Asking other instructors for review and feedback
Hi,
I am wondering if it is possible to ask other instructors in this community to review my course and give me feedback. My course is on data structures and algorithms and is now live for 2 weeks.
Thanks
Comments
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You're certainly off to a good start with your first few student reviews!
I'm also a tech instructor and am familiar with the subject matter of your course. It seems comprehensive, your audio quality is good, and delivery is good.
Some feedback:
- While this is a hot topic, you're up against some very tough competition. The top-selling course in this topic has 28.5 hours of content, and a 4.7 review score from over 23,000 ratings. (How he manages to talk about linked lists for 5 hours while still getting great reviews is beyond me, though - and the reviews shown on his landing page don't support a 4.7 score which is weird. But that's another topic.) The #2 top-selling course has 56 hours of content! Even though you have covered the main things you need to know about data structures and algorithms, students will want to see a lot more content before they'll choose your course over these other ones for the same price. (It is possible this world will change when Udemy introduces dynamic pricing, where shorter courses might be offered a lower prices than longer ones, giving courses like yours a better shot.) But, I'd at least recommend exploring the top-selling courses in your topic to see what you can learn from them, and consider expanding your course over time.
- There's nothing wrong with your promo video, but making it faster paced and more exciting is a relatively easy way to boost sales. The promo video for the topselling course in this topic is frankly kind of terrible, and the #2 course isn't much better, so it would be one way to distinguish yourself. There are some great threads on this forum on creating promo videos if you search for them.
- You'll find that tech students want hands on activities. Many expect every course to basically be a learn-to-code course even when it's about algorithms, and will review you harshly if that's not what they're getting. I noticed you encourage students to "practice with a piece of paper" at the end of your lectures, but they're going to want more. I know your topic isn't language-specific, but showing some examples in some popular language like Python or Java would be a good idea - as well as giving students exercises and challenges they can do on their own.Good luck. I think yours is a good course and I hope it finds success.
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Thanks alot for the swift response and thorough review! I will take your comments into account, getting a better promo video is indeed a nice place to start. I have also paired my course with an open source git hub repo and provided links to the the implementations in C# next to ech course. As for your comment on coding, I will need to think of a way to emphasize the existence of this repo further. Thanks again!
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I just looked at a few of your preview videos and missed the github repo. If it's just a matter of referencing it more often, that's an easy thing to change! I see you do in fact mention the repo in your course description. I might suggest re-wording that so instead of emphasizing that you don't need code for this course, emphasize that the code is available (but if code scares you, that's OK too.) The problem is that the landing page cuts off your course description after the first few lines unless the student expands it, and they only see "no coding is leveraged for teaching these algorithms" which is the wrong message.
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@PiJei
I can't embellish the detailed feedback you've received from knowledgeable instructors. All I can say, is your course seems professional and well organised. Your voice comes across really well and you have an engaging manner. I hope your course does well, I can see you have poured a lot of time and energy into it. Good luck with your Udemy career.1
