What to Include in a Printable Workbook for Your Online Course

If you're making a workbook for your online course or coaching program, this video has the answers you need. Using our Canva Course Templates as an example, Alice walks you through structuring your workbook and what to include for the best learning experience possible.

Organizing Your Workbook for the Best Experience

In the video, Alice walks through putting together a workbook that helps your customers apply what they learn in your course...and also shared our templates as an example to help you quickly put together your own course workbook.

TIP: Don't worry about having a variety of types of worksheets in your workbook. Simply provide a useful opportunity for your customers to apply what they learn in your training. It doesn't matter much what it looks like...just that they are able to put what you teach into practice.

Workbook Template Pages

Tips for Creating an Awesome Workbook for Your Online Course

When it comes to creating a workbook companion to your course, your goal is to provide an opportunity to APPLY what they learn in your course. Your course helps them solve a problem or learn a new skill - and you workbook helps them put it into practice.

When putting together all your course materials, we recommend creating your presentation first, so that your workbook can complement that learning opportunity most effectively. The workbook should also follow the same structure and sequence of your course, so it's easy to follow along with.

First, Create Checklists to Be Your Guide

Once you're ready to put your workbook together, start by creating checklists that cover all the main steps needed to apply what you learn. These will serve as a nice summary that you can build other workbook materials from. Your checklists should also follow a logical sequence and be in line with the course topics as well.

Once your checklist are complete, you can plan the rest of the sheets for your workbook. You might do brainstorming sheets where you ask questions, ask them to reflect on certain things, create a to do list and more. The important thing is that your workbook contains USEFUL exercises to achieve their objective. Your customer's time is valuable and there is no need to create fluff or try to make pretty workbook pages, just to impress people.

Putting Your Course Workbook Together

Once you know what will be in your workbook and in what order, it's time to start putting it together. We have a basic structure for that in our Course Creation Templates and since they're made in Canva, it's all pretty drag and drop easy.

We suggest including the following in your workbook:

  • Introductory Page: Introduce the purpose of the workbook, include basic instructions on how to approach the workbook and let them know what to expect.
  • Introduce Yourself Page: In addition to introducing the topic and giving them an overview on how to use the workbook, introduce yourself...much like you did in your presentation. Add photos, share something personal that makes your audience relate to you...and gives them insight on why you have something useful to share on this topic.
  • Table of Contents: A table of contents is always useful, so your customers can see at a glance what's included and use the parts of the workbook they'll find most helpful.
  • Modules / Sections: Divide your workbook up, much like you did your presentaiton. If your presentation had four parts, for example, divide the workbook into 4 modules. Or if it's a pretty simple and straightforward workbook, you might not need to divide it up. 
  • Workbook Pages: Again, the types of pages you include will largely depend on what the workbook's objective is. Certainly, you'll have checklists and to do lists. You'll also likely have brainstorming sheets where customers can explore certain questions, so they can make their plan on what to do next.

...and above all, don't forget the instructions! Always give your customers guidelines on how to approach your workbook as a whole...and the individual workbook pages as well. The more you guide them, the better they'll be able to fill them out and get the results you promised them.

We hope this has been a good introduction into creating a quality workbook to complement your course or coaching program. If you need help with editing and creating workbooks in Canva, we have a tutorial for you here as well.

The best thing about our approach and templates as we always keep things as simple as possible. No fluff...just approach your course as a solution to one specific problem and deliver the guidance and tools they need to solve that problem.

NEXT - Save Time and Headaches with our Easy to Use Course Creation Template Packs

Course Creation Template Packs

We have a growing collection of Life Skills Course Template Packs that will make it easy for you to put together:

  • A course presentation with our Canva slide show template
  • A course workbook with our Canva workbook template
  • A course companion journal with our Canva journal template

Plus, we've included "Create a Fast & Simple Course in Your Niche" Insider's Guide...to help you create a quality learning experience and come up with hot selling topics for your next course.

Click here to choose yours...or grab 23 of our course template packs at an amazing price.

We've created the simple structure to create quick and easy courses with big impact for your customers. They'll save you tons of time and headache launching your next course.


* Watch our Create a Workbook in Canva Tutorial: https://youtu.be/9S3CHu-Asac

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