CMM and online learning development process design

Universities need to significantly increase their capacity to develop high quality online and blended delivery through the recruitment and training of Learning Designers. Institutional scale requires a shift from focusing on individual Learning Designers’ capabilities to concentrating on the organisation’s capabilities for designing learning. First, universities must consider how Learning Design projects are managed and implement sound project management principles. Next, they need to implement a structured development approach through research, evaluation, and peer review, the creation of rigorous quality standards, a formalised development pipeline, a strong community of practice, and progressive professional development.

Good project management of course design and development projects keeps them delivered on time, on budget, and within scope, and ensure a high standard for the student experience. Most learning development models are in their infancy, with few standards defined. If institutions want to produce novel and innovative online courses, they need to borrow design and development techniques from other fields, including software engineering.

The Capability Maturity Model (CMM), developed at the Carnegie Mellon University for large software projects, evaluates a product development processes level of maturity. It is focused on standardising the process of design and development and so counter to many agile methods but will work well with established teams in large organisations. CMM accepts that design and development processes are idealistic and do not represent most projects’ messy and improvised nature, but that tightly controlled and fully documented processes are better. The messiness level varies from project to project, and CMM aims to categories these into five levels of maturity.

Learning Design teams can use CCM’s five levels to improve their operations and assess how individual Learning Designers perform. Teams work through the levels in sequence to standardise their process to produce consistently high-quality online courses no matter the team working on it. The highest level would be represented by a clearly defined process that can be taught and learned, with clear quality metrics that lead to near-zero adverse outcomes. It includes mechanisms for capturing innovative practice and incrementally improving with each course iteration.

The five stages of maturity

All stages above level two subsume the standards of the previous level.

Level 1: Initial – an ad hoc process which can be chaotic. Each Learning Designer follows their version of a basic process. This is the starting point for using a new or undocumented repeat process.

Level 2: Repeatable – each project includes cost scheduling and basic project management practices. Some processes are repeatable, with some consistent results.

Level 3: Defined – the process for managing and developing courses is standardised and documented.

Level 4: Managed – measurement is made of the process and course quality. These measures are used to control and improve practices. Effective achievement of the process objectives can be evidenced using metrics.

Level 5: Optimising – processes are continually improved through quantitative measures and testing innovative ideas and new technologies. (Few developers are considered to be at this level).

The next three to five years will see massive growth in online learning, and universities core delivery will keep much of the changes they have implemented over the last ten months. Departments responsible for supporting online and blended learning should be spending time now on process improvement to optimise their design and development model to prepare for this rapid growth.

Get in touch with me on Twitter if you want to discuss the process of design and development of online learning.

How to interact with people on Twitter

I miss interacting with people. Twitter has people. I will use Twitter to interact with people.

I asked the marketing guru that is my wife for some guidance. Roma suggested I comment on at least five posts per day for the next three weeks using hashtags related to my field. After three weeks, after I am a part of the community, I should then share something that I have been working on that they would value.

I did a bit of a search and found some additional tips

Sort out my profile
Tweet more
Connect with people I already know
Join a regular Twitter chat
Follow and engage with more people in my industry
Learn from Twitter accounts I thing are awesome

Sort out my profile: Your profile is searchable, and people look at it before they interact with you, so make it useful. Get a clear, close up photo of your face, use the full 160 characters for your bio, and complete all the fields including your location.

Tweet more: The best way to grow your Twitter circle is to get people following you to retweet things you post. To do this, you need to tweet consistently with useful things. People who tween more have a larger circle, and so you can use tools such as Tweet deck to schedule tweets ahead of busy times. Use one or two hashtags to increase the visibility of your tweets so people can find you. Stay up to date with topics in your field and tweet about it and include links.

Connect with people you already know: Find and follow people you already know through work and other social networks. You can import your email contacts to your Twitter account to speed this up. Adding your Twitter account to your email signature can also encourage people to find you outside of work as you interact with new contacts.

Get involved with Twitter chats: People meet regularly on Twitter for gatherings using various hashtags. Roma has one called the #5amteacher or something similar when crazy people get up early and talk to each other.

Follow and engage with more people in my industry: Follow the authors of the tweets you are commenting on and individuals that are visible within your industry. Search hashtags to find the people that have similar interests as you, follow them and start to interact with their posts. You can also find great people to follow by viewing who the people you follow are following.

