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Summary: A pre-made online YTT curriculum can save significant time for teacher trainers by off-loading classroom hours while offering ready-to-use materials that are compliant with yoga industry standards. Using pre-made curriculum can help accelerate course launch, streamline assessments, and – when it’s well-built – ensure consistent teaching quality. Off-loading some hours can also reduce your creative burnout, allowing trainers to focus on more student engagement and teaching rather than time-consuming content creation.
Creating a yoga teacher training can be enormously time consuming, taking hundreds of hours to develop lesson plans, assessments, and program structure. If you want to offer an online portion to your curriculum, it will take even longer: developing quality online materials can take at least four times longer to develop than in-person lessons! This is where a pre-made online yoga teacher training curriculum can be a great solution. If you’re wondering: how can a pre-made online YTT save me time? Let’s take a look!
Making some of your curriculum offline literally saves both you and your students classroom hours where you have to be present live in person. Offering an online component adds an element of flexibility to your program, where your students can work at their own pace in their spare time. Putting some material online can also help reduce expenses that may come from a room rental or (for a studio) cancelling classes for YTT time.
Most obviously, a pre-made YTT curriculum eliminates the need to build all your curriculum from scratch. Even if your plan is to eventually develop your own online materials, beginning with a professional pre-made online module can help you launch your first program more quickly while giving you time to develop your own materials on the side.
Instead of spending weeks creating slides, manuals, and guides, using a pre-built system can provide you and your students with a polished, organized curriculum instantly. In my experience, anatomy and philosophy content is a great fit for online, as it’s not directly related to your teaching and cuing methodology. (In my experience, it’s best to keep your teaching methodology topics like cuing, sequencing and teaching skills “in house” as you will have a particular method and style for teaching these subjects that needs to be consistent.)
Offering a portion of your curriculum online can be a great way to outsource subjects to a specialist who really loves teaching these topics and is skilled in teaching them well. For example, teaching anatomy may not be your cup ot tea. If that’s the case, finding an expert who loves to teach anatomy is a great way to effectively cover this part of your teaching. Also, adding online modules taught by a passionate expert can be a great way to get additional teaching voices in your program without impacting your core curriculum.
As a yoga instructor, designing an online YTT that meets certification requirements can be complex and overwhelming. Using ready made lesson plans or online content designed by me (Rachel Scott) can support alignment with registration bodies. Investing in these materials can help you reduce the time spent on compliance research and enables you to confidently launch a program that meets these important requirements.
A place where online curriculum can fall short is assessments. To be effective, an online curriculum must include both application activities as well as cogent assessments to evaluate knowledge acquisition. A quality pre-made curriculum should include assignment, quizzes, and evaluation frameworks. These materials can help you to ensure student progress while saving you administrative hours.
Designing hundreds of hours of new content is tiring! Using a pre-made online YTT curriculum can give you a little more space to focus on student connection and feedback. With proper guidance from structured programs, you can avoid burnout while delivering a comprehensive and engaging yoga teacher training experience.
So: how do you find an online module that will work for your program? Not all online programs are created alike, and it’s important to find one that aligns with and supports your own unique teacher training vision.
First of all: research! I would encourage you to investigate online to find several online programs for comparison. In your preliminary research, make sure to look at your potential collaborator’s resume to ensure they have the prerequisite knowledge and skills to present the material well.
A potential collaborator should be very willing to chat, do make sure the following questions are addressed:
In our online world, a pre-made online YTT curriculum can be a powerful time-saving element for yoga teacher trainers that can be a boon for both you and your students. Using high-quality online modules allows you to save time, reduce your classroom hours, include expert voices, and focus on your own core teaching subjects. For more information, feel free to reach out to me (Rachel Scott) to find out more!
Rachel supports yoga teachers and studios around the world to create transformational education experiences that help them thrive in their business, share their passion, and inspire more people to practice yoga. Her extensive knowledge and experience include: earning two masters degrees, authoring three books, leading 4,000+ hours of TT, building a teacher training college for a national yoga company, and working behind the scenes in yoga studio & teacher management for more than fifteen years. As a writer and speaker, she continually wrestles with the juicy bits of life: relationships, authenticity, and discovering meaning in this crazy, wildish world. E-RYT 500, YACEP, BA, MFA, MSci. Learn more about Rachel.
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