Annyce Davis

Helping you write beautiful code

[NEW COURSE]: “Intermediate Kotlin for Android Developers”

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My second course with LinkedIn Learning is now available, “Intermediate Kotlin for Android Developers”! As an avid fan of the Kotlin programming language, I had lots of fun putting this course together. I hope you enjoy watching and learning!

Course Description:

Kotlin is now officially supported by Google as an Android development language. If you’re an Intermediate Developer interested in learning more about Kotlin, this course can help you get acquainted with this concise, fun language by learning about its efficiencies and power in Android development! The course starts with a general overview of what Kotlin has to offer, and how to leverage the Kotlin Android Extensions plugin. It also explains how to work with Anko, and provides an overview of some of the library’s main artifacts: commons, layouts, and coroutines. To wrap up, the course covers how to work with collections.

Topics Included:

  • What Kotlin has to Offer
  • Working with Lambdas
  • Common Android Extension functions
  • Kotlin Android Extensions overview
  • Making use of the Anko library
  • Working with Coroutines
  • Nullability and Collections

For more great video content, check out my course page!

Creating Your Own Video Course, Part II: Execution

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In Part I of this series, I discussed what it takes to prepare your own video course. In this part we’ll talk about the tools and processes you can use to plan for and record the actual videos. So let’s get started…

The Slides

So in many cases you will want to have an introductory slide(s) before perhaps switching to the application or code that you want to demonstrate in the given video. In my case, I prefer to use Keynote, a presentation software from Apple, in order to create the slides for my course. For the majority of the videos I would have an introductory slide which allowed me to introduce the main concepts that would be covered in the video.
 
Simple Introductory Slide
Then as far as providing content for the actual slides, I would try to keep the slides free from clutter. This would include using fitting images or diagrams when appropriate and then just talking about the information instead of having a long list of bullets. For example, I could have a slide which contains a listing of the benefits of automated testing, or I could use a simple slide with an image (see below) and speak to the benefits. Which one would you find more appealing?
 
Use images if possible

The Script

On to the script. Have you ever listened to a video tutorial and the person seems to be rambling or loses their train of thought often? Well, having a script will help to alleviate this problem. It doesn’t have to be anything extremely involved. I used Google Docs to store the scripts for each video. 

Each file consisted of the title of the video and a chart with two columns: Action on Screen and Audio. I would put a screenshot of what would be showing on the video in chronological order and then what I wanted to say about that portion of content in the Audio column. This helped me to stay on track and make fewer mistakes during the recording of the videos.

Recording

Finally, recording the videos was the easiest part of the entire process. Since I had everything prepared in advance, I would just open Camtasia and make sure I was using my headset for the recording and push record. I had a list of things I wanted to make sure I did however, before recording, and that consisted of the following:

  • Turning off all Messaging Applications
  • Turning off any Notifications
  • Setting the correct resolution (1280 x 720) for my display
  • Closing the door (no outside noises) 
  • Hiding the Dock on my Mac
  • Properly place the headset and microphone


In Part III of this series, I’ll share what I did to help market my course.

Check out Part I if you missed it!

Creating Your Own Video Course, Part I: Preparation

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I recently launched my first video course: Developing High Quality Android Applications. It was a significant undertaking for me. But through good planning and execution I was able to create a 2 hour course with over 40 videos in just about 2 months, while still working full-time! So while everything is still very fresh in my mind I wanted to share how I was able to do it. 

This is going to be a three part series where I break down the Preparation, Execution, and then Marketing of the course. Hope you find this information useful and you can use it as a reference for your first course! So let’s get started…

Preparation

First step in creating your own video course is to prepare a rough outline for yourself. It’s good to have a roadmap for what you hope to deliver and the various topics that you plan on covering. I began with the outline you see below. For each video I provided a “guesstimate” of about how long I thought the final product would be. You would want to use a similar structure so you can have a big picture view of the course content.
 
 
 
Next, in order to keep myself organized and make sure I delivered each video during the time promised, I created a Trello board. This is where I would keep track of what still needed to be done and what I was working on currently. It consisted of the following columns: 
 
  • To Do – Upcoming tasks
  • Doing – Tasks I was currently working on
  • Done – Completed Tasks
  • Before Shooting – Reminders for before shooting videos
  • During Prep – Resources for when I was preparing slides
 
 

This really helped me to stay organized and not feel overwhelmed by having to complete so many videos. Then for each section of videos that needed to be created, I would have one Trello card. That card would contain an embedded checklist that allowed me to specify a due date for when all items should be completed. I really liked this feature of Trello because I had a visual reminder of what needed to be done and what I had accomplished already.


I would also put links to references and my notes for that section of videos in the Comments portion of my cards. This was handy for me because I would sometimes come across information that I would need for a future section and I didn’t have to worry about searching through my Browser History to track it down again.

In Part II of this series, I’ll share what I did to create the slides and videos for my course.