The experience of creating a course on Android development on Udemy
Some of the December holidays, in the absence of any more interesting lesson, I mired in front of a laptop screen. I don’t remember exactly how I found myself on the Udemy website, but the first thing that caught my eye was the “Become an Instructor” button. I knew about the existence of online courses firsthand, but all the courses that I took were created in collaboration with universities or large companies. I heard about Udemy and even visited the site, but I never understood the details and did not know that this platform provides an opportunity to create your own online course. I began to study the platform, watched which courses were in demand and multiplied the cost of courses by the number of subscribing students, gauging the instructor's possible revenues, and immediately set about trying to create my own course. As soon as I decided how much I would spend untold riches, I set to work. And now, a month after the publication of the course, I want to share with you my experience of creating and promoting a course on Udemy.
Much of the courses at Udemy are in English. Courses in other languages do not use special demand, especially paid. The need to create a course in English greatly complicated my task. Even though I have been living in the UK for the last year and a half, my English is far from Shakespeare. I was reassured by the fact that quite a few popular courses with high ratings were recorded by people with an even more terrible accent and pronunciation than me. And really, in vain worried.
I chose the topic fairly quickly. It was decided to start from the very basics and make a course for novice developers or students who already have an idea about Java and OOP, and want to start developing Android applications. Having studied the platform a bit, I derived several rules that I tried to follow when creating the course:
- Course duration 1-2 hours. This is the optimal course duration for Udemy.
- Attractive title. As you know, people want to get everything at once, so courses with names like “Make your Instagram”, “VR app for an hour” are in demand.
- Sequence. Personally for me, when learning something new, the most important question is: “What is there to start with?”. A variety of terms, frameworks and patterns can easily scare away a neophyte. It’s one thing if you are an experienced developer who has traveled all the way from Pascal to ReactJS, and another thing is a student or Junior Developer who has barely learned to distinguish an interface from an abstract class. Such a risk is immediately lost in all these activity, the fragment, the fragment, the view, the layout, the content provider, the context et cetera et cetera. Knowledge should be presented consistently and with examples.
- Do not complicate. Android development has changed a lot over the past few years, fragments, compatibility library, design support library and a bunch of popular frameworks have appeared. But during the first hour of training and to create the first application, it is not necessary to know all these things in detail.
- Practice. Just to retell what is written in the guide to the Android development does not represent much value. More than this, it is boring. I immediately decided that the goal of the course should be to create an Android application that can be downloaded to Google Play.
- From the very beginning, developers should be taught to keep the code clean and tidy: observe naming conventions, make strings in strings.xml, and size of fonts and indents in dimens.xml.
I decided to start by creating an application and, building on this application, build the whole course. The application should not be too complicated. I didn’t invent anything original, and in a couple of evenings I bungled a simple notebook to which you can add notes, view them and delete them. I did not intentionally edit the entries, but a week after the publication of the course I downloaded the code where this function was implemented on github. Especially for those who are too lazy to implement it yourself, but want to have a ready application.
')
The application was ready, and I began to figure out how to break its development into lectures for 2-5 minutes. In addition to developing the application itself, a bit of theory was planned. For example, a small overview of the life cycle of an Activity or various types of markup. I sketched a small plan, created several auxiliary slides, armed myself with QuickTime Player to record what was happening on the screen and with a cheap microphone, and decided it was time to start.
I will say right away that I had no such experience, so I began to experiment. The process was much more laborious than I expected. At first I wrote the text, then I tried to read it from the phone in the course of my actions. I constantly stumbled and stammered, re-recorded one lecture five times, until I realized that this would not go further. I realized that I had to record audio, and only then record the screen separately, and then glue the audio from the video. So it went a little faster. Especially since I had a free week, which I devoted completely to this business. I was able to record about 3-4 videos per day.
I signed up for Udemy as an instructor and began designing the course page. Registration is extremely simple. Next, I came up with a name, a description containing the keywords to search for, and uploaded an image. If you do not have your own image, designers from Udemy can prepare it for you. And completely free. This is the option I used. Just a couple of days I was sent a quite decent picture. I changed the name several times, including after the publication of the course. The course is now called Android Development for Beginners: Your first app in 2 hours. Perhaps, and leave him. I also chose the price of $ 115. Do not be surprised, because the initial price of the course on Udemy has almost no value because of the specific sales model based on huge discounts. I will write about this separately. I gradually published lectures, added resources to them, and when everything was ready, I pressed the cherished “Publish” button.
