If you're a licensed therapist or counselor thinking about creating an online course, you're entering territory that most of your colleagues haven't explored yet — which means the opportunity is wide open. But it also means you'll need to navigate some questions that a business coach or marketing consultant wouldn't face: scope of practice, CE accreditation, and the line between teaching and treating.
Yes, therapists and counselors can create effective online courses. The key is clarity about what you're building: education and training, not therapy. Start by identifying the knowledge you repeat in sessions, choose whether you're serving fellow professionals or the public, and launch a small pilot before building a comprehensive program.
This guide walks you through the full process — from separating your teachable content from your clinical work to enrolling your first students. It's written for licensed practitioners who have deep expertise but aren't sure how to package it into a course.
Why Therapists Are Creating Online Courses
Every therapist has frameworks, psychoeducation modules, and skill-building exercises they teach to client after client. An online course lets you package that repeatable knowledge once — and reach hundreds or thousands of people who need it, without adding more hours to your clinical schedule.
Kay Adams, a Licensed Professional Counselor with over 40,000 clinical hours and 13 published books, built Journalversity on Ruzuku. She now has over 7,000 enrolled students across her NBCC-approved CE courses and personal growth offerings. As she put it in a Course Lab podcast interview: "When I started with Ruzuku in 2017 or 18, that I did my first evergreen classes. Just a game changer in my work."
But here's an important reality check from Abe Crystal's The Business of Courses (Mirasee Press): simply building a course doesn't guarantee students will come. Crystal calls this the "Field of Dreams" fallacy — the belief that "if you build it, they will come." The therapists who succeed are the ones who plan not just the course content, but how practitioners or the public will discover it, engage with it, and apply what they learn.
A Reality Check: Courses Are Leveraged, Not Passive
You'll hear "passive income" attached to online courses everywhere — including from some of the competitors ranking for this very topic. Here's the honest version: courses aren't passive. They require real upfront work to create, ongoing updates (especially if you're maintaining CE accreditation), and consistent effort to reach new students.
What courses are is leveraged. You invest deeply once — building the curriculum, recording the content, designing the assessments — and then that investment serves hundreds of students over years. Kay Adams built her core Journalversity courses years ago and continues to refine them, but the foundation compounds. That's different from passive. It's sustainable.
The therapists who struggle are the ones expecting to record a few videos and watch enrollment roll in. The ones who succeed treat course creation like what it is: a serious professional project that, once built well, creates ongoing value for both you and your students.
Step 1: Separate What You Teach from What You Treat
This is the foundational step that makes everything else possible. Your clinical work involves individualized assessment, diagnosis, treatment planning, and a therapeutic relationship with a specific client. Your course content lives in a different space entirely: teaching frameworks, skills, and knowledge to groups.
Start by listing the topics you explain to almost every client. The coping strategies you teach repeatedly. The psychoeducation you deliver in the first few sessions. The frameworks you draw on whiteboards. Those are your course topics.
Then think about what colleagues ask you about. The approaches other clinicians want you to train them on. Those are your CE course topics. For a deeper look at this distinction, see our guide on teaching vs. treating and scope of practice.
- Teachable: "Here's a framework for understanding anxiety triggers" — psychoeducation that works for groups
- Clinical: "Let's explore what triggers your specific anxiety" — individualized assessment and treatment
- Teachable: "These are evidence-based techniques for managing conflict in relationships" — skill-building
- Clinical: "Let's work through what happened between you and your partner last week" — therapeutic process
Step 2: Choose Your Audience
Therapists typically serve one of three audiences with online courses, and your choice shapes everything from accreditation needs to pricing to content depth.
Licensed Professionals Seeking CE Credits
Other therapists, counselors, social workers, and nurses who need continuing education credits to maintain their licenses. This audience expects clinical rigor, evidence-based content, and — critically — CE accreditation. Kay Adams' Journalversity courses are NBCC-approved (ACEP #5782). GERTI, a nonprofit in Kansas run by Belinda Vierthaler, LMSW, delivers 25+ CE-approved courses for nurses and social workers in elder care. Both secured accreditation as individual practitioners or small organizations — not large institutions.
Aspiring Practitioners in Training
Students in counseling programs, interns, or professionals pursuing specialty certifications. This audience may be part of a formal training pathway — your course might complement their academic program or help them prepare for licensing exams.
General Public Seeking Personal Growth
Individuals who want to learn skills — stress management, communication strategies, journaling for self-reflection, mindfulness techniques — without needing a therapeutic relationship. This is psychoeducation, and it's a natural extension of the skill-building work you already do in sessions.
