To help you decide the appropriate content for your course, you must decide what you want to accomplish with your course and who will be taking the course. Studies have shown that a technical employee (such as an Information Technologist) will take a class on average for an hour and a half, while the average sales person will only take a course for 15 minutes. When you create a course for a specific type of employee, you must take in account the characteristics of that type of employee. For example if you are a product manager in a bank and you are creating a course to train bank employees in a branch office you might know that not all remote employees have full time access to a PC, or that their schedule only allows for about a half hour a day when they can access a training course. With this knowledge, you would be better off creating a series of small fifteen-minute courses than one large course.

To help create effective courses you should identify the demographics of your audience and draw conclusions from these demographics. The questions you should ask yourself before creating a course are:

1. Who is the student? Do they have a high school, college, or post secondary degree? Course content, and language should be modified based on their education. How old are they? Are you focusing on people who are 20, 50 or 80 years old? Depending on the average age of the student you may need to design your course differently. What type of job do they have? Are they technical, production, or management employees?
2. What is the student's environment? Are they in a factory or shop floor, cubicle or office. You should design the experience so that it is effective for their environment. Employees working in a cubicle should not get applications with audio components. Employees working on a shop floor might need an audio component.
3. Why is the student taking the course? If you understand their motivation, you can make sure you provide them with the information they need to make the learning experience a success.
4. What specifically does the student need to make their learning experience a success? For example if they need a particular skill you can include simulations that ensure the student learns the skill.

By better understanding your audience you can create an effective course.