Udemy Course

I can’t believe I finally figured it all out…

Update: this online class is no longer available but the information may still be of help.

Learning the Basics of Chinese Dietary Therapy is live on Udemy. It only took three to four months but I persevered and now, hopefully, I will reap the rewards of my hard work. Putting this class together was much harder than anticipated. Maybe it’s partly due to the fact that I’m feeling farther and farther behind on technology; it takes me so much longer to figure out stuff.

What I did first was upgrade to MS Office 2019 after facing several frustrating issues with my old limited-ability software. It was a good decision that followed getting Windows 10 uploaded to my older laptop (which I bought refurbished over six years ago – wahoo Toshiba!). Now it runs like it’s almost new and I can’t believe how much faster it is, nevermind enjoying the perks of the new software. 

The Devil’s in the Details

I gained a new appreciation for the detailed work involved in creating each slide in PowerPoint (13 sections with 6-15 slides per section); that alone took around two months. Thankfully I had already done several live seminars and had my book in a PowerPoint presentation. Breaking it down into doable sections (per Udemy’s instructions as to font size, etc.) took a greater attention to detail and I became frustrated more than once through the process. Once the slides and sections were completed I had to go back and narrate/voice-over each slide as well as create an intro page for every course section (see above).

Sounds easy, right?

Except….

Lesson After Lesson

I learned a valuable lesson during the narration process. I learned that my voice changed with my mood so I had to re-record some of the slides because I didn’t like what I heard (it was easy to tell when I was in a bad mood or a good mood). Some had to be re-recorded because I spoke incoherently (it didn’t seem so when I was recording).

We all think we sound normal, articulate and intelligent but hearing oneself in a recording, over and over again, gave me insight to how much I had to focus on these aspects: speech pattern, enunciation, timing (moving from one sentence or paragraph to the next), word usage (avoiding big or difficult words), context, word emphasis, etc. There is definitely a rhythm to narrating that must be learned over time, with experience (which I need more of).

Once the narrations were completed, I had to save each section and every slide as video/mp4; this took several hours over a course of several days. It was the main reason for my technical upgrades, because my old software couldn’t save the .ppt as video and the old Windows system took too darn long.

Once that was done, I had to go into my Udemy Instructor Dashboard and download each section, one by one and complete their checklist of requirements. In addition, I had to download any section-related documents in .pdf – this was the easiest part since I already had what I needed from the seminars. From there, I submitted the class for review and awaited approval. In less than a week, the class was approved and went live online.

Whew

All I can say is, at this point, I’m glad it’s done. The only extras I’ll need to add in for an upgraded version are in .pdf and won’t be difficult to do. The hardest part is behind me but I’m glad I did it. A challenge accepted and completed. One more adversity ticked off the list.

Lessons learned and shared so someone else can have an easier time with it.

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