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Please do not make noise

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Good afternoon, dear readers.

Recently I came across an article How an IT expert can make extra money on his knowledge . It describes a relatively honest way of weaning money by monetizing technical knowledge by creating “training” videos.

Someone is wrong on the Internet, so I sat down to write an article until the fuse was gone.

Please do not make videos


Videos are “hellish shit” ™ . Argumentation - in the article under the cut.

Petabytes of all nonsense are stored on the modern Internet. Every day this garbage only gets bigger. Do you seriously want to add your voice to the cacophony surrounding us in the modern world?


Are you listening to me, or are you looking at a girl in red?

Do you want to earn extra money on your knowledge? Bored of staying at home? Get advice or tutoring. Well written about the consultationsmaxfarseerin my article My JavaScript Consulting Experience (React / Redux) .

Under the cut, I will grumble about the video format and share my experience in tutoring “18+”.

Summary:

  • Internet is a big dump
  • Why you might like tutoring
  • Why aren't you interested in doing videos?
  • Additional costs for the training video
  • ROI tutoring
  • Pupils do not always know what they want

Thank you for opening the full text. I don’t like the pre-kat format. As one of the movie heroes of the 90s said: “We are not like that, life is like that.” I will continue less shockingly and more systematically.

I know firsthand the field of freelance in education. My teaching experience began in 2014 and by this moment I have on my track record:


I conduct individual courses in parallel with work and provide people with confident knowledge for the device in the IT company. I do not collect the employment metric because I cannot allocate time for this.

Internet is a big dump


Videos are a good product that you can pack nicely, do SEO optimization and sell by the piece. Perhaps from the point of view of "making money" this is a good and modern idea. You can find your niche, narratively throw on the fan and get profit from advertising.

But in an effort to make money on videos, people get to the point of absurdity. For example, in all seriousness they publish such garbage as "unpacking gadgets" or "first reaction to the film." But what impresses me most is that other people watch it.

To this garbage is added the fact that people write down their account of the same hackneyed topics.

Why is there another tutorial video? Probably because the authors have their own special vision. Maybe they cover the topic a little differently. Maybe they are directly translating some kind of foreign course. Maybe just PR their services. Well, maybe they went about the matter with his wife, who had heard enough of the bloggers and motivated to engage in this garbage.

The motives of the authors of the video tutorials are actually not important anymore. At any request of students who are just starting to engage in self-education, the search engine helpfully dumps a huge mountain of faceless data on keywords. To fetch valuable information from this volume , you need to look at all this volume. To get real knowledgemay require several views. Moreover, the video cannot be “skewed”, as it can do with the text. You have to listen to the whole passage. At such a moment, I begin to respect the trainer with a libretto for each video.

I once decided to watch videos to learn how to set up the front derailleur on a bicycle. It would seem an ideal theme for a video. I spent an hour and a half on idle chatter and searching for a suitable model for me. As a result, I repaired it using a scheme in the form of a picture , trial and error. If videos on the material world do not help, what to do in abstract areas of knowledge? Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I can only call the concentration of information in the video “homeopathic”.

At the beginning of the first lesson, I ask students the same question: Why did you come to me?
A tutor is expensive compared to online courses and videos on YouTube. Almost everyone answers something in the spirit
I watched the videos for three months, but I didn’t understand Nicherta.

After about four lessons (i.e., about a month later), these same students respond
During this time, I have made more progress with you than three months before.
Is I such a fine fellow? Is this an illusion among students? Or is it really “hellish shit” ™ ?

Why you might like tutoring


Nowadays, the vast majority of minor technical problems are solved by the correct search query. Therefore, clients of consultations and tutors are divided into two groups:

  1. Cannot formulate a problem
  2. The problem is so complex that a turnkey solution does not fit

The client of the first type is a student who seems to be working as a programmer, but only yesterday he graduated from the university or generally self-taught. Maybe the company chose the smartest of the adjacent units and assigned too complex a task. The main feature - knowledge of professional terminology is not yet developed. If you listen to it, ask the necessary questions, understand what is the matter and finally solve the problem, then you will be recommended as an experienced specialist. He will come to you again if another unsolvable problem arises.

Perhaps this is very individual, but for me, helping clients of this type is the main motive in teaching. Seeing the progress of your students is priceless.

Moreover, communication with clients of this type can help you develop your soft skills and learn to better understand your colleagues. At work, they issued two jones? Yes, at least ten. A colleague is not coping? We'll figure it out in an hour. No candidates with the right stack? Hire from the adjacent and retrain.

If you want to evaluate the sensations, try on the role of an expert with instructions in the company with someone in the game Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes on your computer or Them Bombs on your tablet.

