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

When you first start your business, the biggest initial hurdle is choosing where your content is going to be hosted.

If you start building a custom platform from the beginning, it may be months before you ship a single course. And if you have a deadline and need to start making a profit this might not be the way to go.

Making the decision to use an existing platform might be tough. Chances are it doesn't do exactly what you want it to. But, you are able to entirely focus on producing your content. And, you can always build something for yourself in the future. Tyler McGinnis went this route and it has really worked out for them!

Tyler also chats about compensating employees as a small bootstrapped startup, keeping the core value that they're an education business first and not a software shop, and how they've leaned into their niche and specialized their content.

• Twitter - Tyler McGinnis
• Bytes.dev
• UI.dev

Running a course platform that not only contains your content, but also the courses of several other third-party creators is an entirely different job than that of the independent creator.

Scott Tolinski, creator of Level Up tutorials has had to learn a lot of lessons as he grew his business and started bringing on guests instructors. The amount of coordination and planning required was a lot. But, they decided to hire a developer who did an amazing job setting up systems that made the flow of connecting with content creators much more manageable.

A small team of people also work on Level Up and Scott has had to really learn management skills. Being able to have people take on some of the workload is a huge help and has allowed Scott to be able to focus on the work that he wants to do more of.

Scott also chats more about what went into building the Level Up Tutorials platform, the essential features of a good course, and how he designs good project examples.

• Website - Scott Tolinski
• Twitter - Scott Tolinksi
• Level Up Tutorials
• Syntax.fm

Making your courses engaging is always the goal, but it's something that's easier said than done. But, Josh Comeau has several strategies that he uses to ensure that his content is as engaging to learners as possible.

There's the element of active practice. A learner shouldn't be able to go through 100% of a course's content on their phone. Exercises are a great way to get the learner involved. By giving the learner a chance to struggle with something you give them an opportunity to think about what they learned deeper, and potentially reach a lightbulb moment.

Another technique Josh uses is to make his content multimodal, which is a fancy term for using multiple mediums. His lessons will have both written and video content so that learners switch gears and learn in different ways.

Josh also discusses how it took him much longer than expected to build his custom platform, how he designs his courses with expanding bullet outlines, the maintenance he's done on his course, and how the strength of his following helped him launch the CSS for JS successfully.

• Twitter - Josh W. Comeau
• Website - Josh W. Comeau
• CSS for JavaScript Developers

Once you've got an idea for a course or some other kind of educational product, there are a number of steps you can take to make sure that it's a good idea and to refine the instructional design before you spend the time recording.

Chris Biscardi uses multiple mediums to try out new ideas. A great starting point is Twitch since the format isn't expected to be as refined and there's more interaction between you and the viewers.

Next you might consider recording a YouTube video or writing up a blog post. These are more refined but nearly the same level of commitment as a course. You'll also be able to gauge interest based on how people react to it.

Not only will you be able to gauge interest, you'll also be to use the questions and feedback you might get to adjust the design of the course.

Chris also discusses creating good example projects, course maintenance, thinking about your content as various streams, and how he deals with people finding ways to access his paid content for free.

• Parti Corgi Discord
• Website - Chris Biscardi
• Twitter - Chris Biscardi
• YouTube - Chris Biscardi
• Rust Adventure

If your main interest is to actually get straight into producing content and start selling it, you probably don't want to jump into developing a custom platform.

Mark Shust has seen many people get into building there own platforms and have all their time sucked into getting it running, when they could've been delivering a course.

It can take much longer than you might expect. Over a year even depending on if you are working full-time or not. There's a ton of things that you'll have to deal with yourself such as payments, refunds, subscriptions, upgrades, authentication, streaming video, and more.

Mark also chats about how he designs his courses by reverse-engineering projects, tax compliance, and how to look beyond what people are saying and figure out what they're needing.

• Twitter - Mark Shust
• Website - Mark Shust
• M.academy