Annyce Davis

Davis Technology Consulting

Creating Your Own Video Course, Part I: Preparation

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I recently launched my first video course: Developing High Quality Android Applications. It was a significant undertaking for me. But through good planning and execution I was able to create a 2 hour course with over 40 videos in just about 2 months, while still working full-time! So while everything is still very fresh in my mind I wanted to share how I was able to do it. 

This is going to be a three part series where I break down the Preparation, Execution, and then Marketing of the course. Hope you find this information useful and you can use it as a reference for your first course! So let’s get started…

Preparation

First step in creating your own video course is to prepare a rough outline for yourself. It’s good to have a roadmap for what you hope to deliver and the various topics that you plan on covering. I began with the outline you see below. For each video I provided a “guesstimate” of about how long I thought the final product would be. You would want to use a similar structure so you can have a big picture view of the course content.
 
 
 
Next, in order to keep myself organized and make sure I delivered each video during the time promised, I created a Trello board. This is where I would keep track of what still needed to be done and what I was working on currently. It consisted of the following columns: 
 
  • To Do – Upcoming tasks
  • Doing – Tasks I was currently working on
  • Done – Completed Tasks
  • Before Shooting – Reminders for before shooting videos
  • During Prep – Resources for when I was preparing slides
 
 

This really helped me to stay organized and not feel overwhelmed by having to complete so many videos. Then for each section of videos that needed to be created, I would have one Trello card. That card would contain an embedded checklist that allowed me to specify a due date for when all items should be completed. I really liked this feature of Trello because I had a visual reminder of what needed to be done and what I had accomplished already.


I would also put links to references and my notes for that section of videos in the Comments portion of my cards. This was handy for me because I would sometimes come across information that I would need for a future section and I didn’t have to worry about searching through my Browser History to track it down again.

In Part II of this series, I’ll share what I did to create the slides and videos for my course.

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