I enjoy teaching computer science and programming to beginners, career changers, and anyone curious about learning. I switched from veterinary medicine to computer science in 2022, earned a college diploma, and ultimately learned most of my practical skills online. I now work as a developer and want to teach programming in a clearer, more meaningful way than I experienced as a student.
I've created a few programming courses and uploaded them to an online learning platform, along with the first parts of those courses on a video channel. However, progress has been slow, and I'm starting to feel discouraged. I'm not sure whether the main problem is discoverability, my titles and thumbnails, the teaching format, or whether the material simply isn't offering enough value to learners.
My goal is to help people build genuine understanding rather than just follow tutorials. I'm especially interested in explaining the story and ideas behind computing, since I often found that typical beginner resources skipped the deeper connections. How can I make this approach stand out, keep learners engaged, and reach the people who would benefit from it?
4 Answers
If the issue is that people aren’t discovering the videos, titles and thumbnails probably need a sharper hook. Generic topics such as “learn Python” are competing with an enormous number of established videos. Try framing each lesson around one concrete problem or outcome, such as building a small tool to organize study notes or automating a repetitive task. A focused project gives viewers an immediate reason to click and lets your personal story support the lesson instead of making the video feel like another broad tutorial.
Consider breaking the long videos into shorter lessons. Three- or four-hour recordings encourage passive watching, even when you tell learners to pause and practice. Try 20–30 minute segments followed by a concrete exercise, a small project, a quiz, or a checkpoint that requires the learner to apply the idea. Video alone is a fairly passive teaching format, so structured activities can turn it into an actual learning path and help reveal whether students are keeping up.
Programming education is extremely crowded, so having good content isn’t always enough. You need a clear reason for someone to choose your lessons over hundreds of similar beginner courses. Your background could be a strong differentiator: explain programming through projects connected to your transition from veterinary medicine, or focus on helping career changers understand what the learning process actually feels like. A specific audience and a specific promise are usually more memorable than a general “learn programming” course.
That makes sense. I hoped the focus on the history and underlying ideas of computing would be distinctive, but it may not be clear enough to learners or compelling enough on its own.
A lot of people want to learn programming, but many underestimate how much practice and repetition it requires. The material can be made more approachable, but there’s no way to remove all of the difficult thinking. Your experience of taking two years to become employable could still be valuable if your course helps someone reach the same point faster or with fewer dead ends. It may help to be honest about the effort while showing learners the satisfaction of understanding how things work and building something useful.
I suspect discoverability is part of the problem, and I’m going to rethink the titles and thumbnails rather than relying on generic designs or automatically generated ones.