All Envato Tuts+ courses are expected to meet certain standards for quality and instruction:
- https://instructors.tutsplus.com/guide/course/courserequirements.php
- https://instructors.tutsplus.com/guide/course/lessonrequirements.php
- https://instructors.tutsplus.com/guide/course/introductions.php
In addition, there are some standards that are specific to the Code section. These guidelines were drawn from the best practices of the many talented Tuts+ Code instructors!
Although not a full-fledged course project, the example code in a coffee break course should still be in the context of a meaningful project. Avoid foo and bar - instead, come up with a reasonable-seeming example that might exist in the real world. Only the relevant parts of the system will be live-coded, but there should still be a sense of a larger context.
Language features or technology details are best demonstrated in a cumulative way, in the context of "real-world" problems, rather than abstractly on a scratch-pad. So, at the end of a lesson, the student has created a source file which demonstrates all the topics that were covered.
It should be clear at the outset of the lesson, what the problem is and roughly how the proposed solution will work. This serves both to rationalize the decisions that are being made and to help the student understand the challenges of the example project.
This is the heart of code course instruction. Our standard should be that every step should be comprehensible both visually and aurally - that we should be able to either watch the instructor or listen to them and entirely understand the sense of the lesson.
All code should be clearly explained, broken down into arguments, and have a clear motivation - similarly any action taken in the IDE, browser or shell. It's not helpful to read code verbatim. Rather, explain each line of code's intention. Think of it as an audible code comment.
A coffee break course requires some compromise in the depth of explanation. Don't try to explain every detail of the example project - focus in and live-code only the parts that are core to the learning outcomes.
Big picture explanations of new concepts are crucial for students who may be coming to the subject fresh. Be sure to give some further context for the course ideas by referring them to themes and trends in teh wider world of development.
Insofar as the course is using a standard dev environment, it isn't necessary to have detailed setup instructions. Do briefly describe your development environment, especially if there is something unusual about it.