One course on a platform can also have multiple instructors who work together to create one course and have a fair share of effort in the creation process. This article will focus on the addition of instructors and teaching assistants to your course to give them due credit for their fruitful efforts.

Co-development of course is a newer and modern approach of adding various branches or expertise of people and their knowledge to create one single project having multiple topics of immense quality.

This option should be used as a positive method of co-development and not to exploit any revenue share on promotions. It should not be a way to gain 97% of the share on sales of the course.

There can be multiple reasons for one instructor choosing to opt for the addition of a co-instructor. Zeroing down the main reasons include:

·         Addition of a co-instructor to help with the creation process

·         Developing the content of esteemed quality

A core instructor can be added to increase the student-instructor interaction as well.

·       Many times, co-instructors are only meant to discuss and reply to the students hence increasing the qualitative interaction of your course with students.

Co- Co-instructors are also added to exploit the marketing tools and to share the student database.

This reason requires the addition of the policy and guidelines for the addition of a constructor as many instructors can exploit this feature.

Policy and guidelines on Co-Instructor setup

The policy and guidelines mentioned here are solely to prevent the exploitation of marketing and sales and any misuse of the student database on the platform. Co-instructing a course is a great way of combining different fields of expertise into one single product. Such courses become highly popular and are accepted by the students widely, as the students get to learn a lot from just one course. This feature benefits both the students as well as all the instructors who take part in the creative development.

But this tool can also be exploited and hence here are some follow-up points that can guide you better on when to allow or when not to allow the addition of a co-instructor.

Follow-up points to keep in mind regarding the Co-Instructor Addition :

·       If any instructor is providing a new angle to the course or bringing up another skill or expertise into the course this feature is apt to use.

·     The core instructors added to the course should be made visible on the course landing page and should be made aware of to the students as well.

·     The students should ideally interact and learn from all the instructors present in the course to increase the quality and substance of the course.

·      If an instructor wants to collaborate to share a student database for exploiting a marketing tool, it is against the policy of the platform. The former can be done by becoming an affiliate in the course. Through this method, you will be able to market each other’s student database without exploiting the policies.

·      If co-development or co-creation is the idealistic goal, then go ahead to use this feature.

An important point to understand is abusing this feature will impact everyone.

If multiple instructors are added to one course and many of them are of no value to the course, it will decrease the learning efficiency of the students.

Hence for every 10 students enrolling in a course, 20 students unsubscribe from the course announcements and notifications. The unsubscribe rates can also be seen by the instructors on their emails which are 5X the marketplace average.

This will impact the whole society of instructors as the student will unsubscribe from all the notifications from the platform and not just by notification of one instructor.

Hence, be vigilant while using this particular feature in your course. If by chance you have added an instructor to share the market database you will first receive a warning and not a sudden violation.

However, after multiple violations of the warnings, it can be seen by the review team that the instructor is posing a negative impact on the platform and hence will be considered as a violation of the policy.

In such cases account suspension or termination can be done.

It is recommended that the core instructors you are adding to your course should be trustworthy and should be well aware of the course content.  If revenue exchange or sharing has been enabled, do take extra precautions before adding any co-instructor. The agreements related to course revenue are not shared with the platform and remain only between the instructors.