The test course did not pass on one point - the sound quality. I recorded the sound on cheap headphones with a microphone and did not process it at all, so in all the videos there was a gray noise in the background. I had to skip all the videos through iMovie, noting “reduce background noise”, and re-fill them. A couple of days later, the course was confirmed and it became publicly available on Udemy.
Udemy lives at the expense of huge discounts. Most often it does not matter what price you put, because Udemy is selling absolutely all courses for $ 10 - $ 15 daily. They constantly send emails to users and try to sell your course for everyone at a discount of 70% -90%. In the end, more than this price for the course on Udemy, few pay.
The instructor's share depends heavily on how the course was sold. If a person bought a course by going to your direct link, the instructor will receive 97%; if a person has found a course on the Udemy website, the instructor will receive 50%; if he got into an advertising course from Udemy or through affiliate, the instructor will receive 25%. More information about the distribution of shares can be found here .
Udemy allows you to create discount coupons for your course. The minimum course price is $ 10, it is also possible to create a coupon with a 100% discount. A course with a large number of students and a better rating will be located higher in the list of courses and can go to the first page of the site, and such a course causes more confidence among people who are willing to pay money. I created 9999 free coupons and started sending them to sites that publish coupons for Udemy, Reddit and Facebook groups. The best effect was given by Facebook. For 3 days I received 1000 new students, for the fourth day I received another 1000 students. Free coupons from Facebook are leaked to the forums and published on various sites dedicated to Udemy. In general, people were interested in my course, which could not but rejoice. I figured that 2,000 students would be enough for the beginning and I deactivated the free coupon. In addition, I created discount coupons that offered a course for $ 10 and scattered them in groups. This had almost no effect, but sales were slowly going. For the most part, sales were organic. The students themselves found the course, wandering around Udemy, and bought it for $ 10 - $ 15, of which I received half. Part of the sales came from advertising companies Udemy and through affiliate.
Udemy provides the opportunity to request a refund within 30 days. This function is rarely used, but still sometimes used.
Almost a month after the publication of the course, I earned about $ 100. Most of the sales are organic, right behind them are sales from advertising companies Udemy.
Creating a course turned out to be more laborious and time consuming than I imagined. Especially considering the fact that I went along a simpler path and managed only to capture what was happening on the screen. The course itself can be found here .
If you are interested in the course, feel free to contact me and I will share with a free coupon.
Tongue
Much of the courses at Udemy are in English. Courses in other languages do not use special demand, especially paid. The need to create a course in English greatly complicated my task. Even though I have been living in the UK for the last year and a half, my English is far from Shakespeare. I was reassured by the fact that quite a few popular courses with high ratings were recorded by people with an even more terrible accent and pronunciation than me. And really, in vain worried.
Course topic and format
I chose the topic fairly quickly. It was decided to start from the very basics and make a course for novice developers or students who already have an idea about Java and OOP, and want to start developing Android applications. Having studied the platform a bit, I derived several rules that I tried to follow when creating the course:
- Course duration 1-2 hours. This is the optimal course duration for Udemy.
- Attractive title. As you know, people want to get everything at once, so courses with names like “Make your Instagram”, “VR app for an hour” are in demand.
- Sequence. Personally for me, when learning something new, the most important question is: “What is there to start with?”. A variety of terms, frameworks and patterns can easily scare away a neophyte. It’s one thing if you are an experienced developer who has traveled all the way from Pascal to ReactJS, and another thing is a student or Junior Developer who has barely learned to distinguish an interface from an abstract class. Such a risk is immediately lost in all these activity, the fragment, the fragment, the view, the layout, the content provider, the context et cetera et cetera. Knowledge should be presented consistently and with examples.
- Do not complicate. Android development has changed a lot over the past few years, fragments, compatibility library, design support library and a bunch of popular frameworks have appeared. But during the first hour of training and to create the first application, it is not necessary to know all these things in detail.
- Practice. Just to retell what is written in the guide to the Android development does not represent much value. More than this, it is boring. I immediately decided that the goal of the course should be to create an Android application that can be downloaded to Google Play.
- From the very beginning, developers should be taught to keep the code clean and tidy: observe naming conventions, make strings in strings.xml, and size of fonts and indents in dimens.xml.
