Tips for First-Time Skillshare Course Creators

Please read the first article for more details:

Skillshare: An Honest Review of My Experience Launching a Coding Course_A lesson in community management from Skillshare’s teachers_hackernoon.com

Tips

What did I learn from this situation?

1) Read everything carefully.

Ask any questions that are bothering you. Ask for an explanation if something is not clear enough.

Or anyone will be able to tell you — You misunderstood! (as it happened in my case)

Or you can overestimate an offer. Or you just didn’t find any hidden terms (as it was in my case)

2) Teaching people is hard.

Creating a course from scratch is a hell of a process.

Surely — if you are working on something, that you never did before, it is hard. So any unusual activity will take more time and energy from you at the beginning. But by doing something new you will learn something new too.

3) Your situation is unique.

Unique for you. And nobody cares about it. And when you read about an average level, you need to understand when someone else is above an average level too. (Why didn’t I remember that? I had “A” in Maths logic. Maths is a bitch.)

4) Always make a quick turnaround.

Don’t try to perfect your course the first time you do it. It will help you to review results and draw a conclusion: “Continue to do it or not.”

Do not spend a lot of time on course creation. Yes, this is my advice! Especially if it is your first course. You are LEARNING how to teach. And if you spend a week on it and didn’t feel that you made good progress, then this is a big deal for you at this specific moment. Step back, calm down and split your course into 3 parts.

When I developed my course I prepared and used slides. They helped me a lot. I used some HTML template with jQuery animations. But right now Github is full of different static website generators. And you can use/store your content in *.md format (Markdown format) and it will generate you a slideshow at build. And you can publish it on GitHub Pages and it will be online.

Should you spend time preparing detailed course exploration? Is creating a great “course details” section a must-have?

No, I don’t think so. I did, and still nothing.

You actually can see that content. I used it in order to create an article https://medium.com/quick-code/top-tutorials-to-learn-flexboxes-for-frontend-development-d6dfb2113b48

What do I want with these articles? What is my goal by sharing this story publicly?

• Calm down and move forward.
• If I didn’t publish it — I’ll still be mad and thinking about it.
• It will be cool if I receive some feedback from their top managers, that operating a company.

Not just:

We are sorry to hear that your experience was bad and we’ll make notes and will try to prevent it in the future.

Bullshit. I need or require an official online reply. And it needs to be the long copy.

When you write a letter you expect a letter in return. So when SS decides to reply — I would’ve preferred they do it publicly, instead of sending me links to “rules”. It’s impersonal.

And add the big fucking bold line at the top of your terms:

We don’t guarantee anything. You can have 0 results, and 0 promotion.

Did I tell you how Skillshare found me in the first place?

Because of my articles :-)

There are only 3 publishers that I’m part of:

• Groceristar (my own place) https://medium.com/groceristar
• QuickCode https://medium.com/quick-code
• HackerNoon https://hackernoon.com/

And I was a good lead for Skillshare:

• I’m not working (have a lot of time)
• I’m always interested to explore new things

And I was sold by fancy videos on the Homepage. Videos from Gary Vee and Robert Kiyosaki. It was a nice move from the marketing team. You know it would be like a dream to share the same stage with my influencers.

Do I compare myself with their Top Teachers, that make 30–50k?

Surely not.

I understand that they put a lot of time and effort into it.

But I actually don’t want to be a soldier or a brick in the wall at just another company that created a website. I did that once before. I didn’t like what I got.

Did I hope to get $1000 in 12 months like this article claims?

As you see — I didn’t create this number from my head, it was officially specified as an average.

Ha, no.

I hope that I don’t make enemies among Skillshare team members. I don’t want to be a bad guy here or to be banned from their website. I would lose all my possible future income (joke).

I don’t think that this amount is possible. It’s actually gone a few months ago (4 months). As a reader of this story, tell me, how much time should I wait? There are only ⅓ left.

I can wait. I have plenty of time and with this situation, I’m distracted from building my own project.

If you liked or related to this article, please give it a few claps.

Thanks in advance.

Btw, if you’re interested in an unpaid internship — please contact me. It will be a pleasure for me to teach you. I’m an open-minded person and I would love to share what I’ve learned with you!