Badass Courses – Détails, épisodes et analyse

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.

-Twitter - Greg Róg
-Learn UX

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.

-Twitter - MDS
-Website - MDS
-YouTube - MDS
-Shift Nudge

As an independent educator you're going to end up wearing a lot of hats. Development, marketing, support, on top of the work that goes into actually producing the content.

All of it is essential though if your goal is to actually reach people and help teach them something that's relevant to their goals.

A part of that is finding out what to actually teach. It can sometimes be a challenge finding something that is interesting to you but also relevant to the audience that you've grown.

Jorge Vergara has found that it's very effective to ask your audience what they're working on and some of the problems they've been struggling with. Asking directly if they'd like a course on X subject might get you enthusiasm but it doesn't actually tell you what they need.

The development side of things is huge too if you aren't outsourcing the platform. It can be very difficult to balance working on it with actually producing content, especially if you have a full-time job.

There's more value to working on your platform than just setting up a place where learners can watch your videos. You have opportunities to work with and gain practical expertise on technology that you are wanting to teach. You also get full control of the learning experience.

In the end, It really is up to you to weigh the trade-offs and decide what will work best for your needs.

• Twitter - Jorge Vergara
• Website - Jorge Vergara
• 30x500

If you've ever taken a course on the internet you may have come across an exercise or some kind example that just left you thinking

okay but why?

This lack of real-world context is a problem that a lot of courses suffer from.
Creating examples that are engaging learners, isolates the skill being used, while also showing off the context in which the skill is used takes time and expertise but the payoff is well worth it.

It's not just examples/exercises though. Creating an engaging environment to learn in is important. Angie Jones has a ton of advice in this episode and talks about what she did at Test Automation University to build that environment.

The true goal of all this work is to improve the outcomes of your learners. Making sure that you are giving them the means to succeed and stay committed to their learning goals on your platform.

If you stay true to this goal, you'll both improve the lives of your learners and the success of your business.

We can sort of categorize courses and other educational content into two different categories.

The first is a targeted instrumental style, where the learner is taught procedures and technical skills. It's important to learn these skills in whatever subject you are learning but this type of course lacks the greater context and can leave you wondering how everything fits together and where you'd actually apply these skills.

The second type operates on a higher level of concepts and patterns. It teaches the learner mental models and forms the context surrounding the skills of the domain.

It's necessary to learn from both types but you may notice that there are a lot more of the first type. And part of the reason for that is that it's a much more challenging instructional design problem. Both the delivery method and content of the course have to be different.

Which for Josh Kaufman this has meant building a custom platform for his Personal MBA course that he's designing. Some of the challenges have included reducing the cognitive overwhelm that comes with very large courses, structuring the course around a 1to1 asynchronous relationship with the instructor, and designing a system that has the learner revisiting content for spaced repetition.

All of that fits together to create an experience that is more likely to keep learners engaged through to completion and better reinforces the concepts being taught.

Designing a course isn't linear. And it makes sense, since learning itself isn't a linear activity!

We spend years building expertise and gaining knowledge, and concepts don't neatly build on each-other one after another. Our skills end up looking more like nodes on a graph with numerous edges connecting them all.

And Kyle Shevlin knows this well.

Sometimes ideas will live in his head for years before they develop into something more. And developing those ideas involves researching and learning the topic in his own ways.

Once things start to take shape it's important for Kyle to get things out quickly. With his MDX blog he's able to get out quality content for people in a short amount of time.

Getting things out quickly isn't just rushing. A better term would be optimizing for completion. Kyle is self aware of his own patterns and knows that what's best for him is to optimize for completion, and spend less time getting bogged down in making other aspects of the course perfect such as the marketing, or the pricing model.

And that's something that you should keep in mind after you've finished listening to his episode. Look back and think about previous projects that you may have left incomplete. Is there a pattern? Try to keep it in mind with the next thing you work on, and optimize for it!

Terrain was founded out of a frustration with the e-learning industry.

There are a lot of courses out there with great marketing but lack good learning environments, expertise, and instructional design. Eman Zabi set out to change that with Terrain. The idea was to create a platform with high quality vetted courses that are actionable and designed to actually get people to finish them.

A number of solutions were implemented by Terrain to ensure that all of its content is extremely high quality. They reach out to vetted creators, have them create an outline and write a script, and then Terrain has the script peer-reviewed by a diverse panel.

An excellent learning environment is another key feature of Terrain. Distractions are minimal and note taking is at the forefront of the design.

