I'm one of the authors and maintainers of Popcorn.js and this is unbelievably cool. I think you may be the first ever commercial product built with Popcorn.js - so congrats on that and for making such a worthwile product.
Inspiring! The way you used Popcorn.js is engaging, I could see myself using this course. One thing I noticed in your sample chapter is that when I skipped around to see a previous slide, the slides would not change relative to the time. The slide always stays on the last one presented.
Very slick, I was hooked and watched the whole first chapter and I didn't experience any issues to speak of.
As successful as the Django course might be (and it looks like it will be), I think you should also consider working on an audio-course creation application (in Django ;) and charge for that too so other people can create their own courses similar to this one.
Can you share some background on how you decided to create this content, in this specific method of presentation, how did you deicde on pricing, what are your expectations, etc?
I've already mailed you this, but for the others to read:
Some of the decisions are inspired by "The 4 hour workweek" book by Timothy Ferriss; You could see this as one of my "muses" if you're familiar with it. My price is based on the idea that it should be somewhere in between $50 and $200, too cheap and it isn't worth the hassle, too expensive and people would have to think a bit more about it or they expect extra support. I've checked out other courses as well. Real life courses are a lot more expensive, online courses are a on average a bit cheaper, but most of them are videocourses and you don't have the option to ask questions or do the self tests.
My first try was a plain text course. After creating the second chapter for 50% I knew this wasn't the way to go. Way too much text to read, people could buy a book and get the same.
Next try was a video-course, something like lynda.com is offering. It's nice, but: most of the video is just static for minutes, you listen to teacher and the only animation you will see is a powerpoint transition or someone typing in some code. Video's consume a lot of bandwidth as well and what I really missed was to option to click links or copy code snippets during a video-course.
Next try was video with popcorn.js. This worked, but still had the same video issues and I lacked the space on my screen to show the extra context.
My last try was the current one. It worked like I wanted it to work, but I couldn't get the speech right myself, so I made a written script and had a voice-over do it.
I've only created this first chapter to see if people are interested (another useful advice from the book), If I get enough potential orders I'll finish it, since it takes a huge chunk of my time to finish all 21 remaining chapters and I need to pay the voice-over as well. I don't really have any expectations, if it works out: great, if not: another nice experience, no big losses here.
