Wouldn’t it be great to have an unlimited amount of time to create your courses? Unfortunately, this is almost never a possibility. In fact, most course development projects are constrained by time, budget, and sometimes both.

As such, it is important to know some strategies to speed-up that allows us to create effective courses in a timely fashion.

The tips below are particularly useful if you are creating online courses and are under a time-crunch.

Use premade templates for the course design

Creating custom templates for your project is ideal, but often takes a long time to get done and approved. Use templates to speed things along so you can get to the content.

Quiz only at the end of the course

It’s usually a good idea to implement quizzes throughout a course, but when time is a factor then you need to focus only on the essential quiz (which is often the final quiz after all of the content has been presented). Create these quizzes first and then if time allows you can insert checkpoint quizzes.

Stick with multiple choice questions

Ideally your quizzes contain a variety of question types such as matching, fill-in-the-blank, sorting, and so on. When you are under time pressure, then the quickest quiz to create is one with standard multiple choice (and true-or-false) questions.  Remember to make sure that your questions are still challenging.

Use one program for course creation

Some projects request multiple software programs for course creation. For example, I’ve been on projects that wanted Adobe Captivate for simulations and Articulate for the course content. The more programs you use the greater the technical complexity of the project which adds time for troubleshooting, development, and content delivery.