Create an Online Course using just your iPhone

Okay, It’s time to start creating your course. But where, and how do you start?

You’re sat with a blank sheet of paper, wondering where to begin. Should you just start writing and see where it takes you? Or should you first plan out all the modules you’ll need to write?

For almost everyone, the best place to start is to create a course outline.

This is a high-level plan of all the topics you’ll be covering in your course. Getting this plan in place at an early stage will ensure that all the critical elements are included. It will help topics to flow in a natural direction and should speed up your course creation process.

J.K. Rowling used a similar approach when devising the twists and turns of her Harry Potter novels. And if it’s good enough for her, then it’s good enough for your course.

So, grab your favourite note-taking device and let’s get going.

Most likely, you’re creating a course because you have a lot of expertise in a particular area, but it would be unwise to think that you know or can remember everything about that topic. Doing some research and revision at this stage will ensure you haven’t missed anything and help you to consider different ways to communicate the key learning points.

My recommendation is to research your modules generally, rather than focusing in-depth on the lessons you already have planned. This broader approach will allow you to validate your course outline and check if any gaps need filling.

In this lesson, I cover the types of research you should do for each lesson in your course. There is also a helpful workbook to download.

Storytelling is the secret to success for your course.

In this video, I’m going to explain why stories are so important, and then give you a clear five-step process for telling a great story. There’s also a free download at the end, which you can use to write your own stories.

Telling and hearing stories is a fundamental human experience that dates back to the neolithic times. It is a core part of our existence. As humans, we connect with stories on a level that cannot be achieved with facts alone.

Steve Jobs once said: “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation to come.” We’ve all got memories of a favourite school teacher or grandparent who could hold us spellbound with their stories. You may still remember some of them today. That’s because you were gripped both by the story and by the way that person told it.

Stories create deep emotional connections and so can be used very effectively in education and business communications. By using stories to communicate your message, your audience will be more interested in what you’re saying, and much more likely to engage with you.

So what makes a great story, and how does this knowledge help us when creating courses?

Great stories all share a common structure, used by film writers, authors and journalists alike, which you can use too when creating the video scripts for your course.

In this lesson, we look at that structure.

Something that may seem obvious but you need to be clear about, is that you’re making a video course. Not a book, or an online article.

A video course.

This is something quite unique, which will require a particular writing style that is different from other content you may create.

You need to write your scripts in a way that appeals to and engages your audience, helping them to learn effectively.

Wait, what did I just say?

Scripts?

Yes, that’s right. Unless you’re in the 1% of people who can speak effortlessly and interestingly on a topic straight off the cuff, never deviating or rambling, you’ll need to write scripts for all your videos.

In this lesson, I’ll be explaining how to write scripts that work for video courses.

These are intimate, one to one interactions, conversations really. So your scripts should adopt the characteristics you show in conversation and complement your personality. The audience won’t pick up that it’s scripted and you’ll come across as a guru who knows their subject by heart and can speak engagingly about it at will.

Talking to a camera is daunting for most people, especially if you’re not used to it. It’s a skill, and one that will be incredibly useful when creating your course, as being able to speak naturally and in an engaging way will keep your students interested. However, this isn’t a skill that you can learn overnight. It’s a skill that needs to be practised and nurtured until you become an expert.

When speaking to camera, your goal should be to try and simulate a normal conversation. This does take a lot of practice. As an actor, I’ve only recently been able to forget the camera is there. The aim is to train your mind to believe that you’re talking to another person. When you talk to the camera in this way, your audience feels that connection and respond by giving you their trust, which is exactly what you need when teaching.

In this lesson, I share 5 of my top 10 tips for presenting. These tips will help you feel more relaxed, confident and engaging on camera.

Talking to a camera is daunting for most people, especially if you’re not used to it. It’s a skill, and one that will be incredibly useful when creating your course, as being able to speak naturally and in an engaging way will keep your students interested. However, this isn’t a skill that you can learn overnight. It’s a skill that needs to be practised and nurtured until you become an expert.