Learn from Twitter accounts you think are awesome: Find Twitter accounts with large followings and lots of interaction, learn how they post, interact with comments, and layout their profiles. Check if they have a blog post or a video on Youtube about how they use Twitter.

Another Challenge

I will update my profile, and then for the next three weeks, I will follow Roma’s advice and comment on at least five tweets per day. When I gave a few minutes, I will also find people I know and people in my industry to follow and interact with. I will watch Ali Abdaal’s youtube video on ‘How Twitter Changed my Life.’

Find me on Twitter and let me know what awesome things you are working on.

The Coursera quality metrics

I came across these quality metrics from Coursera in some reading today and thought it was interesting.

Components of quality metrics definitions

Engagement (Completion rate): The proportion of completion-eligible learners who complete courses and items
Satisfaction (Rate of 5-star reviews): The proportion of star ratings – given by course completers – that are a perfect five stars. This metric captures more variability than average star ratings.
Skill development (Average score Delta): The average increase in skill scores, demonstrated in graded assignments, and projects in the course.
Career outcomes (Rate of career benefit): The proportion of completers, responding to our survey, who report receiving career benefits from the course.
Coursera

In the paper Great online learning outcomes happen by design, Coursera states that ‘completion rates among most populations of learners are substantially higher than 50% and can be far higher in courses that adhere to Coursera pedagogy best practises‘. For student satisfaction, they state, ‘The average star rating across courses on Coursera is 4.7 out of 5 stars’. Career outcomes are at 73% of the responding students claiming a positive job-related outcome.

The engagement and satisfaction numbers are far lower than what we would see in a good university course. This is before you take into acocunt that satisfaction scores at universities are usually taken mid-year and include students that will not complete, whereas Coursera only asks completers. However, it is worth noting that these numbers are a dramatic improvement from the early days of MOOCs when 15% completion rates were not unheard of and where satisfaction was low. What is more impressive is that Coursera is operating at scale, with 70 million students, making up nearly 200 million online enrollments on over 4000 courses provided by around 200 different universities.

These improvements are down to investment from Coursera and other MOOCs in delivery models and quality. It is worth watching these large providers with their massive data sets, intense focus on the student experience, and lower costs. Perhaps the MOOC might deliver the promise that people initially hoped they would provide.

Read the full paper, Great online learning outcomes happen by design, on Coursera’s website.

Generating ideas with brainstorming

Brainstorming is the commonly used method to generate ideas. It is a group activity where the group’s collective thinking is used to come up with many ideas—booking a specific time allocated to brainstorming highlights to attendees that they have a defined period to generate ideas, and that the evaluation will come later. The technique first appeared in Alex Osborn’s 1942 book How to think up.

Ideation: the formation of ideas or concepts.
Oxford Languages

Brainstorming is a problem-solving process used to activate prior knowledge, develop possible theories or hypotheses, and identify things to research further. The session’s aim should be to construct a shared model to explain the problem and provide a clear direction for what to do next. Design Thinking, Design Sprints, and Problem-Based Learning (PBL) all make heavy use of brainstorming as a collaborative idea generation method.

In PBL, once questions have been identified from the trigger material, the group brainstorms what they already know and identify potential solutions. The group then analyses and structures the brainstorming session’s output and uses missing knowledge to create learning objectives. Each group member then independently researches the objectives, and then they come back to discuss findings.

The Interaction Design Foundation rules for brainstorming

The Interaction Design Foundation has eight rules for running brainstorming sessions:

Set a time limit.
Start with a question, a plan or a goal – and stay focused on the topic.
Defer judgement or criticism, including non-verbal.
Encourage weird, wacky and wild ideas.
Aim for quantity.
Build on each others’ ideas.
Be visual.
Allow one conversation at a time.

The key to generating new ideas is a challenging question or problem statement, get that right, and the rest is down to the people you get in the room. Have a single, specific problem statement that expresses a point of view or a question that challenges the groups’ assumptions.

Do not let anyone evaluate any idea or answer as they are created. Coming up with ideas needs to be dynamic so shorter sessions of up to 60 minutes work best and force people to focus on new ideas rather than evaluating them. If you choose to go longer, never have more than 90 minutes without a break.

Encourage as many crazy, wacky, and alternative ideas as possible; it is a quantity session, the quality will be developed from the ideas at a later session. Whiteboards with markers or post-it notes on a wall make it easy for people to follow and inspire more ideas, so prepare the room before you start.

