This course has been archived as it is no longer relevant. Some or all of the content within the course may not be available.

How to Create Online Course Documentation

This lesson is exclusive to members

Course contents
SECTION: 7
Launching on Skillshare 7:29
SECTION: 8
Other places to host 3:25

Questions

Course info

26 lessons / 4 hours

Overview

My name is Dan & I’m a full time online course instructor. In this training I will show you the best way to successfully launch your very own first course. 

This training is aimed at people who have never created an online course before and  no previous experience is required. 

You might not be doing this full time like me, so I’ve broken process up into easy steps which you can tackle one at a time together with me - step by step. 

You'll learn: 

  • Check the profitability of a course
  • What you should name your course
  • How to create an outline.
  • Options for recording and editing your course. 
  • Places you should sell your courses
  • How to price your course
  • How to successfully launch your course.   

I’ve produced 22 courses. On my journey here I’ve learnt an amazing amount about what to do, and equally what not to do when creating a course. This course will take you through personal steps necessary to develop & launch a successful course.

So if you’re ready to earn extra money, working from home, join me and together let's make your first online course a great success!

Course duration 4 hours
Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Downloads & Exercise files

Transcript

Alright, it is course documentation time. Uh, this bit is the most boring bit for me. Uh, basically you need to write out, uh, all the names  of all your courses in a kind  of a search engine friendly version  and in a people friendly version. So you're gonna have two  documents that I'll show you in a second. So the first one, lots of keywords so  that when people are searching for specific things,  you are more likely to appear for  that result in something like Google  or maybe people searching in a marketplace or on YouTube. And then you're gonna need a version that's less kind  of keyword dense, okay?

And is a bit more specific for just a nice, simple, clear  but not stuffed with keywords. Okay? So those two documents  and also if you're gonna do class projects, okay, this is  where you can document this out as well to explain  to your students, okay, these are, this is the topic  and these are the things I want you to do. Let me jump in and show you both of these. Now these are what work for my courses. You might have other documentation you need to create now.

So any sort of paperwork  or just any sort of stuff that you has  to be written out in Word, this is the time to go through,  get it all in order so that it's done for when you're going  through before you start doing your editing. It's good to get it done now,  so everything is crystal clear about what we're doing  and how it works. All right, let's, uh, jump in. I'll stop waffling. Alright, what do I mean by all of that in the copy folder? Okay, so in seven copy,  what I do is I create three documents for my courses,  uh, the class projects.

Let have a look at that. And here this is just a  document I need for two things. One is I include it in with my exercise files that I give  to students so that they can know,  like this is the class project that I set  and this is the steps. I said, use these images in this folder. Um, these are the tasks I want you to do. And at the end, I would like you to  save it and share it with me.

Okay? So I just go through all, I set lots  of class projects throughout my courses. You might have one at the end, just a place  where students can find all the class projects I mentioned  at the beginning to say, you know,  here's all the notes for the class projects. The other thing to do is if you want to in,  in platforms like Udemy, you're allowed  to add like there's a specific section  where you can say add class project. And it means that you do this kind  of at the beginning here while it's still fresh in your head  and after you've finished editing, which can take a while,  um, when you're uploading it to something like Udemy,  you can easily go in here and just copy  and paste so that you're not having to kind of rethink  what you did or rewatch your videos to try  and get an idea what your class project was. It's just here, it's written down while it's fresh  and it's easy to add these little projects.

If you don't plan on having class  projects, you can skip this one. The one thing you can't skip though is let's look at  these other two files here. Long names and short names. Okay, so let's have a look at both of these. So basically the same thing,  but, so this is my Photoshop advanced course,  but there's a short version of it. So let's look at this first one here.

Introduction to Advanced Photoshop. But over here the short version is just introduction. So this is the human version,  this is the search engine version. Okay? So we're not trying to stuff it full of keywords,  but we wanna make sure that nobody's gonna search  for masking a person. Now they could, okay, so it's not bad.

So it's a good short version, but a sexier version, okay? Sexy is not the word. The like keyword  search friendly version. If somebody's in your website or in Google or in YouTube  and they're going, uh, the, they're more likely  to use words like this. So the easiest way in the world  to mask a person in Adobe Photoshop, you can see it's just,  it adds a whole lot more extra words to it. So instead of masking a person which is in there,  mask a person, but there's a lot more like the easiest way  it has Adobe Photoshop in it.

