Tools for creating online courses

Let me tell you a little bit about me, I work as an HR consultant for a company in Romania. My work revolves around recruitment, training and other projects. A year ago I was thinking about online training and the potential that we can find here.

I was looking for a way to create and sell online courses but I was stuck because I had no audience, no blog, no email list, no nothing. Then I found Udemy and that was the moment I decided to go ahead and create an online course in English about Excel. Shortly after that I published a second course on Evernote.

I learned a lot in the process about course creation and production. I still feel that there is much more to learn and this is why I am writing this article. In part I want to share the tools I used in the process of creating courses but I also want to learn more from people with more experience. This article is an invitation for sharing, please feel free to use the comments section to tell me about the tools you are using.

A quick mention

When I created these 2 courses things were very experimental. I was not sure how things would be working out so I did not want to invest a whole lot, I wanted to find, if possible free solutions.

Screen capture

As my courses are technical, the best way for me was to create them as screen casts. For this I need a screen capture software. My choice at that time was Active Presenter, a quite capable free piece of software.

I would be curious of alternatives, even paid ones, easy to use please 🙂 .

Microphone

I am totally clueless when it comes to audio equipment so I asked for advice from someone who has a clue, I will call hip the sound guru. I ended up choosing the Samson C03U, a USB mike.

The guys from Udemy recommend the Blue Yeti a lot, my sound guru said it is inferior, please don’t ask me why.

Video editing

I am a bit ashamed here, I used the Windows Movie Maker. Had lots of problems with the program crashing or messing up the sound.

I also tried Adobe Premiere, the problem is that I often get lost in all those settings, I would need a simpler alternative.

Audio editing

No I did not use the Sound Recorder app built into Windows :). I used Adobe Audition to clear up the ambient sound, worked great for that task.

I joined a great Udemy course by Mike Russel on using Adobe Audition where I learned the basics.

Image editing

For the course cover and also for the presentations I used Adobe Photoshop for image editing. Would be curios if there is a free alternative.

Other props

I did not use other props, I know there are other tools you can use to increase the quality of the video and audio, as I am rudimentary in both I cannot make recommendations. I am hoping that you, the more experienced person that is reading this, can give me a hand.

This is it, that was my experience, hoping that there will be lots of useful comments more bellow I invite you to read them also.