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Ivana Rangelova for CodeChem

Posted on • Originally published at blog.codechem.com

Knowledge sharing is at the heart of CodeChem

Knowledge is power, but it’s far more powerful when it’s shared.

Knowledge sharing powers our company. And the success of knowledge sharing plays a key role in our company culture that we have been shaping since day one.

In fact, it’s the heart of what we do and how we maintain quality. As such, we leverage it at every opportunity.

Now, we can proudly say that we achieved that on another level.

Our colleague Lazar became an instructor and made his first course on egghead .

In this article, he shares his experience about creating this course.


What was your motive to create this course?

I’ve always wanted to pass my knowledge and experience and help developers be better at their everyday life. Also, I’ve always wanted to produce tech content. If you add the opportunity to the mix, you’ll see the full picture of my motive. This was a fun and interesting experience for me, and it helps me break the ice of course creation.

What was the process of creating this course?

Believe it or not, 80% of the time (or even more) went into planning the course, rather than producing the videos. I’ve had the opportunity to work with Lauro Silva, who's a super cool human being. He selflessly supported me during the planning and creation of this course from start to finish and I’ve learned a lot from him.

In terms of the process, I started by creating the course outline. I thought about all of the single takeaways that could be part of the course and divided them into separate lessons. That list got refined multiple times while I was creating the course. Then I wrote the outlines for each lesson. I’ve had several meetings with Lauro where we went through the course curriculum and discussed what could we change to make it better. After I nailed the curriculum, I started recording the lessons one by one and sent them to Lauro to review them. When I felt like I got the hang of it, I recorded all of the remaining lessons and submitted them in the egghead instructor’s portal. Lauro did a final review of the complete material and that was it! The course was complete!

What’s next?

I really enjoyed creating this course. It was fun, but challenging as well. It took multiple skills to produce it, like planning, writing code, designing the UI, recording, editing, and even marketing it at the end. So I’m motivated to keep creating courses. The courses don’t just help the viewers who are learning from them. They also help me have a solid understanding of the technology that I’m creating the course for. So in a way, I’m also getting better, along with the viewers. It’s a win-win situation where everyone has something to gain.

Tips:

  • Make sure you plan and code your lesson before recording it.
  • Keep your end-result code on a separate screen to remind yourself while recording.
  • Each lesson should have a single take-away. Don't explain multiple concepts and functionalities that are not connected.
  • Hit record and don't stop on your mistakes. If you make a mistake, make a pause, and continue.
  • Try not to move with your cursor a lot. It'll be very obvious when you cut out a segment where you make a mistake.
  • Write outlines for each of your lessons. The level of detail is up to you. You can do bullet points, or the whole narration word by word. Whatever works best for you.
  • Never forget to do a recap at the end. Recaps solidify the viewer's knowledge. Include the Recap in your outline so you won't forget it.

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