Once course design has been completed, the instructor and the course are handed over to a Content Developer (CD), who will work closely with the instructor on implementation until the course is ready for hard launch.

During course development, the instructor is responsible for building a course and getting it "production-ready". This includes creating the slides, scripts, and exercises that make up the course. The instructor is further responsible for debugging code, fixing typos, formatting slides and exercises, and resizing images.
​

Throughout course development, every instructor will work with a CD who will guide them through the process, ensure the course is high quality by providing content reviews, and write the Submission Correctness Tests that will assess the student submissions when the course is live.

To keep the course on track and within a reasonable development, the first step of the course development process will require that the instructor and CD agree on a delivery schedule. It is a CD's responsibility to manage the course to keep up with the deadlines. However, it is on the instructor to preemptively inform a CD when there is a change to their schedule that will prevent them from making a deadline.

Courses are built lesson-by-lesson and chapter-by-chapter to provide both a clear workflow and a clear narrative. It will be much easier for your CD to provide helpful feedback on Chapter 3 if they already know the content of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.
​

After all content has been written and reviewed, the CD will be responsible for writing Submission Correctness Tests (SCTs), which is one of DataCamp's unique selling points; the feedback that students receive upon submitting an incorrect solution is tailored to the part of the student submission with the error. This empowers students to keep moving through the course and helps them learn common coding errors.
​

Finally, once the course has reached a production-ready state, including all SCTs, the CD will prepare the course for launch using DataCamp's course launch system. Once the launch button is hit, a course is available on datacamp.com to over 3 million data science students!
​

Following a short period called soft launch, courses are moved onto the next phase, course maintenance.