When speaking to camera, your goal should be to try and simulate a normal conversation. This does take a lot of practice. As an actor, I’ve only recently been able to forget the camera is there. The aim is to train your mind to believe that you’re talking to another person. When you talk to the camera in this way, your audience feels that connection and respond by giving you their trust, which is exactly what you need when teaching.

In this lesson, I share tips 6-10 of my top 10 tips for presenting. These tips will help you feel more relaxed, confident and engaging on camera.

TV presenters use teleprompters (also known as autocue) to engage their audience by maintaining natural eye contact.

Because they don’t have to keep looking down at written notes, their presentation appears natural and spontaneous, not at all like they’re reading from a script. This level of professionalism is what you should aspire to in your video course, so I recommend you use a teleprompter too.

A teleprompter is a device that uses special glass that’s reflective on one side and see-through on the other. The glass is set at a 45-degree angle, with the script under the glass and the camera behind the glass. Because the glass is see-through on one side, it’s invisible to the camera but will reflect the script to you for reading.

It’s a clever concept and one which used to be limited to media professionals. But in recent years, a variety of devices have become available for the mass market which do the job well and are both affordable and simple to use.

In this lesson, I show you how to set up and use a teleprompter for your online video course. It will make recording your videos quicker, whilst also reducing your editing time and improving your presence on camera.

When creating your online course, you’ll need a location and a set.

First, you need to present from a location that makes sense to your audience. If you’re a chef, your set should be a kitchen. If you’re a business consultant, an office would be appropriate.

If there’s no obvious location, think about what’s available to you?

Ideally, it should be somewhere you can set up and leave everything in place for the duration of filming. Putting up and taking down the set every day is not a good use of time!

A spare room in your house is the ideal location but think outside the box if you need to. For this course, I asked around and a local businessman agreed to lend me his flat in return for me shooting a promotional video for him.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution but in this video I’ll be giving you some tips and walking you through how I built the set for this course.

A green screen, or a chroma key as it’s otherwise known, allows you to replace your background with a different background of your choosing. You could transport yourself to the Grand Canyon, the red carpet, or even to outer space – the only limit is your imagination.

It’s really fun to experiment with this skill when you first learn it, but after you’ve had some fun, it’s important to think about how you can best use it to benefit your course.

You don’t want to shoot the whole of your course with an imaginary backdrop that is totally irrelevant to the topic, as this will come off as unprofessional and confusing to your students. Instead, choose locations and settings that will add value to your teaching, or which are hard to get to or would be difficult to film in.

For your talking head shots, I would advise against using a green screen, as it creates extra work in editing and lighting. You will save time in the long run by creating a proper set for your course, as explained in the last lesson, and it will look more professional. If you have limited space or an ugly background, a printed screen, like my wooden one, will look great and make your life much easier.

In this free lesson I cover 5 reasons why you may wish to use a green screen and give top tips to follow when recording using a green screen.

By this point, you’ve hopefully already planned and maybe even built your set, so now it’s time to turn your attention to yourself. You’re creating a course because you have something to share, a burning desire to pass on your knowledge and expertise to others around the world.

However, you may not be experienced or comfortable in front of a camera. Add to that worry, an audience of hundreds or even thousands watching and listening to you, and the prospect can be quite daunting.

In this lesson, I’ll be going through some tips to help you create an on-camera image that will help you to present with confidence.

Your B-roll are clips that are added on top of your main footage to support the message whilst adding variety and interest. B-roll makes videos come alive and for a teacher of an online course, this will help you drive home your points.

So how do you plan your B roll and decide what to shoot?

There are really only two options. You can either film your own B-roll or use stock footage. In most cases, I would recommend a mix of both. Capturing your own B-roll makes your course feel more personal and you can create shots that really explain your points. However, it can be time-consuming to film all this extra content so mixing it up with some stock footage will save you time while also allowing you to include shots that may be difficult to film yourself.

