AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-02)

I made this course a while back as a paid course, but quickly got sidetracked with other priorities and didn't have much time to put into the promotion of it. Quickly the course hosting fees added up month over month where it didn't make sense to keep taking large losses each month. So I disabled enrolment as all the students were done with the course and was about to shut it all down until I could refocus on the courses again.

But rather than just scrap all the hard work on the lesson videos, I joined them all together into a single course video and placed that on YouTube, thinking a few folks may stumble across it and it will help them with their AWS CCP study journey.

Well, that video to my surprise got a lot of views on YouTube and I've had so many amazing interactions with new students all over the world from it. The comments are filled with folks having passed the CCP and continuing their AWS Certification voyage.

The one downside of the YouTube platform for course videos, is it doesn't allow much for adding additional content. Further, the interactive video components I had in the lessons, where interactive graphics and links to documentation would appear in the video aren't easily possible with YouTube.

So, I wanted a way to offer a better "course" experience where I could have extra training material and track student progress and enrich the overall learning experience. Wanting to keep costs low, I experimented with a WordPress based course learning management system (LMS) and now students had a choice to just watch the YouTube video, or enrol in the free course on my site and get a bet better experience and be able to resume where they left off and a few other extra training materials.

Then over a few months of trying to tweak the LMS system I was building, I realized I wasn't happy with the the student experience and the somewhat fragile WordPress-based LMS system as I needed a crazy amount of plugin-ins to get all the features I wanted and there were constant conflicts with updates that would break the courses or site, and I didn't see that it would scale to my vision without significant custom development work.

This brings me almost full circle now, as I'm again offering courses back on a more professional LMS backend. With that comes quite a bit of cost overhead, but have been inspired by all the comments and student successes to continue on offering high-quality courses and building more of them.

This whole process has been a big learning curve, but feel I've settled on course platform that provides a great experience, enables great community discussions and professional network building for students, and a platform that will ultimately scale long-term and avoid future disruption switching platforms down the road.

Thanks to all the students caught in the middle of me figuring things out and causing some re-creation of user accounts and so forth, but I think the big changes of the course platform are behind me now and I can focus on building new training material.

So I hope that provides some background for anyone wondering why there's free YouTube videos of this course as well as this one (which free as well!) and based on those same YouTube lessons. If students are able to comfortably able to pay a little bit to support the site and future course development, it is always greatly appreciated.