Delivering a 5 week steemit course to promote the platform in Wales...

As part of my work promoting steemit in Wales I have been asked whether I could run a course to teach people about the platform.

This came up while I was recruiting people as part of the #signup100 campaign.

It did rather take me by surprise as I hadn't envisaged doing any sort of course. So far I have just spent half an hour or so with the people I have recruited to show them the basics of how to use steemit.

A course is a good idea though. I am sure people would benefit from more extensive training. Steemit can be rather daunting to a newcomer.

So I have spent much of the day thinking about how I could deliver a course and what the content would be.

Logisitcs

I would hire a room at a community hall or similar venue in my nearest town. I will aim for a venue with full disabled access.

The room would of course need to have good, reliable wifi.

I anticipate each session would be two hours long - the first hour would be teaching theory, the second hour would be guided practical creating posts.

The course would run over 5 weeks. This is an arbitrary number but it feels about right for someone to get to grips with enough of steemit to get over the initial difficulties and make a go of it.

There would be a maximum of 10 participants - although I wonder if this might be a little too many to give everyone enough attention.

All participants would need to bring their own laptop. Smartphones could be used but that does make the guided practicals much more difficult. I might have one or two spare laptops available if needed.

Ideally participants would have some basic graphic manipulation software available. Any recommendations for the best free online or free to download and simple to use graphics software if they don't have any?

Because of the account approval delays I will attempt to ensure all course participants have signed up and got their accounts activated before the first lesson.

Content

If anyone has a ready-made course available do please let me know. No wheels need to be reinvented on this.

I think I recall @stellabelle running some Saturday courses. Not sure though if they were wider crypto / bitcoin courses rather than steemit specific.

Here is my rough and ready first draft of a syllabus for the five week course. It will still need considerable refinement - particularly on order of delivery. All suggestions and inputs welcome.

Week 1 : Steem, Steemit and the Blockchain - Getting Started

What is Steem and what is steemit?
A brief introduction to cryptocurrencies and the steem blockchain.
Getting an account on steem. Setting up your profile. Passwords and keys.
Making a first introduce yourself post.

Week 2 : Voting, Steempower & Maker better posts

Voting - when and how.
Steempower, Steem and SBDs.
What to post about? How often to post?
Markdown, layout and basic graphics.

Week 3 : Networking, commenting and building a following

Commenting and comment etiquette [or should this be in week 2?]
Steemit.chat and Discords.
Finding communities.
PAL and other big communities.
MSP Waves and other radio stations.

Week 4 : Advanced steemit

Minnows, dolpins, whales
Witnesses
Bid bots and auto-voters
Buying steem and selling steem

Week 5 : Other ways to post to the steem blochain

Busy.org, ChainBB, eSteem
Steepshot and Zappl
DTube and DSound
DMania and DLive

Costs

It would be great to not have to charge at all for the course.

But there will be costs - room hire (£15 - £20 per week), refreshements, printing etc.

Also if there is no charge you can often get 'no-shows' and the spaces on the course are wasted.

However I have a plan to get the best of both worlds.

I will charge a £25 (US$34) 'deposit' rather than a course fee. At the end of the five weeks I will ask the participants to pay me the equivalent of £25 in SBD or steem and I will then return the £25 deposit to them.

This assumes that they will have earnt on steemit the equivalent of £25 during the course. I believe that is perfectly feasible if they work at it between sessions. It will also encourage people to ensure they attend all five sessions.

Assuming that works out then they will have in effect had the course for free - zero-sum education !!!

This is still a work in progress. It will be about 2 months before the course would run.

I welcome any input, ideas, suggestions on the course design and logistics.

Any materials I develop for this course I will happily make available to anyone else who wants to use them elsewhere in the world.

I hope the course will successfully onboard and retain a group of steemians in my local area.

And I hope they in turn will spread the word to the their friends, family and colleagues about the potential of steemit.

Although steemit is an online world I do very much believe in the power of boots on the ground and face-to-face promotion.

Let's teach the world to steem.

You might also be interested in some of my other posts :

[ classroom image from pixabay - Creative Commons CC0 // other graphics by @pennsif ]

Delivering a 5 week steemit course to promote the platform in Wales - anyone done anything similar?