Switching between the two modes of individual and collective ideation sessions can be seamless—and highly productive. Alex Osborn’s 1950s classic Applied Imagination gave advice that is still relevant: Creativity comes from a blend of individual and collective ideation.
Interaction Design Foundation

Brain dumping – the brainstorm for individuals

Brainstorming is a group activity whereas the brain dump is its solo equivalent. By dumping all your ideas about something onto a page and out of your head, you open up mental space to more creative ideas.

You can use individual brain dumps and group brainstorming together for even better results and make sure everyone contributes. Getting each group member to do a brain dump at the start can help quiet group members contribute and free up everyone’s headspace for new ideas. You can use brain dumps after a brainstorming session to continue the conversation after the group session. Allocate five minutes at the start of the session for each member to write questions or ideas on paper or post-it notes and then share their thoughts, put these in a visible place and group together any duplicate ideas.

Try the better brainstorming technique

Hal Gregersen published a three-step method to better brainstorming sessions in the Harvard Business Review. The technique focuses on questions rather than answers to get group members excited about the challenge presented and avoids the negative traps present in many ideation sessions.

Step 1: Set the stage

Select a challenge you care deeply about and invite people that will see that challenge from fresh angles. Set our the problem in a maximum of 2 minutes, this will keep it high level and avoid constraining the questions with too much context.

Set two rules

Questions only
No preambles or justifications to questions

Step 2: Brainstorm the questions

Set a timer for 4 minutes and ask a group to generate as many questions as possible within this time. Aim for 15 questions in the 4 minutes to keep the pressure up and the focus on questions only. Once complete, check with the group about how they feel about the challenge, if needed, rerun the 4 minutes until the group is excited.

Step 3: Identify a quest – and commit to it

Study the questions and select a few interesting ones. Try to expand these questions with a set of follow-up questions related to them. Once the challenge is fully understood, and multiple approaches have emerged, commit to at least one pathway.

Let me know on Twitter if you give this a try. I will be doing a brain dump and then group brainstorm for my project 4W/KG in the coming week and will share the outcome.

Make useful videos, publish them once or twice per week, and do this for two years

Many people have predicted that the future of work is in portfolio jobs made up of multiple income streams, including online courses. This week YouTuber and Junior Doctor, Ali Abdaal released his 2020 income that gives information on what that portfolio might look like and how someone might get there. Ali’s income revolves around his Youtube channel, which currently has 1.3 million subscribers.

Ali Abdaal’s 2020 Revenue – £1,013,000

A full-time job as a doctor £22,100 (First seven months of the year only)
Youtube Adsense £100,695
Affiliates £132,471
Sponsors £136,000
Skills share courses including affiliate links £350,000
Online Part-time YouTuber Academy course £220,000
Alumni inner circle membership £53,000

The online part-time Youtuber Academy course and Alumni Inner circle membership

Ali recently launched his first online cohort-based course. The course lasts four weeks and starts at $1495 for the Essential Edition. Premium and Executive editions cost $2495 and $4995 and provide additional features including lifetime access to future courses and further access to Ali and his team. The course’s first cohort had three hundred and sixty students enrol for a total income of £220,000. Ali chose to charge this amount to provide a premium service that would deliver meaningful change in his students. In the video, he explains that people need accountability and community to help them learn from a course in today’s world of unlimited online content. By charging a significant fee for a four-week part-time academy, he can get heavily involved. He delivers sessions live, provides access to himself and his team, and can do much more to help his students make it as creative entrepreneur’s on YouTuber.

If you build an audience over a long period of time who, know, like, and, trust you, then when you start charging real money for a product which is actually good, people will be happy to pay that money and pay for access to you.
Ali Abdaal

The course was so successful that the students asked for ongoing access to the community and Ali. An impressive one hundred and twenty-four students (34% progression rate) have signed up for membership of the Alumni inner circle service. Features of the Inner circle include a monthly coaching call with Ali, guest workshops, additional content, and weekly and daily events.

This idea of building a following via YouTube and social media and then providing access to you via an online course is an interesting one compared to the University model. Large institutions leverage their longstanding reputations and Government protection to attract students and charge them significant amounts of money to provide them with the content, accountability, and community Ali refers to. Courses like this one are beginning to develop sophisticated delivery models and provide motivated students with the skills they require to succeed at work. Will we start to see academics pursuing a portfolio job, working part-time for Universities while building a YouTube follow that they then use to deliver courses directly to students?

