How to Write and Film Your Own Online Course

1. Intro: What if you could quit your nine to five and make a living by teaching online through platforms just like this one, that is more possible than ever before. Today, we're going to go through the entire process, from writing to filming, to publishing your course. Hi, my name is Zoe. I'm a cinematographer and professor of film. I've been shooting films for many years now. And the projects I've worked on have gone on to be shown at film festivals like Sundance and CaribbeanTales. I've created tons of online courses and have hosted a handful of them right here on Skillshare. What this course will teach you is how to successfully write for the camera, how to effectively teach online, and how to structure a syllabus to make the biggest impact on your students. By the end of this course, you'll know how to do all of this and more for yourself. Let's get started. 2. Class Project: Class project. The project for this class is to Write and Film Your Own Course. What's you'll need access to our three things. Somewhere to Write down your script. Like a computer with access to Google Docs, something to film your script with a camera and something to edit your course with, like a computer with a video editing software program. Most importantly, though, you'll need a topic on which to film 3. Example Lesson: In this lesson, you're going to learn what CSS is, how to Write it, and how to use it along HTML to style webpages. Now that you've got a good grasp on HTML, Let's level up our game and learn CSS. Css is a styling language that can't be used on its own. It requires HTML in order to work. Css enables all the pretty fonts, beautiful colors, and other non-standard design elements on our webpage, CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It is a Stylesheet Language used to describe the way in which HTML is presented to the user. Css can either be linked using an external sheet or written within the HTML document itself. Will explore both options throughout this course. Css is made up of selectors and rules. Selectors are indicators that tell the computer which elements to apply the desired styles to. The rules are those styles. Each CSS rule starts with at least one, but possibly more than one selector. These can select either a type of elements such as an H1, P or image, or a specific class of element, or the ID of a singular element. Both classes and IDs can be added to any HTML element and access by CSS. But where S class is can be added to multiple elements to carry across a consistent set of styles. Ids are meant to be unique to only one element. Depending on your goal, you may want to use one or the other or both. Class selectors are written in CSS by prepending the name of the class which you choose yourself with a dot. Ids are written in almost the same way, but instead of a dot, you use a hash or a number sign. As you can see, there are multiple ways to select an element using CSS, but how do you know whether or not your rule will be applied correctly? Css has two features that help with this cascade and specificity. As its name implies, the styles and CSS are applied it in a cascading manner. That means that the styles that are written at the top of the file are applied first. And then as you go down, the other styles are applied on top of that. In this case, if you've written two conflicting styles for the same element, the one that applies later in the CSS sheet will be the one that is applied. However, this can get a bit troublesome after awhile, especially if you don't know where you've nested this style. There is a way to override this. Let's take a look at another feature called specificity. Specificity allows us to override previously stated rules based on how specifically the element is selected. For instance, if all P tags reset to have the color red, but then we give a specific P tag, the class of special, and gave that class the rule of color blue, regardless of where that rule is stated in the document. So irrespective of the cascade that P tag would be forced to take on the color blue because classes are more specific than element selectors. The same is true for IDs. If we gave that same P tag, the ID of unique, and set the rule for that ID to be the color green. That P tag would then take on the color green. This is because IDs are the most specific of all three of our selector options. So it goes elements then classes than IDs, as you might have already picked up, CSS rules are written using a set of declarations that led me the use of properties and values. The property on the left side of the declaration is the stylistic feature that we want to modify with our rule. The value on the right side is a specific style choice we've made when we combine the property and the value, we get a CSS declaration. These declarations will live inside our CSS rule sets are rules and will then be applied to our HTML. As you can imagine, CSS has hundreds of different properties, but don't worry, you're not meant to memorize all of them. You can use sites like W3 schools, Mozilla Developer Docs, and Stack Overflow to look them up whenever you need them. Each property can also have many different types of values, which needs to be spelled correctly or written in the right order for them to work. So if you're ever unsure about the property or styling you're working with, it's best practice to just look up the documentation 4. Writing: Writing, the first thing you'll need to do is plan out your syllabus. Now, depending on the topic you've chosen, this could be a short course or a longer course. You'll want to make this decision at the beginning as it will impact the next steps are about to take. If you're doing a shorter course, say something under an hour, you'll just want to list the lessons in order in which it makes the most sense to teach them to your students. Think about what prerequisite knowledge they need at each stage and whether or not the previous lessons give that to them. If you're doing