Creating a long course in a technical subject

RobertDuHam226
RobertDuHam226 Posts: 1 observer rank
in First-time course creation

I created and taught a 720-hour course in electronics and computer technology at a brick-and-mortar school. I developed everything including my own textbooks and I own all of the rights to the materials. After teaching the course for more than a decade with an 81% job placement rate for my students, the school decided to drop the course in favor of more lucrative short seminar courses.

Looking for somewhere else to teach my course I found that vocational schools and community colleges have been dropping and curtailing their courses in electronics technology. The Electronics Technicians Association told me that this is a national trend leading to a critical shortage of electronics technicians. They encouraged me to put my course online.

I created a website (rsdacademy.net) where students can read the textbooks online and take exams for free. I also have over 150 lecture videos on YouTube. I have over 60,000 subscribers to my channel, nearly 150 patrons on Patreon, and over 2,500 students signed up at the website. My video lectures aren't fancy, just me at a whiteboard, but I have built a loyal following and a reputation for my unique style of explaining high technology.

I have decided to explore moving my course over to Udemy. I need to know if such a long course is a good fit for Udenmy. If so, how would how should I modify the course to make it work best?

Bob DuHamel

Comments

  • Rudranil Chakrabortty
    Rudranil Chakrabortty Posts: 154 specialist rank

    A 720-hour course is way too long I believe. I am not sure, but I would guess that average course length on Udemy would be about 12 hours. I have seen a few Digital Marketing and Coding courses run for 50-70 hours.
    So, if you can compartmentalize your courses into blocks of 50 hours each, I think that would be a good start. The tricky part here will be to bring every course to a logical end, and to start every course from a logical beginning that would make sense to the users even if they have not gone through the previous courses. Else, you can name the courses as part-I, part-II and so on.

    Every course must have a great course intro video, that is designed to persuade learners to join in.

    Also, this is very important. Sales is mostly topic driven. A great course on Machine learning will generate huge sales, while a super-great course on an obscure topic may not generate sales. So, if you can sell your content on the topic that already has a big student base on Udemy, that will be great. You will find stats on the popularity of topics inside Udemy's marketplace insights.

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