In this lesson, I go through how to plan the B-roll for your course.

When using an iPhone, figuring out when and how to use frame rate and resolution can feel a bit daunting.

It’s actually quite simple once you get your head around it.

In this lesson, I explain what frame rate and resolution are, and how you should be using them in your online course.

You may have noticed that Apple is gradually adding more and more lenses to the back of their iPhones, and while it’s hard to imagine, there’s a good chance there could be even more lenses in future.

There is a good reason for this.

It’s to allow creatives access to different lens options for iPhone photography and videography, and different opportunities for each.

In this lesson, I discuss the various lenses and suggest which ones you should be using for filming your digital course.

Composition essentially means “everything that your camera sees”, which is therefore what your audience sees.

As you’re creating an online course, your aim is to teach. Bad composition can distract the viewer from your message, so it’s important to get it right.

It’s so easy to just turn on your camera, hit the record button and start shooting, but if you take just a little time to think about the composition, I promise you’ll create more engaging content and more 5-star reviews.

To help you, in this lesson, I’m sharing my top 5 tips to improve your video composition.

When executed well, a timelapse can be one of the most interesting and engaging shots in a video course.

They’re fantastic for showing the progression of time and can help to tell a great story in a compelling way, with minimal production costs.

Timelapses are particularly great for teaching because they allow students to see a process unfold over time. For example, if you are creating a course on baking, you can shoot the process of a cake baking in the oven using timelapse and watch it rise in a matter of seconds rather than minutes.

An even more dynamic way to show the movement of time is a hyperlapse. This is similar to a timelapse but with the camera moving rather than fixed on a tripod.

Luckily for us, Apple has made it super easy for us to create timelapse and hyperlapse videos and this is what I will show you in this lesson.

Slow-motion – we see it everywhere. That beautiful, buttery smooth video enables an audience to really focus on the finer details.

There are many places in films where slow motion can be effective – waves crashing on the beach, a bird flying through the air or a character running through a large field.

It’s fantastic when shot correctly but can feel clunky and outdated if overused.

Whether you should use slow motion in your course will depend on your brand and what you’re teaching. You’re less likely to have a need for it if you’re a bookkeeper teaching payroll than if you’re a personal trainer creating an epic opening sequence.

You should only use slow motion where it adds to your video, never as a gimmick.

In this lesson, you will learn how to record slow-motion using your iPhone.

In this lesson, we’re talking about how to get stable shots when shooting on an iPhone.

One of the most common issues with handheld iPhone footage is a shaky image. Shaky footage is an easy way to distinguish an amateur videographer from a professional. These days, the iPhone does have image stabilization built-in, but it’s mostly to help reduce small handshakes, referred to as micro jitters, rather than compensating for the large movements you make when moving around.

Even if you’re using a tripod for your course, this is still important for the B-roll. The B-roll is the secondary footage that you weave into the main content, to add context and variety to the film and engage the audience. When creating your own B-roll clips you can apply these techniques to keep your footage stable and shake-free.

Lighting is arguably the most overlooked and underrated part of filmmaking. Most people believe that to get the best image, you need to have the best camera.

This is absolutely not true.

An expert filmmaker would create a better-looking image with an iPhone than a novice could make with a top of the range camera. They achieve this by using effective lighting.

In this lesson, we will turn off all the lights and build up our lighting step by step together.

High-quality audio is hugely important to creating professional course videos.

It is literally half of the viewing experience, and critical to learning – if your students can’t hear you properly, they won’t understand what you’re teaching them. Good audio can be the difference between an amateur-like video and a professional one.

The most important piece of equipment for improving your audio is, you guessed it, a microphone.

