Online learning has so much potential to be vastly better than traditional in-person education. But, why do most courses miss the mark?

To Greg Róg it seems that most people are trying to create content instead of focusing on the actual action of teaching people. People make courses for themselves without consideration of who the audience is going to be. And, no thought seems to be put into the structure and design of the course itself.

The instructor must be engaged in not only teaching people, but in the design of their course experience. To Greg, that engagement is the key element that separates great courses from low-quality ones.

Greg also chats about his learning style that has enabled him to be able to consume and understand nearly 1000 pages of material in only two weeks, how he's designed his platform, and how learning style shifts as you gain more knowledge.

-Twitter - Greg Róg
-Learn UX

Testing out your content in some way before a full release can really improve the quality of your final product.

Matt D. Smith, better known around the internet as MDS, did a beta testing round before he released Shift Nudge. Learners still had to pay to access the beta, which resulted in a very invested group of testers. And, the course is hosted on Notion which gave learners the ability to leave feedback on content inline, and it was easy for Matt to make adjustments and even record new lessons.

Releasing Shift Nudge was different than the other products Matt has launched. It's more personal, and it can feel like the content is a reflection of you that people will judge. But, the best advice Matt has received about that is that as an educator you are not a grand knowledge holder, bestowing your knowledge upon people. Your job is to facilitate and guide people from the state of not knowing, to knowing.

Matt also discusses the lessons learned from the errors he made with offering a design feedback service to learners, and how the idea for Shift Nudge went from being a product design course to a visual design course.

-Twitter - MDS
-Website - MDS
-YouTube - MDS
-Shift Nudge

Creating a course about design has its own unique challenges.

Design is an art, but that doesn't mean it's not quantifiable. With some caveats of course, there are rules you can follow and techniques that you can use to produce designs that are going to look good. Kyle Gill aims to arm learners with these design principles so that they are able to identify what makes up good design and have the ability to produce their own.

Creating interactive examples is also an interesting challenge. In a course about design you probably shouldn't just throw your learners into code challenges, your audience might not just be developers! Kyle has created interactive design examples that animate from a bad design to an enhanced one.

Kyle also chats about the difficulties with measuring learner success, the criteria a good quality course, and the technology behind UI Foundations.

-Twitter - Kyle Gill
-Website - Kyle Gill
-UI Foundations