Creating an online course using free and open source software

This post is about the free and open source software I used for creating an online course.

I published my first online course on Udemy recently. It is about creating a website and blog (like this one) using programs written in Python. This post is about the software I used for creating course content - screencasts with audio, lecture notes and an eBook. This was done on an Ubuntu Linux machine with free and open source software.

Recording Screencasts with Kazam

For recording screencasts (recording actions on the desktop), I used Kazam. It is available in the Ubuntu software center. I saved the output as H264 (MP4).

These shorcuts were useful

CTRL + Super (Win) + R - Start recording

CTRL + SUPER (Win) + F - Finish recording

Recording Audio with Sound Recorder

For recording audio, I used the sound recorder app on my Phone. Here are the settings I used

Editing Audio with Audacity

I imported the *.ogg files produced from the recording into Audacity. Audacity is available in the Ubuntu software center. For Windows, you can download the installation package from Audacity’s website.

For processing the audio, I followed instructions from this youtube video. At times, noise removal alone was sufficient to get nice sounding audio. I also removed (CTRL + X) or silenced parts of the audio that I didn’t need.

Edit → Remove Audio or Labels → Silence Audio

Editing Videos with Blender

Combining screencasts with audio was done using Blender Again, Blender is available in the Ubuntu software center. A version for Windows can be downloaded from the Blender website.

Blender could be overwhelming at first. Here is a tutorial on using the video editing feature.

Here is a sample Blender project (4MB, zip), from my course (includes a .blend file, video and audio files). The final video produced from this project is available here (3MB, avi).

Some tips

• Right click to select a clip (video or audio).
• Right click and drag to move a clip.
• Use mouse wheel to Zoom in/out.
• Use CTRL + mouse wheel to move the view port.
• X to remove a clip (when selected with a right click).
• K to soft trim a clip. The clip can then be resized later.
• SHIFT + K to trim a clip.

eBook and Lecture Notes

Along with the video tutorials, I also included notes and an eBook. Here is a sample chapter (pdf). I used Sphinx and the rst2pdf extension for generating the PDF output.

Slide presentation

For the slide presentation in the promo/intro video, I used reveal.js.

Graphics

For designing the cover for the course and eBook, I used Inkscape and Gimp. For capturing screenshots, I used Shutter.