Two months ago I made the decision that I wanted to start teaching online. The journey I am on is still a very active one, but I really want to share my experiences with it over the last 60 days or so as I believe it’ll share some insights on some of the common mistakes that I believe people might make.
Month 1: Course 1
Step 1 — Leap of Faith
It was a normal day in the office at work, I recall I was trying to explained to some co-workers how Blockchain could be used in more ways then just as a currency. It annoyed me that I couldn’t summarise my knowledge of the topic concisely enough to make my argument valid.
I remember blurting out that I would just put together a learning session for the team on how Blockchain technology could be used in a practical way. I don’t think people took much notice, but in my mind I was screaming…
What have I done!
I’d committed out loud that I was GOING to make a short course.
I remember sitting at home that night stressing about what I was going to teach, how I was going to structure it and what needed to be taught; and that’s when I decided to check out some online courses to see how they were teaching things.
That’s when I found Udemy.
Immediately I saw more value in producing a short online course and then giving it away for free to my co-workers, as it gave me an interesting challenge. It meant that I didn’t have to stand up and present something in front of actual people and I could just talk to a camera.
Step 2 — Find your Niche
At this point in time, the category for Smart Contracts / Ethereum / Blockchain Development were pretty lacking in terms of available courses. There was one other big course on Smart Contract development that seemed to have everything under the sun:
- Awesome Course introduction video (really neat animation and effects)
- Introduction to the Toolchains needed to get started
- Introduction to the Technology in general
- Introduction to the Language used to write the smart contracts
- A very simple demo application
Cool… Awesome… Now what?
That’s when it hit me, sure there was a course on how to get started with some really basic examples; however while these learnings are really important for some, it doesn’t really help new developers to this landscape make anything that is worthy of use in the real world.
A quote came to mind
Learn Programming Patterns, Not Programming Languages
This basically means that learning a Language is always interesting and useful to a point, but at some point you have to apply that language to a problem that is completely unique to that language; and you will fall flat on your face.
Really what I immediately decided I wanted to do, was to teach the technology in a VERY hands on and raw way.
What I didn’t realise at the time as that this is a very risky game to play, especially in a land where not everyone is looking for this kind of course.
Step 3 — Fail Fast, Fix Later
I spent a good week or so designing how I wanted the course to me structured; I spent entire days just thinking about what things I wanted to teach, and in what order I wanted to explain them.
I felt like I was being productive
I felt good about what I was getting through, It seemed like I was making a lot of progress, I mean I had all these great Ideas down on paper and I had this amazing fantasy in my mind about how it was all going to come out when I started filming.
I wasn’t ready to start filming though, Noooooo Nooooo way was I ready, maybe next week I will film the Introduction… ohh but wait I should film the introduction last because I don’t know if I’ll change things, Oh maybe I’ll film it at the start and then If I change it I’ll re-film it, but then…
STOP
By the end of the second week I realise I had fallen into a pitfall of building my own barriers around why I couldn’t just get on with producing videos.
It was worse because I knew that I was going it to. I would go to bed telling myself I’d done so much, but then toss and turn from feeling guilty that I’d wasted 4 hours making a new Course Image.
I decided one afternoon that I just needed to cut the crap and get started; even if the videos weren’t perfect, at least maybe I wouldn’t feel so guilty.
I started filming.
5 hours later and I’d finished a draft cut of my ENTIRE course.
I slept soundly that night
The overall quality of the videos were no where near the Wes Anderson masterpiece I’d initially envisioned. But at-least it was more or less out of the way.
I submitted my course for review, and it was approved pretty quickly; however there was a note from Udemy with feedback that the audio was a little Quiet and that you could sometimes hear noises in the background.
Note: I recently went back and re-mixed ALL the audio for my videos removing background noise and added annotations to complicated sections. I did this after I launched the course when I had a couple people mention that it was a little hard to hear in places.
Step 4 — What Now?
I launched the course and I felt great! Over the moon! The next day at work I handed out a bunch of free coupons to my co-workers and told them they should check it out if they wanted to learn more.
I kept checking that Instructor page, hitting F5; but nothing really changed. I didn’t get any new students, even from the free coupons. Not only that but most of the people who I did get to sign up didn’t sit through the any of the content at all. I didn’t really expect anyone to, but I sorta hoped that I was going to see at least some student flow through from Udemy’s store front.
Nothing
I read a bunch of comments from threads that I could relate to on the private Instructor page on facebook that Udemy runs, and realised that self promotion is pretty much necessary to get courses off the ground.
I was part of about 20+ discord groups that all revolved around Ethereum games, I can’t remember why I joined half of them but it seemed like a really good place to start looking for potential students.
Before I went around posting links however; I wanted to develop some more detailed graphics to catch the attention of people. Because the Udemy course guidelines didn’t allow for text, I had to develop something else.
The first advert turned out to be not super successful overall, it did lead to some sales; however I have a feeling that most people only bought the course because of the text block I had accompanying the image.
Over the next 3 weeks I changed up my visual strategies and eventually began advertising on Reddit, which has been probably the most successful out of the major advertising platforms out there.
https://www.udemy.com/cryptodoggies
Month 2: Course: 2
The development of my second course The Complete Flutter and Firebase Developer Course went a lot better in terms of productivity. I don’t want to repeat myself, so I’ll summarise the key things I picked up during the production.
Co-instructor
I worked with a Co-instructor this time around which was really helpful for developing more content, and also having someone to proof read the things I was delivering was great.
Advertising
I went WAY too hard on advertising early on, I was only just breaking even because there are only two major courses that teach Flutter on Udemy at the moment. I was making most of the revenue from Affiliates and Udemy advertising.
After about a week I cut back to just Reddit ads.
Promotions
I wish I’d started promoting much earlier on in the courses life, after about a week and a half a I started giving out Free coupons to a couple facebook groups I was part of specifically focused on the subject matter I was teaching.
The feedback and responses I got from this were fantastic! A lot of positive vibes overall and heaps of constructive feedback.
Source Code
This time around I didn’t skimp on source code as course material. I provided code chunks for each individual video.
The students could download that lessons source code and pick up from anywhere in the course without having to go back through videos to find what they missed.
Unfortunately I have noticed that a good number of students don’t seem to use this resource nearly enough, and I still get a fair number of “This code isn’t working for me” Q/A’s where its a simple syntax issue where code hasn’t been copied in correctly.
Misc Resources
I spent HOURS making up supplementary materials for literally every video in the course. It allows people to follow up from the slide presentations and they help me when I’m teaching content to remember which parts come next
Scripts don’t work for me at all, and I’ve found the slide methods make the videos seem a lot more natural for me which the added benefit of being an excellent resource for my students.
YouTube Promotions
As part of our ongoing content, we produced part of our course for YouTube as well which allowed us to potentially draw in some interest for Flutter by targeting the main language it uses.
It’s still too early to say that its working, but at the very least it’s providing a service to the overall community!
Now What: Part 2
We’re still delivering content to the course in a steady manner, We’ve taken on a lot of feedback and the originally 4 section course is already nearly 7 seconds now; going from the original 4.5 hours to nearly 7.
We’d like to continue to improve as we go rather then making another one for other pieces of information, we’ll see how long we can add videos while still keeping the content logically ordered.