Preparation of materials
I decided to start by creating an application and, building on this application, build the whole course. The application should not be too complicated. I didn’t invent anything original, and in a couple of evenings I bungled a simple notebook to which you can add notes, view them and delete them. I did not intentionally edit the entries, but a week after the publication of the course I downloaded the code where this function was implemented on github. Especially for those who are too lazy to implement it yourself, but want to have a ready application.
')
The application was ready, and I began to figure out how to break its development into lectures for 2-5 minutes. In addition to developing the application itself, a bit of theory was planned. For example, a small overview of the life cycle of an Activity or various types of markup. I sketched a small plan, created several auxiliary slides, armed myself with QuickTime Player to record what was happening on the screen and with a cheap microphone, and decided it was time to start.
I will say right away that I had no such experience, so I began to experiment. The process was much more laborious than I expected. At first I wrote the text, then I tried to read it from the phone in the course of my actions. I constantly stumbled and stammered, re-recorded one lecture five times, until I realized that this would not go further. I realized that I had to record audio, and only then record the screen separately, and then glue the audio from the video. So it went a little faster. Especially since I had a free week, which I devoted completely to this business. I was able to record about 3-4 videos per day.
Course publication
I signed up for Udemy as an instructor and began designing the course page. Registration is extremely simple. Next, I came up with a name, a description containing the keywords to search for, and uploaded an image. If you do not have your own image, designers from Udemy can prepare it for you. And completely free. This is the option I used. Just a couple of days I was sent a quite decent picture. I changed the name several times, including after the publication of the course. The course is now called Android Development for Beginners: Your first app in 2 hours. Perhaps, and leave him. I also chose the price of $ 115. Do not be surprised, because the initial price of the course on Udemy has almost no value because of the specific sales model based on huge discounts. I will write about this separately. I gradually published lectures, added resources to them, and when everything was ready, I pressed the cherished “Publish” button.
The test course did not pass on one point - the sound quality. I recorded the sound on cheap headphones with a microphone and did not process it at all, so in all the videos there was a gray noise in the background. I had to skip all the videos through iMovie, noting “reduce background noise”, and re-fill them. A couple of days later, the course was confirmed and it became publicly available on Udemy.
Promotion
Udemy lives at the expense of huge discounts. Most often it does not matter what price you put, because Udemy is selling absolutely all courses for $ 10 - $ 15 daily. They constantly send emails to users and try to sell your course for everyone at a discount of 70% -90%. In the end, more than this price for the course on Udemy, few pay.
The instructor's share depends heavily on how the course was sold. If a person bought a course by going to your direct link, the instructor will receive 97%; if a person has found a course on the Udemy website, the instructor will receive 50%; if he got into an advertising course from Udemy or through affiliate, the instructor will receive 25%. More information about the distribution of shares can be found here .
Udemy allows you to create discount coupons for your course. The minimum course price is $ 10, it is also possible to create a coupon with a 100% discount. A course with a large number of students and a better rating will be located higher in the list of courses and can go to the first page of the site, and such a course causes more confidence among people who are willing to pay money. I created 9999 free coupons and started sending them to sites that publish coupons for Udemy, Reddit and Facebook groups. The best effect was given by Facebook. For 3 days I received 1000 new students, for the fourth day I received another 1000 students. Free coupons from Facebook are leaked to the forums and published on various sites dedicated to Udemy. In general, people were interested in my course, which could not but rejoice. I figured that 2,000 students would be enough for the beginning and I deactivated the free coupon. In addition, I created discount coupons that offered a course for $ 10 and scattered them in groups. This had almost no effect, but sales were slowly going. For the most part, sales were organic. The students themselves found the course, wandering around Udemy, and bought it for $ 10 - $ 15, of which I received half. Part of the sales came from advertising companies Udemy and through affiliate.
Udemy provides the opportunity to request a refund within 30 days. This function is rarely used, but still sometimes used.
Income
Almost a month after the publication of the course, I earned about $ 100. Most of the sales are organic, right behind them are sales from advertising companies Udemy.
findings
Creating a course turned out to be more laborious and time consuming than I imagined. Especially considering the fact that I went along a simpler path and managed only to capture what was happening on the screen. The course itself can be found here .
If you are interested in the course, feel free to contact me and I will share with a free coupon.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/322592/
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