The iPhone itself comes with a pretty good microphone, but it’s designed for everyday sound rather than specifically voice. This means it tends to pick up all kinds of sounds, including annoying background noise such as traffic, whirring computer hard drives, and echo in a room. This makes the audio it captures pretty noisy, and potentially distracting.

In this lesson, you will learn everything you need to know to improve your course audio using external mics.

In this lesson, I’ll be giving you my top five tips to remember before you start shooting your online course.

“If you fail to prepare, then you are preparing to fail”

Benjamin Franklin

This is one of my favourite quotes and rings true in most areas of life, but especially in filmmaking.

There are so many things to focus on when creating an online course that it’s easy to forget an important step in the midst of shooting. The last thing you want is to review your footage after a 30-minute talking headshot to find that the audio isn’t working, arghhh!

To avoid this kind of thing happening to you, I’ve listed the top 5 things to remember to do before you start shooting, to save yourself a headache later.

This episode is available to watch free of charge. Simply follow the link below and enjoy.

In this section of the course, I’ll be walking you through exactly how I put together a full episode, step by step, from start to finish.

There are lots of fantastic editing applications on the market, but for these lessons, I’ll be using LumaFusion. It’s an incredibly powerful editing tool that competes with industry-standard software such as Adobe Premiere Pro whilst also being affordable and having the added benefit of running perfectly on both iPad and iPhone devices.

LumaFusion is currently a one-time payment of £28.99 from the App Store. If that’s too pricey for you, there are plenty of free programmes out there, such as iMovie, but you are likely to find their functionalities quite limiting.

In this lesson, we will be setting up a project in LumaFusion and importing our clips.

In this lesson, we’re going to trim down our videos and perform some colour corrections.

When I filmed the talking headshots for this course, on average they are 4 times longer than the finished video – due to the number of mistakes or retakes I do for each episode.

Trimming allows us to remove the mistakes and keep only the best bits. This will then give us the skeleton for our episode.

So let’s get started.

In this lesson, we’ll be using the b-roll plan created earlier in the course, to add in our b roll.

We will also explain the concept of layering which is so important in video editing.

Let’s dive in.

Stock footage is content that other people have created and made available for us to use.

It’s great to use if you need a certain shot but haven’t got the resources or time to capture it yourself.

The only issue with stock footage is that it can get expensive, with individual clips costing tens or hundreds of pounds. This is why I love to use Storyblocks, because it’s affordable, costing under £10 per month when subscribed directly through LumaFusion. It’s incredibly convenient too. You can choose from thousands of videos and import them directly into your editing timeline without ever leaving the app itself which saves you precious time.

In this lesson, we will be focusing on how to use Storyblocks in LumaFusion to enhance our videos with stock footage.

Lumafusion comes pre-installed with a vast array of titles and transitions for you to choose from.

In this lesson, we will be introducing some titles and transitions to our edit. This will help to support our message and make the finished video look more polished.

In this lesson, we discuss music licencing and audio editing using LumaFusion.

Studies have shown that playing music in educational videos can increase dopamine levels in students and improve concentration. If you’re considering adding background music to your videos you must have the appropriate licence for any music you use.

The great thing is, included in your Storyblocks subscription is a vast array of music and sound effects to choose from at no additional cost.

It’s really important to choose a piece of music that doesn’t overpower your presentation. As awesome and epic as Hans Zimmer’s music scores are, they may not support your educational content as well as other music could. Make sure you spend some time choosing a piece that is a good fit for your course and try testing a few pieces before committing to one.

Right, let’s head into LumaFusion and import our music.

By this point in the course, we have gone through every process of pre and post-production and the only thing left to do is export our video.

So, in this lesson, we explore the various options available for exporting your videos.

The video you’ve exported can now be used in your course along with the others you create.

Earlier in the course, you learnt how to use a green screen to transport yourself to another location.

Hopefully, you even filmed some clips of yourself speaking in front of a green screen.

In this lesson, we will be editing those clips to remove the green background and replace it with something more interesting.