Udemy Course is LIVE!! Congratulations Ally Lane!
Congratulations to Ally Lane for publishing her first Udemy Course called What's Your Story?
I am so happy for her and for those of you who are considering turning your own training into a Udemy Course (or you are a clhoient that is wondering what the process actually is), I wanted to share with you how Ally and I tackled this project.
Ally Lane is a professional story teller. She has written plays, speeches, books and workshops her whole career. In light of that, she did not come to me looking for my assistance in writing a course. She came to me, because she was looking to turn her course into a format that was compatible with Udemy. She was looking for assistance with Video Editing, and at a more basic level, looking at Udemy's requirements for publshing, understanding them, and putting her content into the format she wanted. She had already burned a bunch of her own time on the site, and was getting frustrated trying to figure out how to do the technical piece.
Her course is on storytelling, and is intended to help people learn a framework to create engaging stories. This framework can be applied to almost anything. The audience of her course is really for any content creator, whether you are looking to do storytelling in your business, or even in your personal life. This framework can be applied to blog articles, writing speeches for weddings if you are emceeing, writing a book, a play, or even structuring a story that you intend to tell. As I was creating the content, it was evident to me that a story needs to have a point, a theme, a start, middle or end. Without a basic structure, its really just a bunch of rambling. People like Ally who can engage one person, or 1000 people get this, whether they are writing a book, sitting on a stage, or hanging out at your house drinking wine. Storytelling is about engaging others, and its about your audience. Not about you. So structuring your story helps people understand what you are saying, where you are going with your story, and what the point of your message is. But trust me, I am not an expert in this. I am very much a student. I would recommend that you take Ally's course to learn more.
Let's now share the process that Ally and I went through to get this awesome content published.
What the client had:
16 videos that she recorded of each lesson. The lessons had supporting PDF materials, plus the whole course had some additional bonus PDF material as well on related topics
She had a headshot and a logo
What the client did not have:
No templates. The PDFs were plain text
No video templates, intros and outtros, so you literally clicked on the video to her saying hi, and going straight into her topic
No video editing, so the videos had unstable quality in audio, various backgrounds
No knowledge on how to take her creation and put the videos into a format that would be compatible (and accepted) on Udemy
So we got to work!
Tool - Adobe Premiere: I started with watching all 16 videos and doing video editing. I adjusted decibels to get the best audio experience I could from the videos. I also adjusted the video to focus on just her. I zoomed in so that the background in her home didn't steal any of her thunder. Her home is lovely, but I thought adjusting the frame to be mostly her, would create room for graphics or bullets to drive home points in the learning as she was explaining concepts.
Tool - PowerPoint: I used Allys Logos and colors to create a template that would play her video on one side, and have bullets or graphics on the other, so that the learner could focus on her speaking, and be prompted to pay attention when a bullet came up with a key message.
Tool - Viddyoze: I used Allys logo, Unit title and URL to create an intro to introduce each lesson. I created one Outtro to be used on the end of each video to share Ally's URL again at the end of the message.
Tool - Camtasia: I imported the edited video into the slide deck for each lesson, and added the bullets with the key messages that I pulled out of the videos. I then ran the powerpoint and timed the bullets with her voicceover and recorded it it Camtasia. I exported the Camtasia Files into MP4s.
Tool - MS Word: Each of the PDF files she sent me with plain text, I templated her content into Word documents and saved them into PDFs to upload with her course.
Once all of the pieces were sent over, Ally approved them (or sent me edits).
The final product was uploaded by Ally into Udemy. They approved it within 48 hours and then it was published.
Congrats again, Ally!