The second type of client can be a serious solid company that knows how to count money and understands that sometimes it’s better to attract a senior for an hour than to keep him on the staff all the time. This is a typical freelance, but only for the most difficult cases. No one will go for advice on developing a dumb CRUD, which means that there will be the most interesting tasks.

If you really help your students, then word of mouth starts to work anyway. As a result, the value of you, as a consultant, is either in the ability to understand the interlocutor, or in the ability to solve something extremely complex. The more you have, the higher the price tag you can put. The higher the price tag, the more customers of the second type.

Why aren't you interested in doing videos?


Honestly, I myself had no desire to conduct classes in this format. However, I took an interest in this topic and found an article with calculating the cost of commercials on the site. I raised the suckers of the “club of money lovers” . . Their title thesis:
A high-quality video is a few days of a team of three to ten people and spending from $ 200 to $ 10 thousand.
If in a little more detail, then you can start with an iPhone and a sheet behind. Professional equipment costs $ 4-5 thousand. Making a video lasting 20-30 minutes takes 14 hours. The cost of the installation program is declared at $ 200. You can illegally save on this, but here we are law-abiding people.

80% of the effort will be spent on marketing. For a publication to be seen by 30-40 thousand people, you need to pay about $ 20-30. These figures were relevant on 11/13/2018, so do not forget to adjust for the circumstances.

In my opinion, the most interesting thing is in the highlighted phrases. Let's calculate the complexity. If 14 hours is 20%. then all you need is 14 / 0.2 = 70 hours.

Just think, 70 hours of work per 30 minutes of video .

As a result, this means that instead of monetizing the existing knowledge, you will be engaged in video editing and studying the model for promoting courses on the educational platform.

Do you really want to spend your time on video editing and SMM?

Additional costs for training materials


In my opinion, the estimate at 14 o'clock on the preparation of the video in 30 minutes is too optimistic.
In the article to which I answer , for each listed platform there was an item “course placement cost”. So this item also needs to be added to the initial costs. In my opinion, it is already obvious who makes money on whom in this model, but I will pay attention to other features of the preparation of courses.

A video is educational material. Any training material requires additional costs. I’ll talk about the video below, but these points are true for other types of materials.

The preparation of any training material includes familiarity with sources and competitors. I recently had to give a short full-time course in discrete mathematics lasting 24 hours. To prepare for it, I spent a couple of weeks-evenings reading literature and watching videos of what, how and in what order other teachers tell. Of course, you can simply dump knowledge into the script and then broadcast from a piece of paper, but the quality will be dubious. If you do not bother with this, you will get even more useless noise on the Internet.

Another non-obvious point is that you still need to watch how students react to the video. This is only possible if there is an opportunity to collect feedback: polls, comments, task verification, direct communication. All this will also have to spend extra time.

Want to make really high quality material? Be prepared for the fact that after collecting the first batch of student reviews, you will need to change the video. Do you think it is easy to quietly change 2 minutes in the middle of the finished video? Have to either re-shoot the whole or keep special clothes for filming.

With presentations and training manuals in this sense it is easier, especially if you do not need to coordinate with anyone.

It turns out that the total cost of shooting and installation will be several times greater than the initial investment. Do not count on what you can do the first time.
Training material requires constant development.

Videos do not teach


In my opinion, the video format is only suitable for narrative purposes. For example, to superficially introduce a listener to a topic. If the goal is to apply knowledge in life, then you need to develop skills or somehow develop a person. For this purpose, practical exercises that require careful competent verification by an expert are more suitable. Try to learn to sing, drive a car, lay a parachute or play the "mafia" on video lessons.

Why video will never crowd out real teachers?

With all the authors' will, the video on YouTube will not be able to:

  • Answer an arbitrary student question
  • Identify gaps in preliminary preparation
  • Ask a question to check your understanding
  • Submit the same information in a different form depending on the feedback

Are you sure that your video will really teach someone?

To be sure of this, try the same speech to tell some real person who is really not familiar with the topic. He may have such a misconception that you did not even suspect about or even planned to consider in your video.

This is generally a very big topic, write in the comments if you want to debate.

ROI tutoring


In order to start tutoring at all, you will have to invest some time in the preliminary promotion.

Personally, I conduct classes on the basis of a small educational institution of professional retraining. About 5 years ago, I installed an SEO plug-in on their WP-site, fixed basic warnings, wrote normal descriptions of my courses and clicked on links. It took a week of evenings. Offhand - 10 hours. After a couple of months, the site reached the top of organic search results for "programming courses in the City."

From technical means - you need a computer on which IDE tolerably works with a small project, a decent microphone and headphones so that there is no echo. I didn’t buy a separate equipment for classes, but a laptop of thousands for 20 rubles seems to be enough.

