Five tools to create your own online lesson

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Practical advice on starting your own online lesson from one of the key speakers of the conference, Maria Gubina.

Online courses are such a popular topic now that many people want to try themselves in it. Experience shows that the most difficult thing is not to come up with a course format, not develop a program, and not even gather participants. Most of the questions are raised by the technical side: what services and programs need to be mastered in order to make the first online lesson with high quality?

Here are some proven tools that will allow you to take an online lesson, record a video, and turn it into a real online learning product.

Conducting a lesson live

The most common solution for online broadcasting is, of course, using a dedicated platform for hosting webinars. But there are a lot of sites, which one and by what criteria to choose?

The main features of webinar rooms are as follows: presentation, chat, audio and video of the speaker, drawing. If this list of options is enough for you, then in choosing a site, be guided by prices, efficiency of technical support, the possibility of testing (availability of a demo package) and the intuitiveness of the interface for speakers and participants.

But if you need additional functions - screen sharing, playing video or audio clips, uploading and downloading materials by participants, conducting surveys, collecting statistics, and so on - study these nuances in advance, since they are not present in every service.

In terms of the price / quality / functionality ratio, I recommend taking a closer look at.

Pros:

• Good broadcast quality.
• Automatic recording and saving of a webinar, the ability to download or watch it online (this option is not available on all sites).
• Automatic saving of the chat tape, the ability to download it.
• Excellent technical support 24/7.
• The ability to participate in the lesson from smartphones and tablets without installing any programs and applications.
• Lots of features: a drawing board, polls, a landing page builder and the ability to upload the platform to other sites (that is, you can broadcast from your own page).

Minuses:

• The price is higher than that of a number of analogues.
• The service does not always function adequately in some browsers.

Other webinars that I would recommend considering:, (English),.

Create a webinar, broadcast or screen recording

Most webinar rooms record their own lesson. However, technical problems are possible on any platform, so I advise you to always make a duplicate recording in order to send it to participants or later sell it as a separate video tutorial.

With the help, you can not only record the entire screen as a whole, but also a part of it (for example, only a window with a presentation without a chat), as well as process the video afterwards.

Pros:

• Sufficiently intuitive interface.
• The program can capture the entire screen, part of it, simultaneously write the screen and the video camera.
• The ability to convert content to various video and audio formats.
• Video editing in the program.
• Compress files without losing quality.

Minus:

The program is paid, although relatively inexpensive

Alternatives: (more expensive, but with more features), (English, free), (for Mac, convenient but with fewer features), (free and very basic).

Conducting a group lesson (videoconference)

For a full-fledged online lesson, you may need a conference format - the ability to communicate between participants.

Some webinars offer a multi-speaker broadcast format, but rarely more than two. If you choose a standard web room, pay attention to the description of the tariffs for the number of speakers.

To communicate with the group online, you can use.

Pros:

• The ability to communicate with the group without delay in the broadcast - and, perhaps, I do not know the absolute analogues.
• Free package for events up to 40 minutes long.
• The ability to create a recording and save it on a computer or in the cloud.

Minuses:

• All participants in the broadcast need to download the program to a computer or phone.
• The presentation is not uploaded to the service, but is shown using screen sharing, which is not very convenient for the speaker.

Alternatives: good old or.

Pre-recording a lesson

If you do not plan to gather a group online, but want to initially make a lesson in the recording, then in addition to the programs already described, you will need an extension for Chrome.

Its peculiarity is that Loom does not record the screen of your computer, but the windows opened in the browser. Accordingly, if you plan to use a presentation in a lesson, then use Google Docs to create a presentation or open it in a browser.

Pros:

• No need to convert content, videos (pretty good quality) are ready to watch right away.
• Ability to share a link to a video. In this case, it is not necessary to download it to your computer (but the download function is provided).
• Video camera recording function - your face will be visible (you can turn it off if you want).
• The extension is free.

Minuses:

• Lack of video editing function.
• The inability to select a separate area of the screen or record something that is not open in the browser.
• The only output file format is MP4.
• There is no way to remove the service toolbar.

Processing video or creating a lesson from slides

If programs like Camtasia Studio or Movavi Screen Capture seem complicated (or expensive) to you and you don't need to record screen, but need video processing, give it a try.

Pros:

• A large number of functions: you can trim a video, merge several parts, create a slideshow from photos or pictures from a presentation, there is a function for writing text and selecting an audio track.
• Intuitive interface.
• The service is free.

Minus:

To process a file, you need to upload it to your YouTube channel. And in order to download the result, you need separate add-ons

The listed tools make it possible to create your own online lessons with little or no investment. At the same time, I repeat, the online technology market is quite wide, it has many interesting solutions that you will surely get acquainted with in the process of mastering the online learning niche.

The second practical conference on online education will take place on October 26-27 in Moscow. The most famous Russian experts will share their knowledge in the field of creating educational products.