Your thoughts on text-based courses

Hey!

I've been developing text-based courses in my project: www.nocodehackers.es and people seem to love them when they need to follow steps or a proccess.

The main consensus is that for complex topics or things that require some level of a deeper explanation, video is better, but that text helps them to follow steps, and have a place to return to without skimming trough the video.

Hope it helps!

Text based courses are hard to do.

I spend more than 4 years seeing courses and reading books of different topics, from that experience I can tell you:

1. I have done more video courses than books, why? for me it's because they are easy for your brain, you have visual, sound and text cues.

2. Nowadays video courses include a workbook, initially I thought they were not usefully but then I started to see better and better ones, which helped me to remember what I saw in previous chapters.

   • For me, a good workbook is the one that doesn't include a lot of wording but concentrates on the key points and key examples of the chapter as well as some actionable items

3. Text-based course are hard to follow because of the lack of sound and visual cues, but that is not a problem if you are willing to have an appropriate time designing your content well, let me give you some examples:

Courses
Brilliant: For me, the best platform with written courses and even better the best science courses I saw as a beginner
RefactoringUI: A nice written book that really delivers value on each image and word

Blogs
https://ciechanow.ski/lights-and-shadows
https://github.com/a327ex/blog/issues/30
http://www.r2d3.us/visual-intro-to-machine-learning-part-1/
https://www.lightnote.co/

Of course, I don't have any experience creating content, so I say all of this from my consumer experience

I wrote some Docker course, text based, sold 20-30 copies... 20 pages length, it doesn't have to be a book.

For what it’s worth: I appreciate the option for both. I recently purchased a course and found myself flipping between the PDFs and the video.

Hi Aquiles,

If I understand correctly, you might want to check Next.js I think its one of the best I have seen based on UI and even the thorough walk-thru (I'm fairly new to programming only a year old, so there might be something else better). So check it out for inspiration. And might be a better way than thinking about making a book as you have mentioned, plus maybe you can even split it into a weekly lesson to not have pressure to need to finish the course before you ship it.

Also, you can check Dan Abramov's Just JavaScript which is simple and unique! I have learned many things from his simple way of explaining the mental model of how JavaScript works and removing any complexity.

Another example is The Odin Project but I still think Next.js is better.

Mozilla's is famous also but I think its a bit dry.

But in general I think having a text based course is useful.

And all the best on this new course you're working on!

Personally I also prefer text. Video is super slow and often full of irrelevant stuff that I want to skip. I think the key to a text based course is to make it bite-sized and make it possible to complete each part. This mild gamification works like chapters in a book, and makes you keep thinking "I can complete just one more part" - leading to much higher completion rates.