Starting sometime in 2003, I embarked on my training career as a freelance Microsoft Certified Trainer for companies big and small across the country. During that time, I taught classes in C#, Visual Basic .NET, ASP .NET, and SQL Server to name a few. After enjoying this great experience for a few years, I decided to quit travelling and work on a solution that would put the best learning material in front of a wider range of students at a much lower cost ($1,500 in person versus $125 online) – and thus, my website C# Classes was born.
I launched a site that offers online an online C# tutorial using text, hours of video, labs, and online quizzes to enhance the learning experience. After spending countless hours putting the material together, I figured that it would be a good idea for me to share the resources that I used to create the content so anyone can create their own online course in software, hardware, cooking, carpentry, etc.
The first step is to understand your audience. Who are you creating this for? What’s their age range? What’s their level of experience? What about their economic status? Once you understand your audience, you can build out the public facing web site to market your content and even take early signups via PayPal while you work on building the content.
To create the content always start with an outline first. This was easy for me since I was able to test and tweak my outline in front of actual students in a classroom. Make sure the outline is as detailed as possible and put yourself in the students’ shoes and ask yourself if the transitions from one chapter to the next would make sense if you had no experience.
Once your outline is complete, write all of the necessary content for your tutorial. I originally used Moodle and then shifted to WordPress since I found it was easier to use and modify. There are also a lot more plugins for WordPress than Moodle which makes adding new features a breeze. Speaking of plugins, I used the Membership, Affiliate, and Payment plugins from WPMU which have been pretty good thus far. They handle the ability for user roles, affiliate tracking, and payment processing through PayPal for new students, respectively. I also found a plugin in the WordPress gallery to create online quizzes.
Once the content was written, I then used Camtasia to record my instructional videos. I edited each one to remove background noises and those split seconds when it recorded me taking a deep breath between sentences. Once the videos were created, I hosted them on Vzaar and dropped them into my content.
Creating your own content is just a matter of following this is step-by-step guide. All you have to do is find something you’re passionate about and eager to share with the world.
