I've been writing books and leading online courses about Microsoft Outlook for over 15 years. Right now, I am leading online courses in Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013. These courses are syndicated to universities throughout the English-speaking world. Over 10,000 people have paid to take my Outlook courses, and thousands more have purchased the books.
And now it is time to build an Outlook 2016 course.
My previous Outlook courses are heavy on the text, with the occasional video to highlight a feature. For Outlook 2016, I am doing something different. I am moving to a video-based design, with text and other resources in support of the videos. This is forcing me to rethink my approach to teaching and course creation.
The first step is to redesign my old courses for Outlook 2016. They need to be much more modular, broken into many short lessons that lend themselves to video as well as print. This is what I am working on now.
I am publishing my preliminary content (the narrative, and step-by-step written instructions) here on STEEMIT. My hope is that Outlook 2016 users here in the community will use it to learn Outlook 2016, and give me feedback on what I have posted.
This is great! This stinks! You forgot to cover this issue. Are you sure you're a real writer? And so on.
Some book authors do this now. They put out chapters of their new work, and get feedback from readers before the book gets printed. The authors get to address problems when they are much easier to correct. The contributors get an early look at new works by authors they like, and get to help shape the final product. They also usually receive a free electronic copy of the final book when it is published.
I am trying the same approach with this course creation project.
It works like this:
- I write a chunk of the course, and send it off to my editor.
- Once I incorporate the edits into the chunk, I will publish it here on STEEMIT.
- Anyone who wants to can use the chunk. If you spot something unclear, or flat out wrong, I hope you will post a comment describing the problem.
- I will incorporate your feedback into the chunk.
Eventually, I will have run the entire written portion of the course through this process. Anyone who is interested will have gotten a free, professional-grade Outlook 2016 course. And I will have received a ton of feedback that will help make this my best course ever.
After all that, I will create videos that correspond to the chunks. I plan to publish the video version of the course on Udemy.com, or one of the other video course platforms on the Internet.
I will reward people who give me real feedback with coupons for deep discounts on the final course, or something similar, depending on where I finally publish the course.
That's the plan. If you are an Outlook 2016 user please follow me and take advantage of the free content. I would love your feedback.
--Bill Mann