Let's look at another one. Uh, randomly picking one. Let's go for this one here. 23. How to put loads of images into one Photoshop file quickly. Okay, so that's a nice long good string  that somebody might search for,  whereas over here, I've just got a shorter version.

Now what do we use the shorter version for? 'cause we're, I guess we're kind of clear  what this version is for, right? It's where what we use to name the files  and our courses and our videos. Why do we use this other version? Let me show you what it is on my website. So this is my website.

It's hosted on Instructor HQ  and when I upload it, I upload it  and I give the video a name  and I call it the easiest way in the world to mask a person. So in Adobe Photoshop. So that's a long version. Why? Because this is the kinds of stuff that Google Index  and come up in search results. If I was gonna give this one away free on YouTube as well,  that long name is what I'd give it.

But I need the short version for something like this. Say my little intro video. Let's have a little look. Hi  Everyone, it is time to get started. We're gonna start with something called  Select. Okay, so you  saw that little intro there.

You don't have to do a fancy intro like mine. It might just be a flat screen,  but it makes more sense that people know they're at the,  the video called masking a person. If I have to squeeze all of  that text in there, it's not great. Same with social media. Social media is not  as much of a search engine. It's saying something like YouTube or Google  or Udemy is okay, so I'll just use masking a person  as the name of the video.

It's clear, but it doesn't need to be stuffed. All these extra keywords. That's why I have two versions of them. The way I do it is I'll generate the long version first, go  through it all, just add all the things  that I think people might be searching for. Um, also remember earlier on when we were deciding on a  course name, often I'll, I'll do a check like that as well. I'll go through and use say Moz  or the AdWords keyword tool just  to make sure I'm using the right language, okay?

Making sure I'm getting good keywords in my titles. It's painful and slow a lot of the time. I just guess them. Okay and hope for the best. But there is a method to that madness. Making sure people can find my videos when there  are searching on the internet.

And then once I've done that, I go through  and I just make a short version of it. Make sure it's nice and small so it fits on my like slide. When I'm talking and it's clear about what it is,  leave them both in my uh, seven copy folder  and it just means later on, like often. Um, if you're thinking, man,  why does he bother doing all that? Now it's easy to do it. Once you're in the zone again, you're recording the courses.

Um, and later on when there's,  say there's a new marketplace opens up,  it's called Dan's Fantastic video tutorials  and you want to upload your courses  to it, it can be really easy. Often those new marketplaces, they'll say, Hey,  just send us a link, you know, a Dropbox link  to all your videos and just give us a list  of all the course names and we'll do all the work for you. It makes it super easy for me to go, here's a link  to the videos that I've edited  and here's a list of the names. Please use this. And often they'll go and do it for you. Even if you have to do it yourself.

Just means that in six months  or a year, you need to upload that course somewhere else  or transition it from one site to another. You've got all the names, they're all in one place  and you can even outsource this type of stuff. That's what I do. I get help doing it. And if I'm consistent, they know  that once I've taught the person where all the names are,  the short names, the long names,  or all the videos are for one course,  because I've got this beautiful file structure  for every single course,  it means they can go off and do them all. Teach 'em the first one  and then they know how the kind  of format works for them all.

If you're one of those people who love to fire your files,  rename them something new every single time,  it's just gonna make it in a too hard basket later on if you  need to go and kind of pass this work along to somebody else  or even just to do it yourself. Alright, so that is creating your documentation. Now that's, that's what I use for my course. You might find that you have something else you need  to create some bit of Word doc that helps kind of, I know  with the flow of your course  or the thing that you're teaching now is the time to do all  that sort of stuff and jump in  and take it off your checklist. Speaking of checklists, if you are using Instructor hq,  you can go into your Instructor HQ account  and you can see all the steps  that we're covering here are all  steps in this lovely little checklist. And once you've done your create document course checklist,  you can get the satisfaction of saying, ah, it's done.

Then move on to the next one. Speaking of which, let's jump into the next video.
  • Powered by Marvin
  • Terms of use
  • Privacy policy
  • © Bring your Own Laptop Ltd 2025