Write your course proposal

Before you start producing your egghead course, we ask you to write and submit a course proposal.

For you, the proposal defines your intent for the course, and gives you a chance to craft great titles for the course and its lessons to guide your work.

For us at egghead, your proposal lets us think more deeply about the content and structure of the course to make sure it’s solidly planned and delivers a ton of value to your learners.

How to structure your proposal

Here’s a perfect example of a course proposal, and here's a blank template for you to use.

🔥 We strongly prefer you create your proposal in Google Docs. 🔥 It’s the easiest way for us to collaboratively make comments and edits to help you make your proposal perfect.

The proposal should consist of 4 parts:

• User story
• Goals
• Summary
• List of lessons

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

The user story

Your course proposal starts with a user story. This is similar to the agile software practice of writing a story to describe who, what, and why we’re creating this thing.

For example:

As a developer, I want to build applications with React and Redux so I can create applications that aren't littered with state.

This short exercise helps you think like your learners to define what challenge(s) your course will help them solve.

Goals

The second section of your proposal lists your goals for the course.

• What am I trying to teach?
• Why am I teaching it?
• What knowledge should the learner walk away with?

Summary

The course summary is one paragraph (or two short paragraphs) that describes the course, the technology you’ll cover, and what will be learned.

Here’s the summary from the example we shared:

In this course we will build an image gallery application that connects to the Flickr API to load its data. We are going to start from an empty directory, and build the application incrementally, discussing the problems that we might encounter along the way. The image gallery is a simple application, but even the simplest applications need to deal with application state. We will use Redux to help us with that aspect of the image gallery. For asynchronous communication, we will learn about redux-saga, a wonderful library that uses JavaScript generator functions to make complex async application “side effects” a pleasure to construct.

Keep in mind that your approved summary will be presented along with the course on egghead.io, so only include content in your proposal that you’d want to publish. These guidelines will help you write a succinct and successful summary.

List of lessons

Finally, the course lists each lesson in the course, including the titles and summaries for each lesson.

There’s an art to writing a lesson title. By now, instructors should know how to write them. For a refresher, they should be concise and follow the "how do I..." format. The lesson summary should be just that: a summary of the technology covered and the goals for the lesson.

For example:

Load data with redux-saga effects from an API in React – redux-saga makes loading data from a remote API in a Redux-enabled React application very simple. In this lesson, we will create a saga that connects to the Flickr API and loads data for an image gallery component.

Sharing your proposal

Your coach will, first of all, be psyched that you’re ready to take the plunge into courses. Share your proposal with then on Slack. Did we mention that Google Docs is the way to go?

Now hop to it.