1. Course Development
Now that you've learned about course design, it's time to learn about the next stage in the course creation process: course development.
2. Course development
Once your course is handed off from the Curriculum Manager to the Content Developer, you will start developing content.
3. Course development
Who is a Content Developer, what does developing content mean, and how can you take your course from handoff to launch? That's what this lesson is going to cover. So let's get started!
4. This is your course
First, it's important to clarify expectations. The course you create is yours: you own the intellectual property, you are the subject matter expert, and you will be creating all the content for your course.
5. Instructor responsibilities
In practice, this translates to creating the slides, scripts, and exercises that'll make up your course, including: debugging code, fixing typos, formatting slides and exercises, and resizing images.
6. Instructor responsibilities
In other words, getting your course into a state ready to be taken by DataCamp learners: a state we like to call "production-ready". The most frictionless way to arrive at this state is by respecting DataCamp's content guidelines, which you'll learn all about in a later chapter. Once your course content is production-ready, you'll be responsible for creating the audio recordings for the course, just like this one. Now, does this sound intimidating?
Well, enter a Content Developer! Throughout the development process, you will work with a Content Developer,
7. CD responsibilities: Reviewing content
whose job it is to guide you through the course development process and help ensure your course is of the highest possible quality. A critical component of this involves reviewing your content throughout development and providing feedback on how it can be improved. We're passionate about education and Data Science and are committed to helping you create high-quality content.
8. Course development timeline
The amount of time it will take for your course to go from handoff to launch is dependent on your schedule and how much time you can commit per week to creating your course. At handoff, your CD will work with you to create a course development timeline that makes sense for both you as well as DataCamp.
9. CD responsibilities: Project management
Once the timeline has been created, it is the CD's responsibility to manage the course to ensure that it remains on track towards achieving the agreed upon launch date. We use a project management tool called Asana, which you'll learn about in the next chapter, to keep track of course progress.
10. Adhering to the timeline
In order to operate comfortably throughout the entire process and ensure your course is of the highest quality, it's important to adhere to the agreed upon timeline to the best of your ability. This ensures your CD has enough time to review and provide feedback on the content, and you have enough time to implement the feedback.
11. CD responsibilities: Writing SCTs
One of DataCamp's unique selling propositions is the feedback that learners receive upon submitting an incorrect solution. You can see one example on the slide here, where a learner enters an incorrect submission and receives feedback - shown in orange - on how they can edit their submission to solve the exercise.
12. CD responsibilities: Writing SCTs
This interactive feedback is the result of submission correctness tests, or SCTs, that are coded by CDs. It is your CD's responsibility to write high-quality SCTs so that learners taking your course receive meaningful feedback. The earlier you complete the exercises in your chapter, the sooner we can begin writing the tests!
13. Deploying your course on DataCamp!
Finally, your CD is responsible for configuring DataCamp's course launch system, which will make your course available to over 5 million learners!
14. Summary
Here is a summary of the key responsibilities during course development. What you should take away from this is that as the course instructor, you're responsible for creating your own course. Your Content Developer is not your assistant, but will provide you with high-quality feedback and will write high-quality SCTs to ensure that your course performs exceptionally well. Additionally, your Content Developer will hold you accountable to meeting deadlines so that your course launches on time.
15. Let's practice!
With all of that said, let's dive into a couple of exercises now to round out Chapter 1! Hope you have fun, and I'll see you in the next chapter.