time.
It’s hands-on from the beginning. Learning happens in action, not just through information.
This is how courses should work too. Teach a small skill, let participants practice, layer in the next skill, repeat.
A great example of outcome-first teaching comes from Nicholas Cole’s YouTube video called "1 Simple Exercise To Defeat Writer’s Block Forever"
Instead of just giving examples of well-written articles and saying, “See what works?”, he does something different:
He shows his exact process for structuring an article.
He walks through each step he takes before he starts writing.
He provides a repeatable template that viewers can follow.
He explains his thought process in real time as he writes.
This is teaching. He’s not just sharing information—he’s demonstrating a process and giving viewers actionable steps they can replicate. (I include a link to the video at the end of this article)
The Bottom Line
Most courses fail because they focus on information instead of implementation.
To create a truly valuable course, shift from content-first to outcome-first by:
Teaching small skills and layering them over time.
Providing clear, actionable steps for beginners.
Measuring success based on participant results, not just content quality.
Refining and simplifying processes so they are easy to follow.
This shift doesn’t just make courses seem better—it makes them actually useful.
And that’s what real teaching is all about.
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