Top tips for 1st time course creators?

Hi Kevin,

I've worked with a lot of first-time creators in my career (Udacity, Pluralsight, and now Curricular). The up front advice is always the same: It's going to be harder and take longer than you think. You'll have times where you second guess the course, where you'll be unhappy with the quality, and where you'll want to give up. But learning by doing is the best way, and after pushing through your first course, you'll have the skills to do it so much better the next time. And you should really think about this as a long term endeavor, where you're going to get increasingly better at teaching your students over time.

The vast majority of success in course development comes from two factors: 1. planning well, and 2. how quickly you can get content in front of students (I know others in the thread have mentioned iteration loops, it's super critical).

On planning:

Outcomes matter most. Start with the outcomes - what students should be able to do after taking the course. Then plan backwards. Design the entire course experience around equipping students with new abilities. This is the best way to design a high quality course.

Student experience matters tremendously. Give students fun and interesting stuff to do throughout the course. Not just videos or coding along with you. Practice problems. You can supply solution videos for them.

Think about differentiating your course. Consider things like: office hours; 1:1 coaching; providing feedback on student work; adapting the curriculum (e.g. give students additional practice in areas where they're struggling); or giving students more structure (due dates, community, things like that).

On getting content to students quickly:

Pilot test your curriculum. After you plan but before you record, build an MVP version of the course materials (lectures, demos, quizzes, exercises) and workshop with real paying students over something like Zoom. Hold it over a weekend or one week of evenings. You'll get validation and amazing feedback for how to improve your course prior to going into production, and you can often earn enough from this workshop to finance the time-cost of creating a course. I wrote about this process in depth if you're interested.

Here are the steps I recommend for courseware

1. What outcome do you want students to have?
2. Think of a subject you genuinely enjoy learning about
3. Figure out how much insight do you have in this domain?
4. How do you wish you learned this subject?
5. Create the sequence of understanding
6. Collect the resources you would need to teach this
7. Based from your sequence mapping, create a map
8. Start recording and find your teaching style
9. Review + Polish
10. Publish

Interesting!

We might have different definition of what does success mean.

Course #1: The first online course I created was a disaster. This is it being a successful course in the offline format. I quickly learned that just because something works in the offline format doesn't necessarily translate to the same in the online format.

Course #2: I pre-sold 20 seats even before I created (record & edit the videos, set the assignments) the course. The format was a 1 video a day with an assignment at the end of the video. I had about 30% of the students who completed the course. 10% did not even start (they paid but just did not start). The rest did not complete the course.

Course #3: I sold enough seats to cover my cost. The success of this course was based on what i've learned from course #1 & #2. I added mentoring, weekly zoom calls, and also email/text support for students who are stuck. Every single one who took the course completed it and was able to achieve their goals to a certain extent.

I would say, by most standards, #2 and #3 were both successes.

Going forward I would be looking at these factors:

1. Build a community or at least join several communities and develop relationship with people who fit the profile of your ideal learners.
2. Interview them: ask them questions regarding their challenges and frustrations.
3. Demonstrate your proficiency via content creation
4. Develop a minimum viable course
5. Make them an offer they can't refuse
6. Coach them, guide them, inspire them, follow-up with them. In short, help them succeed.
7. Get them to give you testimonials.

At Catalytic Courses, we have a course bundle that helps first time course creators get up to speed quickly. If you see something that catches your attention let me know and we'll do something special for you.