February 26, 2017 at 11:06Experience in creating a course on Android development at Udemy
One of the December weekend, in the absence of any more interesting activity, I vegetated in front of the laptop screen. I don’t remember exactly how I ended up on the Udemy website, but the first thing that caught my eye was the Become an Instructor button. I knew firsthand about the existence of online courses, but all the courses that I took were created in collaboration with universities or large companies. I heard about Udemy and even went to the site, but I never went into the details and did not know that this platform provides the opportunity to create your own online course. I began to study the platform, looked at which courses are in demand and multiplied the cost of the courses by the number of students who signed up, wondering about the possible revenue of the instructor, and immediately got excited about the idea of creating my own course. As soon as I decided how exactly I will spend countless riches, set to work. And now, a month after the publication of the course, I want to share with you my experience in creating and promoting the course on Udemy.
A significant portion of Udemy courses in English. Courses in other languages are not in special demand, all the more paid. The need to create an English course greatly complicated my task. Even though I have been living in the UK for the past year and a half, my English is far from Shakespeare's. I was reassured by the fact that many popular high-rated courses were written by people with an even more terrible accent and pronunciation than mine. And really, I was worried in vain.
I chose the topic quickly enough. It was decided to start from the very basics and make a course for beginning developers or students who already have an understanding of Java and OOP, and want to start developing Android applications. Having studied the platform a bit, I deduced several rules that I tried to adhere to when creating the course:
- The duration of the course is 1-2 hours. This is the optimal course duration at Udemy.
- Attractive name. As you know, people want to get everything at once, so courses with names like “Do your Instagram,” “VR app in an hour” are in demand.
- Sequence. For me personally, when learning something new, the most important question is: “Where to start here?”. A variety of terms, frameworks and patterns can easily scare a neophyte. It's one thing if you are an experienced developer who has gone all the way from Pascal to ReactJS, another thing is a student or Junior Developer, who barely learned to distinguish an interface from an abstract class. This immediately risks being lost in all of these activities, fragment, view, layout, content provider, context et cetera et cetera. Knowledge must be presented sequentially and with examples.
- Do not complicate. Android development has changed a lot over the last 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 to know all these things in detail is not necessary.
- Practice. Just retelling what is written in the Android development guide does not represent much value. More than that, it's boring. I immediately decided that the goal of the course should be to create an Android application that can be downloaded on Google Play.
- From the very beginning, you need to teach developers to keep the code clean and tidy: follow naming conventions, place lines in strings.xml, and font sizes and indents in dimensions.xml.
I decided to start by creating an application and, building on this application, build the entire course. The application should not have been too complicated. I didn’t invent anything original, and for a couple of evenings I started a simple notepad in which you can add entries, view them and delete them. I didn’t do editing the records intentionally, but a week after the publication of the course I uploaded the code on github where this function was implemented. Especially for those who are too lazy to implement it yourself, but want to have a ready-made 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 little theory was planned. For example, a short overview of the Activity life cycle or various types of markup. I sketched a small plan, created some auxiliary slides, armed with QuickTime Player to record what was happening on the screen and 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 time consuming 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, rewriting one lecture five times, until I realized that it would not go any further. I realized that I needed to record audio, and only then separately record the screen, and then glue the audio from the video. Thus, things went a little faster. Moreover, I had a free week, which I completely devoted to this matter. I was able to record about 3-4 videos a day.
I registered with Udemy as an instructor and began to design the course page. Registration is extremely simple. Next, I came up with a title, a description containing the keywords to search for, and uploaded the image. If you do not have your own image, designers from Udemy can prepare it for you. And it’s completely free. It was this option that I took advantage of. Just a couple of days later they sent me a pretty tolerable 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 I’ll 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 due to the specific sales model based on huge discounts. I will write about this separately. I gradually published lectures,
The course did not pass verification on one point - sound quality. I recorded the sound on cheap headphones with a microphone and did not process it in any way, therefore, in all the videos, gray noise was heard in the background. I had to skip all the videos through iMovie, ticking “reduce background noise”, and fill them again. A few days later, the course was confirmed and it became publicly available on Udemy.
Udemy lives off huge discounts. Most often it doesn't matter what price you set, because Udemy sells absolutely all courses for $ 10 - $ 15 every day. They constantly send emails to users and try to sell your course at a discount of 70% -90% for everyone. Ultimately, few will pay more than this price for a Udemy course.
The instructor's share is highly dependent on how the sale of the course was completed. If a person bought a course by going to your direct link, the instructor will receive 97%; if a person found a course on the Udemy website, the instructor will receive 50%; if he enrolled in an advertising course from Udemy or through an affiliate, the instructor will receive 25%. Read more about the distribution of shares here .
Udemy allows you to create discount coupons for your course. The minimum price of the course 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 may 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 where coupons for Udemy are published, on Reddit and on Facebook groups. The best effect was given by Facebook. In 3 days I received 1,000 new students, in the fourth day I received 1,000 more students. Free coupons from Facebook began to leak onto forums and published on various sites dedicated to Udemy. In general, people were interested in my course, which could not but rejoice. I counted, that 2000 students would be enough to start and deactivated a free coupon. In addition, I created discount coupons that offered a $ 10 course and scattered them in groups. This had almost no effect, but sales were slowly moving. Most of the sales were organic. 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 Udemy advertising companies and through affiliate.
