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7 Quick Tips For Making Great Courses

How to build the best Custom Courses for your team.

Building Custom Courses is one of the best ways to make MxU feel like a customized, curated experience for your team, and is great at helping your team focus on what you want them learning. It's easier than ever, too! Let's walk through an example and learn some tips about making effective courses.

Let's walk through creating a course for some hypothetical new lighting volunteers, as an example.

Tip 1: Think about what you're trying to accomplish

For our hypothetical lighting team, we're trying to help someone brand new prepare so they're not totally lost the first time they shadow during a weekend. That seems pretty basic, but taking a second to actually define this goal for yourself will make building your course easier.

Tip 2: Courses should try to teach one thing

While it can be tempting to try and build the One Course To Rule Them All, after which any new team member will be a seasoned expert on all things production, that's just not how people learn. It's also not how people search in MxU! Coming back to what we're trying to accomplish, if a new volunteer was able to understand terminology that the rest of the team was talking about, we can help them not feel lost, and maybe even create a moment where they think, "oh, I actually understand what they're discussing!" That can help them feel more connected from the start. So that will be our focus: learning lighting terminology so a new volunteer feels like a part of what's going on around them.

Tip 3: Use filters on the Explore page to find the perfect videos

The powerful filters on the Explore page are your best friend for building courses. Keeping our goal in mind, I've filtered the Explore page to the 101 and 201 difficulties, the Lighting interest, and the Videos type (load the same filters in-app with this pre-filled link if you want to follow along).

Create your new course once you've found the first video you want to include:

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And keep adding to it from that same page...

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Or anywhere you see videos:

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See a longer walkthrough of this workflow here.

Tip 4: More short courses are better than a couple long courses

Try to keep courses to 6 or fewer videos. This will help them feel focused and make it more likely that members will finish them.

Tip 5: Take the time to write a good description

Help your team understand why they might want to watch this course, anchored in what they'll learn (or get refreshed on!) by the time they finish it. These descriptions show up on the Explore page, so a great description makes a custom course seem more attractive, too!

CleanShot 2022-08-17 at 16.25.00@2x

Your course's description makes it eligible to show up in a lot more searches, too!

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Tip 6: Use Assignments to make sure the course gets finished

Since we're building this course to help a new volunteer feel more comfortable on their first shadowing weekend, it makes sense to assign it to them a few days in advance to make sure they've got the basics down. You'll get notified when they're done, too!

Tip 7: Don't stop building! (But you don't have to build alone.)

Since your custom courses show up right alongside MxU courses, creating a new, focused course for your team regularly can help it feel like the MxU library is evolving to fit them better and better (along with our Machine Learning-based recommendations that get better the more they watch, too). If you have members with a Admin role, they can do all the same course creation — so if you have a video expert, they can be responsible for making courses covering the stuff they understand best.

Custom course creation is available to members with with Owner and Admin roles on any MxU Team plan.