a longer course, on the other hand, you'll want to start by breaking your course into topics and assigning units dedicated towards each of those topics. This will help students understand the flow of a larger course much more easily. Once you have your units, the process is the same. Write down the individual lessons you anticipate needing for each unit. Once you have your syllabus, it's time to start writing. When you're writing your script, depending on what format you're using and how quickly you speak. Each page of writing could run roughly 1-2 min on Film. Go lesson by lesson from the beginning, making sure that you're covering everything the student needs to know in a given lesson before moving on. Each Lesson shouldn't do at least two things. Cover the content of the lesson. And then at the end, remind students what things you've gone over within that Lesson. This last step is crucial as it serves as a chance for you to bring back up the many new things they've been able to learn. Having this reminder at the end also provides students with a sense of accomplishment. So don't skip it 5. Staging: Staging. Once you've finished writing your course, you're in a great place. The writing is the hardest part. Now you want to think about the staging portion. Where are you going to set up your filming environment so that you can actually go ahead and record your entire project. Make sure it's somewhere that you can have access to for at least a few days as far as the setup goes. If it's a computer-based course, for example, you might wanna do all, or at least a portion of it's sitting at a desk regardless of how you choose to do your setup, make sure you decide and delegate wished portions of the script will be filmed. Where? Of course, I just filmed on how to become a front end web developer. I featured a combination of talks and tutorials. The talks I film in a more talking head style while the tutorials, I film that a desk while also recording my screen. This is a good point at which to start scheduling your shoot days. Be realistic about how many hours you can talk to the camera for each day. For some people, this number will be higher than for others. Personally, I find I can usually do a max of 3 h 6. Editing: Editing. Now that you finally finish your filming, you're ready to put everything together. You're in a great place. What you wanna do now is to start gathering your information together and separating the different clips you have based on the lessons and possibly units that you've outlined before. At this point, you want to start thinking about the visuals you want to add to your piece. Do you need to film additional B-roll? Do you need to get access to some stock footage which images would best help convey the subject that you're trying to share with your course. What onscreen texts should you include to emphasize certain points? Give yourself a few weeks to work on editing your footage. You want to make sure that you do all of your hard work justice 7. Publishing: Publishing, you've finished your edit. It's time to put your course out there for the world to see. If you're going to publish on Skillshare, you need to make sure that you export each of your lessons as individual files. That way, you can easily title and upload them to the platform. You'll also want to make sure that you're thinking about things that you can add to the tabs underneath the resources tab, for instance, are there different assets that you want to give your students access to? Which websites would they benefit from referring to as they work through your course? If you have anything like this to share with them, the resources tab is a great place for it. Next, you'll want to think about what you're writing in your description. This is a very important block of text because this is one of the first things that students are going to read. When they click on your course, you want to explain to them what the benefits of taking your course are and what things they're going to learn and take away from this course. Why should they take your course over anyone else's? Finally, you want to think about the title. Based on everything you've done, everything you've recorded, what is the most accurate and clear title that you can use for your course? Depending on what your subject is, it could be anything, but you want to keep it relatively concise, not too wordy, but use good language and clear keywords. Think about what a user who was looking to take your class would type into the search bar 8. Follow Up: Follow Up. And that's pretty much it. Once you've done the filming, editing, and publishing, your course is now out there for anyone to take. You can promote your class if you'd like, but those who are already on the platform will eventually make their way to you. Your job as the instructor is to respond to student feedback, encouraged them to post their projects and to send occasional reminders about your course and any upcoming courses you may post 9. Conclusion: We've covered a lot in this course on making courses. From how to write your script to your filming set up to the edit. I hope that some, if not all of this information was helpful for you. I'd love to see the courses that you make. So please postal into your courses in the projects tab underneath this course so that I can see all the hard work that you've done. I do read every comment at every review and look at every project submission. So if you do have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment in the review section below, or to reach out to me directly. Check out my profile page for more information about that. This course mostly focused on the logistics of making a course. But if you'd like to learn a lot more about the lighting and camera techniques that you could incorporate into your filming. Check out my profile as well to see all of the different videos that I have. I have videos on camera techniques, choosing the right lens, how to Write a Script and much, much more. I'll see you in the next one.