UCanTeach: Making online courses with open source tools

UCanTeach: Making online courses with open source tools

Share your ideas through an online course, teach valuable skills and create an income stream. There are free and open source tools for every stage of making and releasing a course, and you can create it all with free community software.

With a combination of lectures and demonstrations you will go through the steps of designing, producing, and distributing a course. With the tools covered in the course all parts of an online course can be made. Use the learning exercises to build your course and get feedback. 

Beyond the tools needed, strategies to efficiently produce courses and make sales will be covered.

To create a course we will cover structuring information into classes and split recordings into scenes. Mind-mapping software will help us organize the knowledge. An office suite to make word documents and presentations is freely available. Sources and references will be saved in Zotero which can link to a browser to easily save a source and a word document to insert a citation. Images can be drawn or made from public domain vector files.

Recording of screen captures and physical videos are combined to make interesting content. Vokoscreen or OBS are demonstrated for video capture. Courses are edited with KdenLive with transitions, audio adjustments, and effects.

To gather an audience a marketing plan and sales funnel is needed. Ideas are first validated for market demand and positioning. Sales funnels that get attention, make sales, and create advocates turn a digital product into a revenue stream. The course will be a digital asset that we will try to turn into passive income.

Tools covered include:

Designing

Mind-mapping - FreeMind

Zotero - Source/citation manager

LibreOffice - Office suite

Inkscape - vector image software

Production:

GIMP - image manipulation software

VokoScreen - screen and camera capture

Open Broadcasting Service - audiovisual recording, streaming, and production studio

KdenLive - video editing

Distribution:

Udemy - Third-party hosted platform LIMS

Moodle - Open source self-hosted LIMS

Make courses with free tools from conception to refinement

Url: View Details

What you will learn

• Planning and building an online course using linux based software

Rating: 4.5

Level: Beginner Level

Duration: 2 hours

Instructor: Eric Poliner, PhD