Step 3: Design Your Curriculum
Structure your course around clear learning objectives. For each module, define what students will know or be able to do after completing it. This isn't just good pedagogy — for CE courses, accreditation bodies require documented learning objectives.
A typical therapy course structure:
- Module 1: Foundations — theoretical framework, key concepts, the evidence base
- Module 2-5: Core skills — progressive skill-building with examples, demonstrations, and practice exercises
- Module 6-8: Application — case examples (composite/anonymized), practical scenarios, peer discussion
- Final module: Integration — pulling it all together, ongoing practice resources, assessment
Include a mix of formats: video lectures for conceptual content, downloadable worksheets and frameworks for practical application, discussion prompts for peer learning, and assessment questions for CE compliance. Kay Adams' Journalversity courses blend pre-recorded instruction with downloadable journal prompts, peer discussion, and live facilitated sessions.
Step 4: Decide on CE Accreditation
If your audience is licensed professionals, CE accreditation transforms your course from optional to essential. Therapists need continuing education credits to renew their licenses, and most will prioritize accredited courses over unaccredited ones — even if your content is excellent.
The process varies by board. For NBCC (National Board for Certified Counselors), you apply as an Approved Continuing Education Provider (ACEP). State licensing boards have their own requirements. Some practitioners start by partnering with an already-approved CE provider and later get their own approval.
For a detailed walkthrough of the accreditation process, see our guide to creating CE/CEU-approved courses.
Step 5: Create Your Content
You don't need a production studio. A quiet room, good lighting, and a clear microphone are sufficient for professional-quality course content. What matters more than production value is clinical quality: accurate information, clear explanations, and practical application.
- Case examples must be composite or fully anonymized. Confidentiality applies even in educational contexts.
- Record in segments. 10-20 minute videos per topic work better than hour-long lectures. Busy clinicians retain more from focused segments.
- Create downloadable resources. Frameworks, worksheets, reference guides, and assessment tools.
- Include assessment. For CE courses, completion verification is required. Build quizzes or reflection exercises into each module.
AI tools can help accelerate the scaffolding work: researching background literature, outlining module structure, drafting quiz questions, and creating composite case example frameworks. But your clinical expertise provides the accuracy and nuance that AI can't — the difference between a technically correct explanation and one that reflects how practitioners actually use a technique. Use AI to handle the structural heavy lifting, then apply your judgment to everything that touches clinical content.
Step 6: Choose Your Platform
You need a platform that supports the structure your courses require: sequential content delivery, completion certificates (essential for CE), assessment and quiz capability, community discussion, and live session integration. Several therapists have migrated to Ruzuku specifically because it handles all of these without complexity — Richard Chandler, MA, LPC, moved from Teachable; Jodi Hardesty, LPC, from LearnWorlds; Tim Shetter, M.S., from UpCoach.
For a detailed comparison, see our guide to the best platforms for therapists to create online courses.
Step 7: Launch with a Pilot Cohort
Start small. Maelisa Hall, a licensed clinical psychologist who teaches therapists on Ruzuku, launched her first high-end course hoping for 10 students and got 4. She iterated from there — refining content based on feedback, building testimonials, and expanding her offerings over time.
A pilot cohort of 5-10 colleagues gives you real feedback on pacing and clarity, testimonials for credibility, refined content before pursuing CE accreditation, and confidence that your material works before you invest in marketing.
Step 8: Get Your First Students
Your professional network is your strongest starting point. For CE courses, listing in CE directories generates steady enrollment. For public courses, your existing client base already trusts your expertise. For detailed strategies, see getting your first students as a therapy course creator.
The Therapy-Coaching-Courses Triad
Many therapists also offer coaching, which operates under different scope-of-practice rules. Courses fit naturally into this triad: therapy for clinical treatment, coaching for goal-directed personal growth, and courses for scalable education. Each feeds the others. For more on this, see why therapists should create online courses.
What Makes Therapy Course Creation Different
Creating courses as a therapist carries unique responsibilities. You need to be clear about scope of practice, careful with confidentiality even in educational contexts, and deliberate about the line between psychoeducation and treatment. But those same qualities — your clinical rigor, your ethical standards, your deep understanding of how people learn and change — make you exceptionally well-suited to creating courses that genuinely help people.
Kay Adams didn't just create courses. She built a platform for 7 faculty members across 6 countries to teach journal therapy techniques to thousands of students. She separated her clinical work from her educational work cleanly, secured NBCC accreditation, and now does 80% of her work online. Clinical depth informing educational breadth, with clear boundaries between the two. Read Kay's full story.