How I created my SkillShare class

November 30, 2013November 30, 2013 Alex Pineda 0 Comments

Special note to Software Hamilton people: Once this class officially opens on December 4th, I’m going to need help populating the student projects section to make it look lively. I’m offering 20 free coupons for anyone here to use or share. The coupon is SWHAMONT. If you do use the coupon, please see the class through to completion (approx.1-4 hours) and share your work in the projects section. If you need help I’m offering free tutoring to you as well. Many regards!

So I launched my SkillShare class yesterday (JavaScript for Non-Programmers : Code a Pong-Like Game. Check it out!). It took about 4 months (on and off) to put together starting early August. The original class stemmed from a live workshop myself and a couple of other guys put together last January. I also launched www.introtojavascript.com which for now acts as a landing page for the same SkillShare class. I used flatro multi purpose landing pages theme from theme forest and hacked the components to a simple arrangement.

My promo video (which I will actually be replacing/upgrading very soon):

Tools I Used:

Google Drive (free) – For creating slides, which I then downloaded to PDF to share with the class.

Camtasia (paid) – For recording video & audio, screen capping and video editing.

VLC (free) – For viewing outputted files. Also for ripping audio out of my initial recordings for further processing. Camtasia’s audio processing is limited.

Cool Edit Pro 2 (paid) – The predecessor to Adobe Audition before being bought out, for converting to mono and doing some normalization + compression on my voice recording.

SnagIt (paid) – For taking screen shots and grabbing particular sections of the screen. Very handy as it freezes the particular image, so animated frames are caught exactly as intended.

Adobe After Effects – I downloaded Adobe cloud so that I could use the after effects trial. I purchased the vintage promo AE package from video hive and rejiggered it to work with my product offering. I’m not sure if it was the best choice but it stands for now. I’d like more people or faces to be in the advert/promo.

For music I searched “free bed music” and ran into podingting bear on freemusicarchive.com, which turned out not to be free, but relatively cheap so I purchased a license for two songs (promo/intros, outro).

I have a General Electric condenser Mic (that I’ve had for over 10 years), and a Focusrite USB audio interface. When I recorded the video I kept my pre-coded stuff on my left monitor with comments in the code directing me on which steps to do next. This way I would keep a good flow going instead of having to tab in and out of notepad or my slides for instance. It worked well.

I’m promoting Cyber Monday code and I will see how that will hold up to my expectations. I’ve got some (modestly funded) campaigns running on FB, twitter, reddit and adwords, and will be monitoring performance. If they fail to gain me any traction I will try again in the new year with some more campaigns. I see success in the future, even if it is a really slow build! That’s all for now.

If you view (or even take) the class, feedback would be priceless. Yours truly!

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