Questions for coding course creators
Hi indiehackers,
I know there are people among you who created coding courses.
How did you do it? Using some LMS or on your own?
How much time did it take?
Were you able to generate profit?
Thanks!
Hi indiehackers,
I know there are people among you who created coding courses.
How did you do it? Using some LMS or on your own?
How much time did it take?
Were you able to generate profit?
Thanks!
I've created a few courses on Alexa Skill Development. I mainly did it to figure out if I want to do it long term.
I used Udemy, but there are other platforms. Creating your own will take time, which might be better spent focusing on course material and technique.
It takes a lot of time. You need to create at least 1 course before you get your proper flow. One of my courses has over 8 hours of lectures.
It is hard. Basically you realize how much research and hands-on work you need to do once you start building. Even if you feel like you know the subject well enough to teach it, it will still feel difficult due to the logistics of creating a course.
You need Quantity + Quality to make any real money, especially on Udemy. Unfortunately, Udemy highlights instructors who have the most students and ratings. So, if you are first on a subject (think A Cloud Gurur) you will have massive success (assuming your course is in-demand and decent quality).
Matt
Hi Matt,
thank you very much for your insights!
I wonder, though, why your choice was the video lectures - instead, say, combination of short videos, text, pictures, and code blocks?
And the second question is: how do you communicate with your students? I took some courses on Udemy but I don't remember if it was possible to ask the teacher questions (if I don't remember, I'm pretty sure it was impossible).
I also wonder how you "dared" to create "one another course" if there are so many courses on each topic/language/technology around?
Finally, the last question is: if you'd have a possibility to create an interactive course, would you still prefer to record videos?
Thanks a lot in advance!
Video is the standard for courses. Within the videos, I do write code, show demos, and interactive PP slides.
All communication is done via Udemy's platform. You can give feedback on assignments and contact any one of your students. You can also send mass emails (promotional and educational) to all students enrolled in a particular course. That becomes useful when you exceed a couple thousand students.
There's always going to be a similar course out there. I try not to get discouraged by similar courses with thousands of students. There are several instructors who have hundreds of thousands of students because they teach on a broad subject (e.g. Learn Angular from Scratch). If you preview their courses, you realize how basic they are. One top instructor teaches everything from Angular to AWS. I looked at a preview of his AWS course, and he did everything in the AWS Console. So, what happens when AWS changes the design of the console (which they do frequently)? Also, teaching AWS purely via the console is a red flag that the instructor does not actually work in AWS everyday. So, that is how I differentiate. I go for slightly more advanced topics. So instead of "Learn Angular from Scratch", I might do a course on "Accelerated Angular for Beginners" (trademarked so don't steal it :-))
I think I would always consider videos. I used a software called Adobe Captivate a while back, but it was very expensive and the output was not great. I like the idea of interactive courses, but it would need to be a killer platform to compete with Udemy, which has coding exercises, handouts, quizzes, etc. With Udemy, you can really build your course however you want, but there is no dynamic interaction.
Hope that helps.
Btw, what wrong was with Adobe Captivate?
It was OK, but you had to create the interactive material, then export. It might be better now, but I used it many years ago. Also, it was cost prohibitive.
Thanks!
Thank you so much!
Haha no worries :-))
Thanks again, your response was really helpful!
No problem!
Where
First time round: Udemy, then teachable, then I built my own (which you can use too).
My two courses are both ~8 hours long, on the topic of ML engineering.
How Long it Took
The first one took me 2 months working on it part-time (evenings/weekends) - but with quite a bit of beast mode thrown in.
The second took me about 5 months, also part-time but a more relaxed pace. It was also a very advanced course so I had to do a lot of research and testing.
Profit
Yep, put the deposit down on an apartment last year with course profits.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I wonder what was the worst/hardest thing when you created your own course?
There's a weird stretch when you're about 40% done where you start to question everything:
This is by far the worst for the first course. Second time round was much easier, but still had some because I went for a more niche + advanced topic. You can offset these with presales. That's what I'll do next time.
Yeah, this sounds familiar... it actually happened to me too, many times.
I wonder, though, why you decided to create your own service for creating courses? Have you found Udemy and Teachable bad fit or there was another reason?
With Udemy I really don't like the 50% cut they take, the lack of control over pricing and lack of access to the student emails. With teachable, I wanted something which suited technical course authors more. For example, next week I'm releasing interactive coding exercises in CourseMaker.
Thanks! It's really interesting insights. I didn't know that Udemy don't give you your students emails...