Building a portfolio job

Most of us rely almost entirely on a single source of income. This should scare us more than it does. For several years, Ali has asked his coworkers if they would continue to work in medicine if they won the lottery. Half respond they would leave immediately, and the other half say they would go part-time. When asked why they do not become part-time now, the answer is usually related to money. The video gives some useful advice for anyone wanting to start becoming a creative entrepreneur and making some, or all, of their living from the internet.

…If you want to seriously want to get to this level…of making money online, you have to put in large amounts of work over a very long period of time. But the good news is that all of this is really, really fun so it won’t feel like work hopefully.
Ali Abdaal

Ali’s full-time job is a tiny fraction of his full income, and he can hire two full-time employees and another part-time to help run it. He notes that all his various income streams result from posting useful videos to his YouTube channel, twice per week for the last three and a half years.

Like every good thing in life, the progress is slow, but if you keep at it consistently over a very long period of time, then hopefully things will start to compound.
Ali Abdaal

Google Adsense income from short video adverts and banner ads on Ali’s YoutTube videos. Monetising a YouTube channel through Adsence requires a minimum of 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time. He provides the annual growth of this income:

2017 – 59 videos – 1,600 subs – £0
2018 – 88 videos – 120k subs – £12,329
2019 – 62 videos – 450k subs – £33,186
2020 – 98 videos (307 total) – 1.3M subs – £100,695

Once the channel grew and the subscriptions and watch time increased, affiliates through Amazon affiliate links and similar, and sponsorship income started to grow. Again, Ali stresses that this income relies on the success of the YouTube channel. Ali also introduced several Skillshare courses in areas including productivity and study skills that are currently his highest income stream but rely on a massive scale driven by his YouTube channel’s popularity.

Success = work x luck x unfair advantage.

Work in this equation involves consistently publishing content that is as useful as possible. Ali mentions that he is routinely spending upwards of six hours per night, developing his skills, researching, and producing content and has been for the last fourteen years. The luck is the type that comes from putting lots of work to take advantage of the opportunities when they arise. This luck includes the YouTube algorithm. Most of his videos get viewing figures around 20% of his subscription numbers, but his videos’ small fraction will often earn significantly more views. The challenge is there is no knowing which videos will go viral and which will get baseline figures. Unfair advantages are the things that you bring to the table that others can’t. Ali provides the example of when he started making videos and was studying medicine at Cambridge University. He used being a trainee doctor and Cambridge University’s reputation to attract people to his channel before proving himself as an individual. He made videos that played off these two elements to build his early subscriptions. Ali suggests that any new YouTuber works from their unfair advantages to help get their first views and subscribers.

So the challenge for any aspiring YouTuber: Make useful videos, publish them once or twice per week, and do this for at least two years, and you will get success.

Watch the full video on YouTube and subscribe to Ali Abdaal’s channel. Get in touch with me on Twitter to let me know what you think.

Problem-based learning: the solution to the skills gap?

In the 2019 QS Global skills gap report, the top five skills that employers identified as a missing in most graduates were:

problem-solving
communication
teamwork
data skills
resilience.

Research in Canada suggests that undergraduate students increase their problem-solving skills in year one but then see no increase in their course’s second and third years. University lecturers can introduce active learning methodologies such as problem-based learning to narrow this skills gap and better prepare graduates for the workplace.

Problem-based learning is a student-centred approach to learning and teaching. Barrows and Tamblyn introduced the method in the 1960s to teach students at the medical school at McMaster University. Students use trigger material to identify an open-ended problem that they then attempt to solve. The process teaches students to take responsibility for their learning, acquire knowledge independently, communicate, work in a team, problem-solve, and present information.

In problem-based learning (PBL) students use “triggers” from the problem case or scenario to define their own learning objectives. Subsequently they do independent, self directed study before returning to the group to discuss and refine their acquired knowledge. Thus, PBL is not about problem solving per se, but rather it uses appropriate problems to increase knowledge and understanding.
British Medical Journal (BMJ)

The students are required to determine their own goals to the presented scenarios or problems through group discussions. Once they have defined the problem, they map out what they know already that will help solve the problem and attempt to determine what else they need to find out. Students then identify how and where they can find this information through research articles, journals, web materials, textbooks and set off individually to collect it. The group then comes to bask together to organise their research, produce a solution to the problem, and then present it.

The teamwork element is key to the methodology. Students work in groups of 8 to 15 to collect each individuals knowledge and ideas, differing perspectives, perceptions, and come up with multiple solutions to the problem. Discussions, both online and face to face are essential, and collaborative research methods are crucial.

