How I Got Started Teaching Motion Design

Award-winning motion designer and self-taught animation teacher, John Sutter started teaching on Skillshare. He says he never thought it was a viable career option just because he's a motion designer. His wife got him into the business by recommending his classes to her Pinterest followers. "The rest is basically history," said Sutter.

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For part three of Making Money in Mograph, we’re talking about how you can earn extra money or even replace all your income by sharing what you know with other motion designers as an online instructor. Even if you’ve never taught anyone anything about your work before, today’s guest will tell you how and why you can teach starting right now.

Jake Bartlett teaches motion design on Skillshare as well as a couple of School of Motion courses. Although he started out working for a production company, Jake found that he can actually make enough to support himself by creating online courses. Today, these courses make up nearly all of Jake’s income and he continues to make new courses all the time.

This episode is all about how you can put your knowledge and skills to work by teaching others just like Jake does. There are a number of different platforms that you can use to host your lessons and we talk about the structures and advantages of several of them. We also go over how to cultivate your teacher persona and create your videos so as to reach your students in an engaging and fun way.

In this episode:

How online teaching platforms can pay you for sharing your skills
Advice for designing and creating your first class
Honing your persona as an instructor so your students will always be engaged with your content
Building a course from scratch even when you’re new to the material you are teaching
The advantages of using another company’s platform to host your courses instead of doing it independently
How motion designers can make extra money with stock websites

Quotes:

“Anyone can teach as long as you know something. If you have knowledge to share, you can teach it.” [8:51]

“If you have a topic that you want to teach, but you feel like other people have already taught it, that shouldn’t be a hindrance, because if other people have taught something and it’s done well, that means that students are interested in that type of content.” [11:48]

“The policy that I have taught by is to just have 100% content. Don’t have any fluff, don’t put anything in there that is boring that people are going to want to skip around or wait hoping the section will start. As long as what you’re putting into the video or tutorial is stuff that is actionable and things that they’re going to be learning from, and it’s engaging, then I don’t think length is an issue.” [14:27]

“This is how it works as a teacher - I have to learn how to do what I want to teach and then I can teach it. It doesn’t matter how recently I learned it.” [26:32]

Links:

Find Jake online

Jake’s classes on Skillshare

Get 2 months premium for free on Skillshare!

Episode 31: Adam Plouff – Battleaxe – Making Money in Mograph Part 1

Episode 32: Zack Lovatt - Technical Director - Making Money in Mograph Part 2

Find the full show notes here