Now just my personal opinion, as a student and as a person who has been working in this industry for a year.
I like one schema on online courses and I noticed, that it works quite well and attracted 25 000$ for some really cheap content (I believe it took ~1 week to 1 month, the guy just shared his SQL-notes). So, I believe, it's possible to compete and earn quite much. So, I would say, that:
1. Courses should be shareable. Means, damn cheap. If there's a good course โ my friends would send me a link. If it's cheap โ I'll buy. In no way I'm going to buy courses for 150$/month for 1500$ in total. If it's something for 5-10$ and it takes ~3-14 days to finish them โ I'll pay and find some time, because my friend recommended me them. So, I believe, _it's important to make courses cheap, without bells and whistles).
2. Stepik offers a cool feature you can gift a course to someone. For instance, on New Year, I got a course as a present, lol. It was super nice.
3. If videos are expensive โ I would not do them. On Stepik some courses do not have videos and it doesn't make them any worse (in terms of income as well). It's PITA to rerecord video, look for the same teachers and make the new insertion/edit smooth. It is SO EASIER to fix the text and so hard to rerecord video. Good course constantly takes students' feedback into account. No feedback = no progress. It means, that you need constantly edit videos or text. The last option is a way cheaper.
4. IMHO, good course = good problems/tasks, pics/animations in the explanation + good support. Good courses โ is just a structured web-pages behind the paywall. It's like a book, but not downloadable, so it's harder to pirate it. It also provides nice feedback for course owners and community students. So it's like an interactive book with communities and support. People pay not for the content itself (the Internet is huge), but for a certificate/proof, a good material structure, good community and good support.
5. Good courses have their auditory and niche. Not like, 'SQL for beginners' and 'Advanced SQL'. There're already many of them. But something like, 'SQL window functions'.
So if I had to start a new online course, I would try to do it this way:
1. I would try to find some _niche_ first clusterised existing courses and looked for the demand. Where there are many courses, I'd try to make a cheap small course with some specific topic, like:
a. Perfecting your Spanish phonetics (for Italians).
b. sql window functions
c. monetizing ChatGPT integration
d. 2 weeks of express Spanish for those who's going to Latin America, but will need to promote them on some other platforms, since, I believe, people who are going for a trip soon may be busy with something else but Udemy).
2. As cheap and nice as possible
a. avoided talking heads videos, for example.
b. But focused more on animated/rich content. If it's language course, then, it would be nice to make short/cheap records of voice sounds of a native speaker, for instance. Prob, short videos of mouth/articulation.
c. Automated support more automated checkers, more peer-reviewed tasks, more feedback.
d. Interactive more problems, more solutions, more communication.
e. I would outsource/delegate:
i. asked a professional to make a great table of content
ii. then, outsourced different chapters to different people.
iii. Then, content managers would need to edit it and merge nicely.
iv. I would probably use existing content, but rewritten by a freelancer. As I said โ courses about structure of material + community/support. The content itself is already in the Internet.
3. Listen to students feedback
a. choose platforms that allow you to do that stepik & coursera. I dunno about udemy.
b. again, text instead of videos for easier taking feedback into account.
c. Moderate community students like to share solutions in comments. So someone has to clean it periodically.
Frontpage
๐ Dark mode
โค๏ธ Your favorites
๐ Nomad insurance
