YouTubing and Teaching

Hey folks! 👋

I'm listening to this right now, feel free to do the same. Now it feels good:

Another week, another time late to write this newsletter. This time was okay, the news is that I'm going to conduct a Research Seminar next Summer Semester, and I'm so excited I can't think about anything else.

Ah, I'm as excited as terrified. A good terror I would say 😄

Since I don't want to start in the dark, started reading the book Teaching College from Norman Eng.

I basically read the 34% in one session. It's interesting and gives you practical actions on how to improve your teaching skills.

As every good insightful book, it's not saying anything new or anything you didn't know before: your students have limited attention and need to be more involved and at the center of your lectures. That doesn't mean that there's no need for lessons that goes "I need you to understand this, let me present it", called the I, We, You Approach in the book. This book goes into the details and gives you actions to improve your lectures and all the components of it.

It was fascinating when I found many connections between the Part-Time YouTuber Academy and the book "Teaching College": first, it says that you need to create a "persona", your typical student.

If you don’t know what your customers need, they will never pay attention to your ads, your product, or your service, no matter how good it is. Teaching works the same way. You are marketing your knowledge to students no differently than executives at Wieden+Kennedy are marketing to Nike customers.

This was a recurring topic on the PTYA course: know your audience and why they should watch your videos. Create a sample person and "tailor" your videos around that idea. Then when the audience comes, you'll know how to change or not.

Another analogy that I found is to... niche down! Someone that took that course might laugh. Niche down is the action to reduce the topics you cover to a minimum.

On YouTube, it helps your viewers to stay on your channel and the YouTube algorithm to propose your content.

This is how the book is describing "niching down":

Find one to three things important about your topic, the parts you want your students to walk out of class remembering. I call this niching down—or narrowing—your topic.

Still today, after 5 months I created my channel, I have difficulties to niche down, but it's becoming more clear that Notion+Software Developer and Electron (a Javascript Programming Framework) seems really palatable.

While reading this magnificent book, I feel so happy to have spent time and money on the YouTube course: YouTube, with its many flaws, it's a good adventure that many should really try out. If someone that was so antisocial like me is out there, you can do it.

Before I finish, if you haven't checked out my latest video, maybe it's going to be helpful to you as well!

Let me know if you adapted the Template or got something from it, I'm really curious 😊

Thanks for reaching until here, even if I don't know it, it means a lot to me ❤️

Have a great Sunday and a fantastic week!