How to Outline Your Course Using Workflowy

Open WorkFlowy and create one bullet for each major section of your course. These are your modules — the big containers that group related lessons together. Don't worry about getting the order right yet. Just get them down.

If you're teaching a course on watercolor painting, your modules might look like this:

• Materials & Setup
• Basic Techniques
• Color Mixing
• Composition
• Your First Complete Painting

Most courses work well with four to seven modules. If you have more than eight, you may be trying to cover too much ground for a single course. If you have fewer than three, you might be thinking of a workshop rather than a full course — which is also fine, but worth naming clearly.

Click into your first module and start adding lessons as nested bullets. Each lesson should cover one specific thing a student will learn or do. A useful test: if you can't describe what the student will be able to do after this lesson in one sentence, the lesson might be too broad.

Under "Basic Techniques," you might have:

• Flat Wash
• Graded Wash
• Wet-on-Wet
• Dry Brush
• Lifting and Blotting

Keep lesson titles short. You'll refine them later when you're writing the actual content. Right now, you're building the skeleton.

Go one level deeper. Under each lesson, add bullets for the specific activities, practice exercises, downloads, or discussion prompts you want to include. This is where your outline starts to feel like a real course plan.

Under "Flat Wash," for example:

• Demo video — even strokes, loading the brush
• Practice exercise — paint three swatches at different pigment concentrations
• Common mistakes note — streaks from uneven water loading

You don't have to fill in every lesson right away. Some lessons will have five sub-bullets, and others will have one or two. The point is to capture what you know now so you can see the shape of the course taking form.

WorkFlowy supports hashtags on any bullet. Add tags like #video, #worksheet, #quiz, or #discussion to mark what format each piece of content will take. This helps you see at a glance how much video you need to record, how many worksheets you need to design, and whether your course has enough variety.

Tags are also searchable. Click any tag and WorkFlowy filters your entire outline to show only bullets with that tag. So if you want to see every video you need to produce, click #video and you have your production list.

A simple tagging system might look like:

• #video — recorded lesson or demo
• #worksheet — downloadable PDF or fillable exercise
• #quiz — knowledge check or self-assessment
• #discussion — prompt for community or group conversation
• #resource — external link, book recommendation, or reference

Click any module bullet to zoom in. Now you see only that module and its contents. This is WorkFlowy's best feature for course outlining — it lets you think deeply about one section without the distraction of the entire course sitting above and below.

When you're zoomed in, you can rearrange lessons by dragging bullets, add notes to yourself, and flesh out activities without losing your place. When you're done, click the breadcrumb trail at the top to zoom back out and see the full course.

This zoom-and-focus pattern is especially useful if you're outlining during short work sessions. You can zoom into a single module, spend 20 minutes filling in lessons and activities, and stop. Next time, zoom into the next module.

Now that you have modules, lessons, and activities in place, read through the entire outline top to bottom. Does each module build on the previous one? Does a student finishing Module 2 have everything they need to start Module 3?

Drag bullets to reorder. WorkFlowy makes this nearly frictionless — you can move an entire module (with all its nested lessons) by dragging one bullet. If a lesson feels like it belongs in a different module, drag it there. If two lessons feel redundant, merge them.

This is the stage where your outline stops being a list and starts being a learning path. Spend real time here. The more solid your outline, the less rework you'll face when you're recording videos or writing lesson content.

Before you start building content, share your outline with someone who can give you useful feedback — a colleague, a beta student, or a fellow course creator. In WorkFlowy, right-click any bullet and choose "Share." You can share a read-only link or an editable one.

Sharing a zoomed-in view is useful here. If you want feedback on just Module 3, share that node specifically. Your reviewer sees a clean, focused list instead of your entire workspace.

Good questions to ask your reviewer: Does this sequence make sense? Is anything missing? Does any module feel too heavy or too light? Getting feedback at the outline stage saves far more time than getting it after you've recorded six hours of video.

Before you open WorkFlowy, write one sentence describing what a student will be able to do when they finish your course. Then ask: what do they need to know to get there? Each answer becomes a module. Each module's answer becomes its lessons. This is backwards design in practice, and it keeps your outline focused on results rather than on everything you know about the subject.

WorkFlowy lets you add a note to any bullet (click the bullet, then add a note). Use these notes to capture why a lesson exists or what problem it solves for the student. When you come back to your outline weeks later, these notes help you remember your reasoning — and they make your outline useful for anyone else reviewing it.

As you outline, you'll think of ideas that don't fit anywhere yet — bonus content, advanced topics, things you might add later. Instead of losing them or forcing them into a module, dump them in a "Parking Lot" bullet at the bottom of your outline. Review it when you're done. Some items will find a home; others will become ideas for a second course.

WorkFlowy is intentionally simple, and that comes with tradeoffs. There are no database views, so you can't create a Kanban board of lessons by status (planned, drafted, recorded). There's no calendar view for scheduling your production timeline. If you need project management features alongside your outline, a tool like Notion or Asana will serve you better. But if what you need is a clear, fast, distraction-free way to think through your course structure — which is the actual hard work of course creation — WorkFlowy is hard to beat.

Formatting options are limited — you get bold, italic, and links, but no images, tables, or embedded media. For outlining, that's a feature, not a bug. You're forced to stay in structural thinking mode. But if you want a polished outline document to share with stakeholders, you'll need to export to something richer.

WorkFlowy doesn't export to formats other tools readily import. When you move your outline into your course platform, you'll likely be copying and pasting lesson titles and descriptions manually. For most courses, that's 20 minutes of work. But it's worth knowing upfront.