Q: I have had several people ask me about the order of our offerings in our course catalog and wanted to see what LERN recommends. We have them divided by subject, which I do not want to change. However, the questions has come up about whether or not to list courses within each subject alphabetically by course title or by date of offering for each course. Does LERN have a position on this?
A: Listing courses by section, as you are doing is definitely what we recommend. We do not suggest using alphabetical or date order for course listing, because this is not how people search for your content. We recommend putting your most popular sections of courses first in the brochure, and within those sections, we recommend putting your most popular courses. The reason is this. Sometimes your courses are not given names that simple and descriptive. what they are about, and alphabetical listings would mean these courses would be hard to find. You could give your courses these kinds of titles, but this might reduce readership of your courses since catchy titles help sell classes. Putting the most popular courses first also makes sense, because this is what most people are looking for. Putting them up front where they are easy to find can encourage enrollments. If people are looking for content aht is farther back in the brochure, they might not look in as deep as necessary, or they might see courses that are not of great interest, and decide the content is not for them. This is another reason too, to have a very well-designed and easy-to-read table of contents to guide people to the content they are looking for.