Badass Courses

Raising The Bar For Online Learning with Greg Róg

Online learning has so much potential to be vastly better than traditional in-person education. But, why do most courses miss the mark? To Greg Róg it seems that most people are trying to create content instead of focusing on the actual action of teaching people. People make courses for themselves without consideration of who the audience is going to be. And, no thought seems to be put into the structure and design of the course itself. The instructor must be engaged in not only teaching people, but in the design of their course experience. To Greg, that engagement is the key element that separates great courses from low-quality ones. Greg also chats about his learning style that has enabled him to be able to consume and understand nearly 1000 pages of material in only two weeks, how he's designed his platform, and how learning style shifts as you gain more knowledge. LINKS -Twitter - Greg Róg [https://twitter.com/greg_rog] -Learn UX [https://learnux.io/]

Facilitating Learning Over Bestowing Knowledge with Matt D. Smith (MDS)

Testing out your content in some way before a full release can really improve the quality of your final product. Matt D. Smith, better known around the internet as MDS, did a beta testing round before he released Shift Nudge. Learners still had to pay to access the beta, which resulted in a very invested group of testers. And, the course is hosted on Notion which gave learners the ability to leave feedback on content inline, and it was easy for Matt to make adjustments and even record new lessons. Releasing Shift Nudge was different than the other products Matt has launched. It's more personal, and it can feel like the content is a reflection of you that people will judge. But, the best advice Matt has received about that is that as an educator you are not a grand knowledge holder, bestowing your knowledge upon people. Your job is to facilitate and guide people from the state of not knowing, to knowing. Matt also discusses the lessons learned from the errors he made with offering a design feedback service to learners, and how the idea for Shift Nudge went from being a product design course to a visual design course. LINKS -Twitter - MDS [https://twitter.com/mds] -Website - MDS [http://mds.is/] -YouTube - MDS [https://www.youtube.com/mattdsmith] -Shift Nudge [https://shiftnudge.com/]

How UI Foundations Was Built to Teach Quality Design with Kyle Gill

Creating a course about design has its own unique challenges. Design is an art, but that doesn't mean it's not quantifiable. With some caveats of course, there are rules you can follow and techniques that you can use to produce designs that are going to look good. Kyle Gill aims to arm learners with these design principles so that they are able to identify what makes up good design and have the ability to produce their own. Creating interactive examples is also an interesting challenge. In a course about design you probably shouldn't just throw your learners into code challenges, your audience might not just be developers! Kyle has created interactive design examples that animate from a bad design to an enhanced one. Kyle also chats about the difficulties with measuring learner success, the criteria a good quality course, and the technology behind UI Foundations. LINKS -Twitter - Kyle Gill [https://twitter.com/gill_kyle] -Website - Kyle Gill [https://kylegill.com/] -UI Foundations [https://www.uifoundations.com/]

Transitioning From Teachable to a Custom Platform with Tyler McGinnis

When you first start your business, the biggest initial hurdle is choosing where your content is going to be hosted. If you start building a custom platform from the beginning, it may be months before you ship a single course. And if you have a deadline and need to start making a profit this might not be the way to go. Making the decision to use an existing platform might be tough. Chances are it doesn't do exactly what you want it to. But, you are able to entirely focus on producing your content. And, you can always build something for yourself in the future. Tyler McGinnis went this route and it has really worked out for them! Tyler also chats about compensating employees as a small bootstrapped startup, keeping the core value that they're an education business first and not a software shop, and how they've leaned into their niche and specialized their content. LINKS * Twitter - Tyler McGinnis [https://twitter.com/tylermcginnis] * Bytes.dev [https://bytes.dev/] * UI.dev [https://ui.dev/]

Learning to Manage a Growing Business with Scott Tolinski

Running a course platform that not only contains your content, but also the courses of several other third-party creators is an entirely different job than that of the independent creator. Scott Tolinski, creator of Level Up tutorials has had to learn a lot of lessons as he grew his business and started bringing on guests instructors. The amount of coordination and planning required was a lot. But, they decided to hire a developer who did an amazing job setting up systems that made the flow of connecting with content creators much more manageable. A small team of people also work on Level Up and Scott has had to really learn management skills. Being able to have people take on some of the workload is a huge help and has allowed Scott to be able to focus on the work that he wants to do more of. Scott also chats more about what went into building the Level Up Tutorials platform, the essential features of a good course, and how he designs good project examples. LINKS * Website - Scott Tolinski [https://scotttolinski.com/] * Twitter - Scott Tolinksi [https://twitter.com/stolinski] * Level Up Tutorials [https://leveluptutorials.com/] * Syntax.fm [https://syntax.fm/]