Today I published my first Udemy training and officially became Udemy instructor. It may be my last training. This largely depends on the audience, as I’m not sure how well I can handle failure 🙂
Jokes aside, while working on the materials, I had numerous thoughts about course creation which I’ve decided to compile for myself and for others who wish to embark on a similar task.
I’ll share six crucial insights from my journey, including the real investment of time and effort, the unexpected personal growth opportunities, and the creative and technical challenges of creating online course. Whether you’re considering creating your own Udemy course or are curious about the process, these lessons learned could shed some light on what to expect.
Motivators
I initially thought of creating a course for passive income, but realised that the effort required is substantial. For the 70 minutes of training, I invested nearly 100 hours.
The training may not sell, I can’t know that up front. So I think I could eventually spend that time analysing some chosen company and investing in their stocks.
So, why did I persist in creating this training? I will start with mentioning that I have done the training with technical knowledge I have gained just in 2023 and it’s really fresh.
I discovered several personal growth opportunities during this process, including improving my voice and camera presence, enhancing my English diction and phrasing, and deepening my understanding of the subject matter.
I exercised my memory for the parts I recorded with myself on the video. I had fun doing it, I was making faces at the moments when it got too serious 🙂 I think those are the key points that kept me going in times of doubts.
Resources
Udemy has created a training ‘How to Create Online Course’ which is an excellent introduction to what you need to consider before you even kick off the process.
My concerns were about the microphone as voice quality is something that can influence greatly your training quality. I decided to purchase an affordable microphone for $40 and that worked perfectly for me. On the video you cannot miss the microphone pinned to my blouse 😃
I also used MacBook camera for the recordings. Interestingly, I used an ironing board as a makeshift stand for face recording.
Besides hardware, Udemy training lists many useful points on lengths of the videos, language, delivery of the training, accessibility, fonts, and quality of the videos.
Check that up before recordings. You can upload test recordings and Udemy is happy to verify the recordings meet their standards.
Mundane Tasks Over & Over Again
You will like some of the tasks and hate the others.
While I have learnt to semi-like watching myself on videos and listening to my voice, making the video watchable was a challenge.
Editing videos and audio was repetitive and less enjoyable. Tasks like removing background noise in Audacity required a multi-step process that could have been simplified with batch processing.
When uploading videos to Udemy, the bulk upload option was switched off, so I had to upload videos one by one. For each of the videos I set title and I also fill a description.
Getting exhausted
Many steps of the training creation must be repeated tens of times. Recording videos was the most exhausting part. It demanded from me constant focus and energy, with many takes needed to achieve satisfactory results.
Some of the lessons I recorded were interesting for me, some of them were not. I am wondering how that translated to the quality of the lesson.
You Are Executor and Judge
If you can share the effort of creating training, you are lucky! When creating a course solo, you’re both the creator and critic. Striving for perfection can be overwhelming.
In many cases you will face a choice between repeating the same over again or accepting that the material does not always have to be perfect. For the training I had created 5 chapters and 50 videos, including the promotional one.
I also created cheat sheet and a document with explanations of code we executed during the training. I also did some summary slides that were part of the recording. And also Udemy requires form you to create landing page elements I have completed at the very end of course creation.Â
If I had to be 100% sure of the quality before publishing, this course would never see a day light.
This is a space to get creative, so be creative!
And I don’t mean just getting creative in creating materials.
Sometimes I had to find ways on how to keep the momentum and push forward with the work.
So I was rotating the parts of the tasks. I started polishing earlier recordings, and by the time I got to the last recordings, I had uploaded earlier videos to Udemy.
Because of that I got a perception of the progress 🙂
I also spent time to create visually pleasant documentation. I always liked when something looks & feels good and so I spent as much time on the content as I did on the presentation.
For my promotional video which I recorded in chunks, I had introduced transitions to cover the fact that I change position between videos. It was 1 minute video which I recorded in 4 parts as I this was the day I could not remember long text for too long 😛
Summary
I actually thought that I can create something like that in a weekend. Instead it took weeks! I can consider myself a master if with my fifth course, I could do it in a weekend.Â
I keep my fingers crossed for those of you who want to attempt course creation. It’s brave move that may pay off in many forms.Â
I think the lessons taken won’t be forgotten for long. Especially if the need to do a training comes from within you and you put your pride and vulnerability on the display.
I wish you all the best. If you want to share with me your thoughts or stories, don’t hesitate to reach out!
And of course, if you’d be interested into my training you can find right here -> Introduction to Neo4j with Python, LangChain & OpenAI
It’s a technical journey on the subject of using ‘Neo4j with Python, LangChain & OpenAI’. My path crossed with Neo4j not far ago, and I described it in my other blog post Neo4j Professional Certificate
I already know what my next course will be about as I have some teaching insights I want to share with you 🙂
Best,
Ali