Introducing a new teaching method is challenging for both the lecturer and the student, especially when shifting from a tutor-led to a student-led way of working. Students are comfortable with their current role in the classroom and lecture hall and have developed the skills supporting the traditional delivery methods. The resources and space required for collaborative learning and the access to research materials can also stress the university infrastructure. A common issue for students when introduced to problem-based learning is information overload. Students need help to identify the boundaries of their research, or they keep going. Sweller and Cooper in 1985 suggested that students should first learn through worked examples and then gradually be introduced to problem-based learning with a gradual ‘fading’ of support given by the academic.

The problem-based learning process

Problem-based learning is a clearly defined method with a set process.

The Maastricht seven-jump process:

Clarify terms
define problems(s)
Brainstorming
structuring and hypothesis
Learning objectives
Independent study
Synthesis

Let me know on Twitter if you have tried or are going to try problem-based learning.

Change through challenge: the university course in running a marathon

Bobby Maximus, a strength coach and author, says it takes 130 hours to build a base level of fitness. He developed this idea through training high-performance individuals to achieve impressive feats of strength and conditioning. In his book, The Maximus body, he provides two examples of how one hundred thirty hours can be completed; through one meaningful hour per day, five days per week for six months or over twelve weeks, two hours per day Monday to Friday and one hour on Saturday. The vital part is 130 meaningful hours of training, and some attention paid to quality nutrition and recovery. Budget your time, set your schedule, and do the work.

A college business module learning to run a marathon

Andrew Johnston, a GRIT and Business faculty member at RRCC and marathon runner, developed a similar idea but with a different target audience. Johnston created Change through Challenge, a 22 Week course for students that had never run before, with a final exam of running the Arizona Rock n Roll marathon. With a classroom session, a group run, and three individual runs per week; the training commitment probably came close to 130 hours.

In Johnson’s introduction to business class, his students asked local business owners for their keys to success; the most frequent answer was developing character and life-skills including a passion for work, work ethic, persistence, determination, and grit. According to Angela Duckworth, who wrote the book by the same name, grit is passion and perseverance for long-term and meaningful goals. As a keen distance runner, Johnston decided that his students’ best way to develop grit was to train for and then complete a Marathon, a challenge that, if you do not put in the necessary work and training, you are not going to finish.

Starting a business is a big goal that often requires the creation of a detailed, written, and time-denominated business plan that breaks it down into small weekly tasks to achieve the goal… That’s identical to a marathon-training plan.
Andrew Johnston

Each of the 22 weeks has a Monday classroom seminar, a Saturday morning group trail run, and three runs per week that students do independently to achieve the weeks running goal. The Monday night seminar covers three elements; Diet, training, and the discipline of the week. The twenty-two disciplines include goal setting, the power of consistency, and dealing with setbacks. Each is then related to the students’ schoolwork, business, and life. The Premiss of the course; all the life-skills needed to succeed in education and business can be acquired and mastered through training for a marathon.

My Change through challenge module

These two examples of time-based courses have me thinking about my next challenge. Can I package a physical challenge into a module? In my work, we typically package modules into 200 hours of learning, and I like the idea of going beyond the base level that 130 hours suggests and achieving something more significant. As I will be teaching myself, it makes sense to make this a problem-based learning module where I start with an open-ended problem and work through a series of steps, with other people to solve it. As an endurance athlete, I will set myself a training target of at least 10 hours per week, giving me around 20 weeks to complete the challenge I set myself—more on this to come.

You can learn more about Change through challenge through Andrew Johnston’s Tedx talk. Let me know on Twitter if you want to start your 200-hour Change through challenge module, and we can all create a group.

And breath… Term one is over

Today marks the start of a two-week break for my team and me after nine months of intense work. We set out at the beginning of the year with an ambitions five-year plan to weave digital and in-person learning seamlessly across all courses at the university where we work.

In March, we pivoted to help move all teaching and assessment online. In June, we started a programme to offer one-on-one support for all modules in the university to move to a blended learning model within the government social distancing guidelines. We carried out over a thousand design workshops, countless emails and helpdesk tickets, and wrote or recorded hundreds of guides, webpages, and communications.

Term one is now over, and higher education is changed forever. Our initial plan is more or less complete, and we start to look at what is next. Will we ever see regular mass lectures again? Will students expect a HyFlex model where they chose online or in-person on a session by session basis? Or are we at a tipping point where new models of learning are about to be launched with methods we have not yet thought about?

