In this era of working from home, doing everything online, Hania (my wife) has started producing online material for her students.
Initially, this was simply Zoom recordings which were then published on the university servers for the students, but we tried to up the ante a bit by producing her lectures beforehand.
After a while of this, we decided to go the full commercial online teaching route by producing courses for Udemy. The first of those courses was made public just two days ago. If you click that link you get to the course’s page on Udemy, and you get a low price if you decide to buy it. If the coupon has lapsed, look for later blog posts, since it needs to be updated every month.
Also, if you follow that link you get the promo video we made and a selection of free previews.
But, even if I’d love to sell many of you on Hania’s course (soon to be plural), the intention with this and following posts is to describe how we set up the environment and workflows, not all of which was trivial.
This first post is about the space itself. We’re lucky in that we both are pretty much anti-social workoholics, or, rather, we love to work. So our living room is our office, leaving quite a bit of space to do this kind of thing.
We already had the desk from before, as well as the Aeron chair. What’s new is the set of lights, the camera, and the sound panels. I’ll go into these in separate blog entries later.
At the other end of the same living room / office space, I have my own desk where I do the editing and publishing of the videos Hania records.
It’s mainly the same setup I’ve used for years, but that I’m changing and adapting as we get more and more into producing these courses. Turns out that video production is quite a bit more resource intensive than just plain coding or writing.
As I said up top, I’m planning to get into each aspect of this adventure in a series of posts. I’m thinking something like:
- Video and camera
- Lights
- Sound
- Transporting files
- Storing files and backups
- Editing
- Network
- and last, but surely not least, preparation for designing and delivering course material, i.e. the teaching as such
That last part, the actual teaching, is something I personally don’t know much about, but Hania does. It’s what she does, after all. But I can talk about the rest.