Lessons learned building courses

Because I have experiment with many online course hosting platforms now, and had to keep multiple platforms in sync at the same time. I'm going to summarise some lessons learned about building your courses to help.

But let me tell you my old approach, my 'don't do this' approach:

• Plan your course on the course hosting platform - build the course outline, and add descriptions, and build your course around the features of that platform
• Organise your videos on disk in an adhoc, topic based hierarchy, and map it on to the course platform.
• Exported videos take space, so rely on the hosting platform as your video backup, rather than keep a local copy, after all, you've uploaded it now. Job done.
• If you do move to another platform, rely on their 'automated migration' to do the job for you.

The above is what you do, when you are learning. You are focused on pumping the course out there, and you are building the course dynamically as you go.

I don't do this any more.

This is what I do now.

Organise your disk better

I use the following folder structures

• \camtasia
• course_name
• 010_section_name
• 010_lecture_name
• 020_lecture_name
• 020_section_name
• etc.
• \archive
• video_exports
• course_name
• etc.

Numbering in 010 allows up to 99 sections, or lecture, but also allows me to add new sections or courses in the middle if I want to insert new sections or lectures without having to renumber anything.

At some point I may do away altogether with the numbers and rely on a meta data system, but I don't do that yet, and this is simple.

I create and edit in the \camtasia hierarchy, and export the videos that I upload to the \archive

Create a meta data file

I now have a course_name_meta_data_file.txt for each course.

e.g.

# Course - Course Name

The course description and blurb

## Section - Section Name

A section description

### Lecture - Lecture Name

description of lecture and other details

This lists the sections, in order, and the lectures in order. The description has 

• The location of the source file for the lecture (i.e the camtasia file) and the export location.
• The text description to copy and paste into the online hosting system
• Details of any attachment files and their location

The meta data file, is essentially my course.

I don't rely on the hosting vendor to 'manage' and 'plan' my course. I do it using the meta data file.

And if you are worried that a text file like that would become unreadable, then it is written in markdown, and you can 'pretty print' it other tools. I use the free online tool dillinger.io

Paste the above markdown into dillinger.io and see what you get.

Organisation takes effort

All of this takes additional effort, but since you are doing it as you go along, it doesn't seem as bad.

Trust me, retrofitting this process on to a 150 lecture course, is hard work.

But when you start, you don't know to do this. You just crack on and do the work.

This has the benefit that:

• When I want to migrate to a new platform, I just work through the file, creating the sections and lectures and uploading and attaching the correct files.
• When I add new lectures, I can add them to the meta data file first, and write the copy and plan that I want for the lecture.
• I can version control the meta data file and see what changes I made when.
• I can re-organise the course without impacting the file system if I want to.

Anyway - that's what I do, at the moment. I'm sure I'll learn new approaches going forward.

And for the technically minded among you, you could:

• convert your meta data file into a leanpub book and sell it as an ebook or give it to students
• convert the lecture descriptions into blog posts using dillinger.io
• generate the meta data file from a mindmap, or track it all in a mind map if you wanted
• do many more things that no hosting company is designed to do