It’s incredibly important for DataCamp to set and match deadlines with instructors. This helps us plan launches as a company across multiple departments, and makes sure that we, in the Content team, can manage our workloads accordingly.
We’ve identified many of the key strategies that have worked for us and our instructors to produce high-quality data science content in a sustainable way.
Plan ahead
If you know your schedule gets busy in September because you teach and the beginning of the semester tends to take up all of your time, or you know you’ll be busy with quarterly reports in a few weeks, work more hours while you can so you can still hit your deadlines with DataCamp and scale back when you need to.
Schedule time for yourself to work on your DataCamp content and stick to it. That said, be reasonable about how much time you’ll need each week and what you can realistically accomplish.
Set aside more time than needed to complete your tasks early on. If you think you should be able to finish something in 4 hours, block off 8 hours. It’s often difficult to figure out just how long it will take to complete tasks, especially when you are first getting started. You can improve with time allocation as you continue with development.
Communicate
Let us know if you’re moving, getting married, going on vacation, etc. We can help you adjust deliverable dates only if we know ahead of time.
Clearly communicating progress on tasks in Asana and hiccups along the way helps us all improve processes down the road.
Begin work on your tasks as soon as possible. Waiting to work on writing content until the day before a deadline will not provide enough time if issues arise, which puts the Content team in a bind.
Have fun
Tell a story!
Give learners real-world context so they can visualize the problems they can solve in their real lives. Research suggests context serves as an anchor in our long-term memory. For example: “We’ve all participated in surveys before, but have you ever tried to analyze the results? Surveys are used in almost every industry as a way to get targeted, qualitative data from respondents. They can range from ‘Rate this call’ to in-depth product surveys. Now, let’s talk about what you can DO with this survey data.”
Write your lightbulb moments down as they come to you.
Across a week/working on other projects, you may often have great ideas for your DataCamp course.
We're here to help
Curriculum Managers and Content Developers each work with between 15 - 20 instructors at the same time, so it’s vitally important that the process is a fun one for the instructor and for us at DataCamp.
We encourage you to not be a perfectionist but work hard to produce the best content you can. We’ll provide you with guidance, and we want to see your best work, but please keep in mind that course development is a very iterative process and takes time and patience.
If there is anything we can do to improve the instructor experience, please let us know.