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Course Production Guide
Get started on your way to becoming a published Open-Certificate.com instructor and contribute to the progress of those around you and earn income at the same time.
Choosing your course topic
To create a successful Open Cert course, you would need to first decide what you’ll teach. This can be your most important decision to make so decide carefully. It makes sense to know what students are most interested in before you finally decide. We will try to help you choose a topic for your course according to your interest and expertise and match those to student demand.
Know your topic’s demand and competition. When deciding on what to teach on Open Cert, pick a subject you’re experienced in and are genuinely excited about. For many of us, there could be a handful of topics that we could passionately talk about and teach. So how do you decide? One way is to look at the topic’s relative demand and competition.
For maximum impact in any topic or subject, make sure your course stands out from others and plan your course with the student in mind. Take a look at other courses similar to yours and see how they are doing in terms of student numbers.
Differentiate your course. Don’t choose a subject just because the next instructor is teaching the same subject. Ultimately what subject you choose should be the subject that you are most confident in and what students are looking for.
Don’t worry if there might be a lot of courses in this topic area, because you can still make your course stand out from the rest. There are many ways to approach each subject and different students appreciate different approached and delivery styles as well as unique perspectives that are relevant to them. So, stay true to your specialty within this broader subject area.
For your information, there are a few topics that are restricted on Open Cert. We do not publish any of these topics on our platform. The list can be viewed here.
Course Information Guide
Now that you have decided on your topic to teach you have to plan your lesson format and delivery.
On Open Cert, we recommend that video lessons be between 20 and 30 mins, not more. This is because it is found that on average this is the amount of time students can give full productive attention. That means after about 20 mins you close the topic and direct your student to your test or quiz for the topic. Other than that, you can include assignments or other practical tasks to keep your students engaged.
As a general guide, your course should have at least 3 to 5 lessons in each section, a minimum of 3 sections in total. Of course, if your subject matter is wide say, a school syllabus, then the total sections can be extensive.
For your course landing page, we need you to provide the following as well;
- A short list of about 5 benefits of your course
- A short description of the course
- A short introduction of yourself as the instructor
- A list of about 5 items for each of
- what’s included with your course
- what students expect to learn from your course
- what skills can they learn from it.
- A picture of yourself if you want to
Video Production
Once all those things are ready and you are ready to start filming your course, you will need to get the equipment ready. The video below gives a very good guide on how to film your course. As stated in the video, we suggest that you start with what you have around you instead of immediately buying expensive equipment. If at all you have to buy a few necessary items, find affordable deals but with good quality. You can always upgrade later.
We suggest that you go through the video a few times until you are confident enough then create a test video. You can choose to forward to us for our academic to review your test video. Once you are happy with your creation, go to the next step that is to edit your video.
Video Edit
This is an important step to ensure that your video has the quality and look of a professional production. The video below provides a very good and simple to understand process of getting it done. Once you are happy with the end result, contact us to get your course uploaded to our site. Once your course has been approved for quality by our panel it will be uploaded as draft to the site, where you have the chance to go through it a final time before your course goes live. It will go live upon your confirmation that you are happy with it.
Marketing your course
Open Cert will certainly do our part to promote all courses on our platform however you are free to promote your course through your own network or social media accounts. This will definitely help you and your course in the long run.
We in fact encourage you to market your course through your network and friends. Better still you should have a marketing strategy to succeed in selling you course online. To compete among the top courses in your subject area you’ll need to implement effective marketing strategies. For example, get the word out on your Facebook page or other social media platforms and start building a presence on YouTube–even a few hundred subscribers can make a big difference.