The bulk of the costs is time. Materials must be collected in a heap, resolved on their own and organized in the form of a document. I can’t name the exact amount of time spent, because not fixed. Approximately 400 tasks, 2 hours per task, a total of 800 hours. I note that this time was extended for all 5 years.

The first six months I spent one lesson per week, a year later I went to 3 lessons per week, and then - 5 per week. Well, that is, every day after work, I conducted a course for someone. I will not publish my prices, because they are biased. I do not conduct classes in Moscow, I consider this a hobby and take it cheaper than the market.

maxfarseerIn my article, My experience in advising on JavaScript (React / Redux) wrote that the estimated price for a tutor in Moscow in 2018 was 1300 rubles per hour. He himself took 1600-1900 for consultations.

Total in my experience is spent:

  • 10 hours on SEO and site content
  • 800 hours to prepare materials

I get paid for the classes themselves:

  • 3000 hours of direct classes

Total approximately 2200 hours in 5 years. This is 440 hours per year or 37 per month. With a rate of 1300 it turns out 48 100 per month.

Please note that you do not reach full “power” instantly. Therefore, you can expect 2 hours a week (which equals 10400 per month) for six months in a lazy mode of promotion and combination with the main work.

With an employment of 6 hours a week, it would have turned out 156,000, but such a heavy load is rare. There are usually many windows.

Due to the situation in the world, I switched to the remote mode of conducting classes through Discord. I really did not want to switch to a new format. However, to my surprise, Discord's split-screen and voice communication is enough to successfully conduct classes.

Tutoring Market Assessment


The tutoring market has a much higher capacity than the video market. If for individual videos the view count ranges from zero to hundreds of thousands, then the consultations simply will not work out on such a scale. For 5 years of my part-time work in the evenings, I got only fifty students. If I were to conduct classes a full day, then the bill would go to hundreds, but not to thousands.

maxfarseerin my article My JavaScript Consulting Experience (React / Redux) wrote that with an increase in the number of comers, he simply raised the price tag. With each increase, he lost 30% of students, but the need did not disappear anywhere and these people moved on to other people.

Tutoring is different. For example, you can prepare students for the exam and, in addition to learning, still engage in communication with parents and psychology with the students themselves. You can limit yourself to stamping finished coursework and diplomas. I had to do this as a student, but now teaching is a hobby in which I can calmly refuse any garbage. Now about a third of my students are university students in my city who come for help with a term paper or in general to learn how to program. I ask on the shore what they need: finished work or knowledge. So far, everyone has chosen knowledge, and I built the lesson so that they themselves could do their job. Often these are very smart guys who want to get knowledge, but can not. The education system does not provide an individual approach at the right level.

The universities are full of smart and responsible guys who would be happy to get real knowledge from real experts and are even willing to pay for it. They went to study for the sake of knowledge, but receive only a diploma.

One of the advantages of working with responsible students and adult working people is that there are no season sessions and the exam. People come for a long time and study while the teacher has something to tell them. However, this significantly depends on the economic situation in the country. Recently, the people have diminished. When there is nothing to eat, people go to the cashier at five, and do not learn programming.

Pupils do not always know what they want


One of the phrases of the article to which I am responding prompted me to write this entire post:
Algorithm for creating an online course:
1. Select a topic. It must meet two criteria: 1) you are an expert in this, 2) it is interesting to your audience

This is an important point, because people in general have a poor idea of ​​what they are getting into. Often they want something strange and cannot formulate a question. Therefore, responding to declared demand is a disastrous business. You will teach people who are not ready to master the topic, what they really do not need. One of the delights of tutoring is that you can first speak with a person, and only then learn something from him.

Several times people came to me with wishes in the spirit of “I want to learn React” or “I want to learn how to make mobile applications”, but at the same time they had no idea about simple things like loops and arrays. Once they asked me to "teach Postman" and "teach Swagger" without any idea about client-server exchange, web-servers and HTTP. Another example - people without a mathematical base in Linal rushed to study ML and neural networks. It got to the point that VKontakte appeared nonsense in the spirit of "3 webinars to neural networks in business."

findings


I hope I gave you an idea of ​​what pitfalls await you when preparing training videos. The topic of training materials is actually worth a separate book.

Please write in the comments:

  • Which last video really helped you get some sort of skill (not necessarily programming)?
  • What was the last time you tried to learn?

PS If you find typos or errors in the text, please let me know. This can be done by highlighting part of the text and pressing "Ctrl / ⌘ + Enter", if you have Ctrl / ⌘, or through private messages . If both options are not available, write about errors in the comments. Thank!

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