Terrain was built with no-code using the bubble.io platform, Circle for the community, and Zapier to handle all of the integrations. No-code was an excellent choice but came with its own unique challenges, such as Zapier not having a needed integration for example.

They've also taken a unique approach to marketing. Eman built a chrome extension that brings the learning environment from Terrain into Youtube, allowing the learning to stay within that optimal learning context. The extension and word of mouth have both been effective in bringing in new learners.

• Terrain
• Bubble.io
• Copyhackers
• Linda Perry - Mindset Coaching

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

"You can't buy cameras and become a better photographer. You have to take pictures to become a better photographer."

Brennan Dunn says this when referring to his tendency for purchasing the best tools before even starting a new hobby. Equipment is no substitute for real experience.

Gathering real experience is critical when it comes to creating a recorded course. It will be very likely that you have gaps in your teaching if you go straight to recording your course and releasing it without getting any kind of feedback.

This is why Brennan likes to host live workshops when planning a recorded course. They're perfect for being able to immediately see where learners are getting stuck, what questions they're asking, and learn why they're trying to learn what you are teaching.

And while the personalized experience of live-content can be the most valuable to the learner, it does come with some tradeoffs. On your end, you lose time by having host the workshop consistently, and your reach is more limited to the amount of seats in the workshop. And for learners, they lose the ability to go back and reference the content of the workshop, and they also aren't able to learn at their own pace.

But, a lot goes into creating a course. And one of the more difficult decisions will be deciding on a platform. There are some significant disadvantages to using an existing platform. Weaker marketing features, inflexible payment models, and a rigid lesson first structure to your content.

All of this added up to Brennan deciding that he would build his own platform. He wanted to be able to take a learner first approach when designing the content, have teaser lessons in courses, and build better marketing pages. It was the right choice to make for what he needed.

And so remember, before jumping right into recording a course, try to teach in front of a live audience. You may be surprised on how much you might be missing. And, when you do finally have something solid, make sure to weigh your options when picking a platform. Making your own might be right for you depending on your content and marketing needs.

• Brennan Dunn - Twitter
• Create and Sell
• Workshop Survival Guide
• The Mom Test
• AlpineJS
• Paddle

Ben Tossel created Makerpad, which seeks to teach that you don't need to spend years learning to code or spend 100s of thousands of dollars on expensive engineers to start a business.

A core part selling educational content online is that platform. Whether it's Youtube, a multi-million dollar site filled with custom functionality, or somewhere in-between, you'll need ways to share your content to your learners.

You can also avoid spending a lot of time and money on your platform by researching the UX other platforms have implemented and repurposing it for your own needs. They have already done the R&D so you don't have to. But, make sure that you are repurposing the features and making them your own and not just copying one-to-one. It's very important that you do not steal.

The point of all this is to say that you don't need to build something completely custom. It's tempting to think that you need something that can't be found anywhere else, but more than likely this part is used as a means of procrastination from actually launching a course.

Shipping and iterating on your content comes first.

No-code can take your business to the point of several million dollars of revenue even. When it comes time to build your platform, ask yourself what you actually need out of your app. More times than not there will be an existing solution!

• Twitter - Ben Tossel
• Website - Ben Tossel
• Makerpad

Quincy Larson, founder of freeCodeCamp, was in his 30's after he quit his job as a school director. After learning how to automate some of the tedious tasks that staff had to deal with, he realized how many people's lives could be improved if they learned how to solve problems with technology.

He spent the next nine months learning to code before landing his first software engineering position. He gained a ton of practical experience on the job and started to think about how to create a path to get people to this point as quickly as possible.

freeCodeCamp was the result.

freeCodeCamp, using game design as its guiding instructional design philosophy, has learners coding with rapid feedback and frequent challenges or "mini bosses". The idea being that a learner can't iterate and improve to their max potential unless the feedback that corrects and guides them is immediate. The idea of the mini boss is to strengthen a learner's problem solving and stop them from getting too overconfident in their abilities.

Coding is hard.

And don't let anyone tell you different. Unless the learner understands just how frustrating and ambiguous programming is, they're going to hit a wall once they are confronted with a blank canvas. Now what?

Iteration is critical to the platform as well. Since freeCodeCamp is well, free, they are able to make changes freely without having to worry about wasting anyone's money. This gives them the freedom to get feedback, iterate and build something truly nice

Quincy goes over all of the above and more in this episode of the Badass Courses podcast. Tune in to learn more about the business model, course design, and history of freeCodeCamp.

• Badass: Making Users Awesome
• Twitter - Quincy Larson
• freeCodeCamp