<aside> 🚨 If you're a brand new teacher at SuperHi, you may be curious about how exactly course production works here so let's break down the process of conception to completion.
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We're pretty data driven when it comes to creating new courses at SuperHi, however we're not literal when it comes to what our data tells us (insert "faster horse" analogy), we like to untangle the data into something more thematic.
For example, one of our previous courses, Experimental Typography for the Web, came about due to data. When we surveyed our students on what they wanted, they didn't exactly tell us "yo, we want to learn experimental typography for the web", however we did notice a trend in support questions that were asking how to make particular examples of experimental typography on websites across a substantial number of users.
When we launched the course, it was strongly received, despite it not being something that was explicitly requested.
Teachers will work closely with the education team and customer support team to analyze potential ideas with you.
Surprisingly for a lot of new teachers, this part of the course development is, by far, the largest. We spend a much longer time on developing the curriculum than most online and offline schools, not just because want them to be really good but we want the courses to be as frictionless as possible. This helps both students and also our customer support.
We try to teach in the most real-world, practical way as possible. Usually this means teaching real world projects that people could use in their portfolio to show (not tell!) learned skills.
It's very common for the concepts for the projects to go through various iterations and changes. As a new teacher, it can be common to look at what others are doing online and thinking it's how everything should be taught. The world doesn't need yet another "to-do app" tutorial.
We aim to cover a set number of topics in each project. If the number of topics in a project feels excessive, we'll split the topics into two distinct projects so that projects don't feel like bloated or split it into chapters with clear definitions.
We generally like to keep each chapter's teaching time to be under 90 mins so it feels easy to complete for our students.
You'll be working closely with our design team and education team to work on this.
The recording is the last 10% of the work for launching the course. Teaching can sometimes feel like a bit of a solitary job sometimes as it's a heads-down, leave-me-alone bit of work that can feel less collaborative than the rest of the project. This is a normal feeling and we have set up several ways to support teachers in this, from a private Slack channel for teachers and regular teacher-only calls.
Each teacher has their own different style of how to record a course, even down to how they prepare notes for the course. Some like to detail what each minute of the video will cover, others like to have a on-the-fly overview.
For example, Rik prefers a list of what each chapter will cover with a small sentence per bullet point, which will equate to an outputted video within the chapter and is a more ad-libbed style. Others like to detail out specific phrases and points they want to cover in each video. There isn't a right-or-wrong way to do this, whatever works for you!
We usually record with Screenflow, a professional screen recording tool, which has served us well over the last few years. We have a setup guide on how to prepare your computer for recording.
<aside> 🚨 A good tip for working with Screenflow is Cmd+Shift+2 will start and stop recording!
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