Creating course for Online teaching

I think I have an idea that may be worth selling. So I need to develop a course around it .

I’ve decided to use Notion to write up the structure of the course and am considering looking to use Udemy to host the course.

The course was submitted to Udemy for review & approval on 2 January 2022 on Udemy, named Revit Productivity, Automating the Tedious Stuff.

Fingers crossed it gets approved and some people may take it.I need to start generating some income as the bills go up.

Course structure

Need to clearly define the problem and what your solution is to that pain point. Show how you can overcome the barriers to make their life easier.

Important to start with quality presentation/course at the beginning. If poor you get bad reviews and they stay with you, best to do high end at the beginning. Lots of other Revit courses out there , average monthly income about $50, but can push up scale if you are good. So worth having a good shot at it.

Explain what you are doing at the beginning and give conclusion at the end of each segment for structure so that its clear what learning has been achieved.

I’m going to record the course in piece, aiming a about 15 minutes per lecture, someone had suggested a good timeframe for people to watch in break times.

I’ve to purchase a mike if I intend to use Udemy as the sound quality is important on Udemy and that is more important than video.

I did the intro video and it was a bit boring- I need some other features to make the process look a bit more interesting and to give it a bit of a pop. I need to add more features.

Save resources to GitHub

First iteration – doing the course outline and setup on my own

I did a first set of videos, just to scope out the content and did the videos with lots of ramblings. Just to assess content and duration, I used Notion to gather and order information and Google Slides to write the lecture bullet points.

I also reviewed Udemy videos on YouTube for how to do it and some not so positive reviews about Udemy on there. But I got the gist of it and started an Instructor page and mainly focused on the content setup as I had to restructure my notes.

I also realised that I had to buy a new microphone as sound quality was important. I looked at the approved microphones and saw that the cheapest was about $110. So I decided to wait for the Boxing day sales and just do a preliminary record on the videos to re-set the structure of the content to fit in with Udemy curriculum theme

Udemy Setup

I decided to follow their format and was writing the main content part and doing videos to demonstrate the lessons and used their format. I only read the minimal of their proposed way of doing things and agreement and also, after I purchased the microphone sent in a 3 minute test for them to review for sound quality

I then proceeded with the new format, initially copy/pasting info that I’d written to GDocs and then to the lecture plan. It is easy to re-order the lessons and once I understood the structure this rationalised the course and I was able to focus more on each individual video.

I thought that you had to have a written lecture and the vid was a resource attachment but in fact you can make the lecture a video, so I had to delete the videos as resources and add them as lectures at the front.

All well apart from initial lecture was open to view so they saw enough to be able to do the things without taking the course, so I had to redo that video.

Paypal would not open to let me register so I went for the other alternative payteer or something. I’ll give it a crack and see how that goes.

I then had to verify who I was and had to submit drivers license to ID myself. That was verified and I got an email saying I could submit my course for review. I did that on 2nd Jan.

On uploading the course for review I saw that they had auto-created captions so I went through and reviewed the first video captions to edit/correct it. They did a pretty good job. I’ll review/edit the others over the coming days.

End comment

Its taken a lot of my time to get this up and running and I hope it goes live soon, I’m interested to see if there will be much uptake.

Course approved on 5th January & has gone Live. Hurray Hurray.

Apparently pretty slow for the first few months.

Also you don’t get paid for about 3 months as people sometimes withdraw from courses.

I didn’t tick business or other advertising at this point and I priced it at the highest tier of $199. Apparently you can adjust this later if no response. So start high and drop later.

I’ve an idea for a 2nd course, on making and selling your own scripts. I’ll think about that for a while, focus on Karl & Zoe’s work and then do that. It will be less popular but something that may get a bit of an uptake if people do the first course.

I’m estimating maybe 7 people do the course in 3 months and 3 will ask for refund. So estimated earnings 800 less people taking stuff off so about $500 earnings at end of March. Lets see if the prediction holds true.