The Crash Course Team answers your questions! (Patreon)

Thank you to everyone who submitted questions for our team this month! If your question wasn't answered this time, it might be in the future. So keep an eye out! 

Ms. Brock: Do you plan to add flashcards to the Crash Course app?

Brandon Brungard, Producer and Project Lead for the App: YES! We're working on European History cards now! After that, we'd like to find a way to start including the cards as part of a show's rollout... though we are still working on the details to make that happen! That said, we ALSO would like to start working through our back catalog prioritizing what the most useful for the audience is first (this is why we launched the app with chemistry, anatomy and physiology, and organic). Admittedly, in an ideal world we'd have decks for every episode, and hopefully we'll get there, but that will take some time. (It's just so many cards to make). What we make next is really up to the audience, we've got a survey in the app that's collecting votes, so tell us what you would like to see!

Grace Barber: I am a HS Health Science teacher and we use the Anatomy videos to review. One of my students asked this recently - "Is that guy Hank Green a professor? How does he know so much?" I explained that it was in collaboration with a College Anatomy course/book. So I was wondering when you are planning new topics, how you decide who your 'expert source' is going to be? Thank you very much for the opportunity to ask AND for the great work you do!

Brandon Brungard, Producer: That is a great question! Our "expert sources" are often texbooks but also the people on our teams! Every time we start a new show we first hire a consultant. This person is often a teacher in a highschool or at the freshman college level. We typically look for people with expertise on the subject (which often translates to a PhD or similar, but not always) and experience building curriculum! They form the framework of our episodes with the help of any texbooks they recommend. In some courses this can be a handful of books and in other courses (that didn't exist prior) in can be a new primary source for every episode. Then we add our writer to the team, who often also has expertise in the field and creates the narrative from this framework. Then we add a fact checker to make sure we don't accidentally make any assumptions. And then our editors help it sound and feel like Crash Course and make sure the structure is best for learning. And of course our hosts are often pretty knowledgeable about the subject! So yeah, there are lots of checks!

Madeline Doering, Managing Editor: If you pay attention to the jobs tab at Complexly.com you too could work with us!

Annie: One day it's my dream to make educational videos/content online. Specifically script writing. I'm a tutor, so I have lots of teaching experience, but I know there are other skills I need to work on too. I'd like to start making content soon, to build experience. Do you have any tips or advice on where or how to start? What do you wish you had known before you began?

Madeline Doering, Managing Editor: Knowing how to explain things in multiple ways or in ways that learners understand in a friendly, nonjudgemental way that encourages them to learn more is like 80% of the work!

Research skills are also really important. I'd start diving into whatever field it is you think you'll focus on in order to start finding all the cool ideas, connections, and topics you want to teach. Try to see who all is a stakeholder in a problem and how something can involve multiple fields -- like if you wanted to teach cryptography, you might look into codebreaking in WWII and how vital it was to the outcome, then dive into all the women who were codebreakers but are just starting to be recognized, in addition to whatever actual math you want to get across.

Educational best practices are also really important to have a handle on because a lot of research has gone into thinking about how people best learn. A lot of stuff is aimed at in-classroom teaching, but if you're creative you can translate that to your content. How Learning Works is a pretty standard start for new teachers, but you could also look into Bloom's Taxonomy or different theories of knowledge building.

Another important skill (at least for CC, other channels take different approaches) is to be able to take a topic and find the story within it. So you might look into storytelling techniques or work on how to craft a narrative arc. The best teachers are able to provide context, not just practice or knowledge. Hope some of that helps! You might try some freelance work for existing channels to see how they function and then what you want to do differently. I've learned the most from getting in there and writing/editing!