Udemy provides an opportunity to request a refund within 30 days. This function is rarely used, but still sometimes used.
Almost a month after publishing the course, I earned about $ 100. Most of the sales are organic, right behind them are sales from Udemy advertising companies.
Creating a course turned out to be a more laborious and lengthy process than I imagined. Especially considering the fact that I went on a simpler path and cost only shooting what is 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 it with a free coupon.
Tongue
A significant portion of Udemy courses in English. Courses in other languages are not in special demand, all the more paid. The need to create an English course greatly complicated my task. Even though I have been living in the UK for the past year and a half, my English is far from Shakespeare's. I was reassured by the fact that many popular high-rated courses were written by people with an even more terrible accent and pronunciation than mine. And really, I was worried in vain.
Course subject and format
I chose the topic quickly enough. It was decided to start from the very basics and make a course for beginning developers or students who already have an understanding of Java and OOP, and want to start developing Android applications. Having studied the platform a bit, I deduced several rules that I tried to adhere to when creating the course:
- The duration of the course is 1-2 hours. This is the optimal course duration at Udemy.
- Attractive name. As you know, people want to get everything at once, so courses with names like “Do your Instagram,” “VR app in an hour” are in demand.
- Sequence. For me personally, when learning something new, the most important question is: “Where to start here?”. A variety of terms, frameworks and patterns can easily scare a neophyte. It's one thing if you are an experienced developer who has gone all the way from Pascal to ReactJS, another thing is a student or Junior Developer, who barely learned to distinguish an interface from an abstract class. This immediately risks being lost in all of these activities, fragment, view, layout, content provider, context et cetera et cetera. Knowledge must be presented sequentially and with examples.
- Do not complicate. Android development has changed a lot over the last 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 to know all these things in detail is not necessary.
- Practice. Just retelling what is written in the Android development guide does not represent much value. More than that, it's boring. I immediately decided that the goal of the course should be to create an Android application that can be downloaded on Google Play.
- From the very beginning, you need to teach developers to keep the code clean and tidy: follow naming conventions, place lines in strings.xml, and font sizes and indents in dimensions.xml.
Preparation of materials
I decided to start by creating an application and, building on this application, build the entire course. The application should not have been too complicated. I didn’t invent anything original, and for a couple of evenings I started a simple notepad in which you can add entries, view them and delete them. I didn’t do editing the records intentionally, but a week after the publication of the course I uploaded the code on github where this function was implemented. Especially for those who are too lazy to implement it yourself, but want to have a ready-made 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 little theory was planned. For example, a short overview of the Activity life cycle or various types of markup. I sketched a small plan, created some auxiliary slides, armed with QuickTime Player to record what was happening on the screen and 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 time consuming 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, rewriting one lecture five times, until I realized that it would not go any further. I realized that I needed to record audio, and only then separately record the screen, and then glue the audio from the video. Thus, things went a little faster. Moreover, I had a free week, which I completely devoted to this matter. I was able to record about 3-4 videos a day.
Course Publishing
I registered with Udemy as an instructor and began to design the course page. Registration is extremely simple. Next, I came up with a title, a description containing the keywords to search for, and uploaded the image. If you do not have your own image, designers from Udemy can prepare it for you. And it’s completely free. It was this option that I took advantage of. Just a couple of days later they sent me a pretty tolerable 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 I’ll 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 due to the specific sales model based on huge discounts. I will write about this separately. I gradually published lectures,
The course did not pass verification on one point - sound quality. I recorded the sound on cheap headphones with a microphone and did not process it in any way, therefore, in all the videos, gray noise was heard in the background. I had to skip all the videos through iMovie, ticking “reduce background noise”, and fill them again. A few days later, the course was confirmed and it became publicly available on Udemy.
Promotion
Udemy lives off huge discounts. Most often it doesn't matter what price you set, because Udemy sells absolutely all courses for $ 10 - $ 15 every day. They constantly send emails to users and try to sell your course at a discount of 70% -90% for everyone. Ultimately, few will pay more than this price for a Udemy course.
The instructor's share is highly dependent on how the sale of the course was completed. If a person bought a course by going to your direct link, the instructor will receive 97%; if a person found a course on the Udemy website, the instructor will receive 50%; if he enrolled in an advertising course from Udemy or through an affiliate, the instructor will receive 25%. Read more about the distribution of shares here .
Udemy allows you to create discount coupons for your course. The minimum price of the course 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 may 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 where coupons for Udemy are published, on Reddit and on Facebook groups. The best effect was given by Facebook. In 3 days I received 1,000 new students, in the fourth day I received 1,000 more students. Free coupons from Facebook began to leak onto forums and published on various sites dedicated to Udemy. In general, people were interested in my course, which could not but rejoice. I counted, that 2000 students would be enough to start and deactivated a free coupon. In addition, I created discount coupons that offered a $ 10 course and scattered them in groups. This had almost no effect, but sales were slowly moving. Most of the sales were organic. 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 Udemy advertising companies and through affiliate.
Udemy provides an opportunity to request a refund within 30 days. This function is rarely used, but still sometimes used.
Income
Almost a month after publishing the course, I earned about $ 100. Most of the sales are organic, right behind them are sales from Udemy advertising companies.
conclusions
Creating a course turned out to be a more laborious and lengthy process than I imagined. Especially considering the fact that I went on a simpler path and cost only shooting what is 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 it with a free coupon.