Why create a course

After you've created 5 or so stand-alone lessons, it will be time to start discussing your first course.

Courses are the bread and butter of egghead.

A course is a composed set of bite-sized lessons. The course itself should be bite-sized, covering a single topic in depth through a sequence of individual lessons.

The lessons in a course can be enjoyed and understood solo—but together, those lessons allow learners to follow a collective thread and understand a topic in much more depth.

A course will include:

• a robust summary that can include links to pre-requisites and other resources
• a list of all the other lessons in the course
• course notes in the form of a GitBook the community can build together
• an "enhanced transcript" that assembles all of the transcripts for a course into a usable document that allows the learner to read the entire course as a book
• the code for each lesson representing its current state, with a readme describing how to execute the code if it isn't embedded.
• individual lesson summaries with links, etc.

If that sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is. Each lesson takes a lot of effort, so a course amounts to the effort for all the lessons you need to create, and then a little more.

But the payoff is worth it. Why?

egghead members love them

Humans love curated knowledge. They want to learn a topic in depth, but at a pace that works for them.

egghead courses give hungry learners a sequence to follow, with the promise of greater understanding at the end of ~8–12 lessons. We’ve found that developers are willing to sit down and watch courses—and pay for them.

Which brings us to our next point...

You make more money!

No two ways about it, courses get more eyeballs than individual lessons. It just makes sense: When you publish courses, you publish several lessons at a time. That’s more content and more chances for views.

Not only that: Learners often watch those lessons consecutively. (Obviously. That’s what a course is meant for.)

Once your course is published, it can continue to create a passive revenue stream for you. Learners will keep watching, and the royalties will keep coming in.

You want to do more with your code

When you’re going through the process of crafting a lesson—creating your code example and using the “show your work” trick—you might need to cut out some cool information. Either because it’s off-topic, or because it widens the scope of your lesson way beyond 10 minutes.

Never fear, courses are here.

Turn that excess info into a string of lessons, and you’ll have yourself a course. A course will take one code example and use a few different diffs to show different concepts. If you’re feeling hamstrung by the bite-sized nature of individual lessons, courses give you a little more room to play and showcase what you know.