As I sit here next to my Christmas tree, beer in hand, and Michael Buble singing ‘It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,’ I am thinking about the great people I work with and the things that they have achieved this year, and I can only smile. These questions are for tomorrow or for January. The next two weeks are about family, food, and that half-marathon time trial on Sunday that is really going to hurt.

Who pays for Higher Education?

One of the biggest questions in HE currently is ‘who pays’. In the UK, students can get government-backed loans for both undergraduate and postgraduate long courses with the Government topping up the course costs. These loans act more like a graduate tax than a traditional loan, with payments only starting once graduates earn above a threshold income and remaining totals cancelled after 30 years.

To support the 49% of students that do not go to a university, in 2016, the British Government introduced the Apprenticeship levy to help fund apprenticeship training. Companies with an annual pay bill of over £3 million pay the levy at a rate of 0.5% of the total bill. This money can then be claimed back for the hiring of apprentices. The levy has led to the growth of higher and degree apprenticeships where student employees can do on the job training for 80% of their time and use the remaining 20% for formal study towards a degree or similar qualification from level 4 to 7.

The next piece of the puzzle is short courses for vocational or technical skills. The idea is that individuals can take short courses to boost their skills to help them get a job and that these ‘micro-credentials‘ can be stacked together into larger qualifications as a signal of proficiency in a particular area. Currently, these qualifications are paid directly by individuals or their employers, but this might be changing.

The UK Government has been making noises about lifelong learning funding or loans to be used for collections of shorter courses over a lifetime. Providers are looking for easier ways for people to pay for courses including instalments or even free upfront but then paying through a percentage of income after graduation for a pre-specified timeframe.

Today I had an email from a private company offering a partnership for an interest-free ‘learn now, pay later’ services similar to those eCommerce sites have started to add to their checkouts. The economics of HE is changing, and the question of who pays becomes more critical. People are retiring later, and technical skills become more important to get into and maintain high-income roles, and employers are struggling to find people with relevant skills. If we can make it easier, and cheaper, to gain the skills needed, society and its individuals will benefit.

Let me know on Twitter if you have found any interesting ideas on paying for higher education.

Recording high production value Youtube videos

It is possible to get started making youtube videos with just an iPhone, webcam, or an entry-level DSLR. This post is going to cover the equipment needed to produce YouTuber style videos with good production value.

The best camera is the one that’s with you.
Chase Jarvis

There several things that you will want to get right before investing in expensive gear and most of them will take time and skill but little or no money. The first is quality content, you can have high production value, but if your content is weak, then it will be a waste of time. You can’t polish a turd as they say. People will forgive low-quality video, but they cannot ignore low audio quality. Find a quiet place to film, make sure that the mic is not picking up any external noises, and remember the closer the mic is to your mouth, the better the quality will be. Finally, plan your background.

In photography, the term framing refers to how you design what is in the picture. You will notice that academics usually have a bookcase in the frame to infer that they smart, or there might be some plants and exciting objects on a bookcase in the background to set a scene. However you frame your shot, make sure no lines coming out of the back of your head and google the rule of thirds to understand you to position a portrait.

An important point to make is that whatever camera you use will have different resolution settings make sure you set these up to record in the quality you want. An excellent place to start is with a 4K resolution, a framerate of 25fps, shutter speed 1/50, a 1.8 aperture (this will depend on your lens), and a 160 ISO for a cinematic look with a slight blur to the background. You can set up the white balance and picture profile too but read up on the camera you have to get the best quality you can out of it.

The Camera

There are many high-quality cameras targeted at youtube content creators; Sony’s Alpha 7C, the upgrade to the popular Sony A7iii is an excellent choice if you have the budget. Sony has added a rotating monitor and updated the autofocus specifically for video creators. The addition of a Sony 35mm F/1.8 or 25mm F/18 G-Master lenses works well for talking head videos. A quality tripod that can handle the weight of the camera and allow a variety of positions is a good idea. For audio, the ECM B1M mic that connects to the camera via the flash adapter or lapel mic will work, and for lighting an Aperture 120dII with the light dome II softbox will create soft light.

To edit your videos, I suggest Premier pro and access to a stock video library such as storyblocks. A couple of 4+ TB solid-state hard drives will keep everything backed up and be fast enough to edit some video directly off it. However, it is a good idea to have the video stored on your computer during editing to make sure it can be accessed without any lag.

Good luck and let me know on Twitter if you select this gear or an alternative.