Before proceeding with the upload of your Courses, kindly ensure that they adhere to Insight Timer's Guidelines for Teachers.
What Are Courses
A course is a set of pre-recorded audio lessons on a particular topic. It should contain high-quality content aimed at providing students with a skill, a set of tools, behaviors, or actions that will support their well-being journey in a positive way. All Insight Timer publishers, provided they meet the prerequisites, can upload MemberPlus Courses directly from their Teacher Dashboards.
Courses are an excellent way to share more of your work and for our community to delve deeper into teachings that complement their practice. They are available to our MemberPlus subscribers and serve as one of the ways for Insight Timer teachers to earn a meaningful income. Check examples here.
Courses must include significant teachings, theory, and explanations, and not consist solely of practices. They cannot be a collection of guided meditations, podcasts, audio versions of live events, calls, or music tracks. For these cases, we invite you to upload them as Premium Tracks.
NOTE: Course lessons cannot be uploaded individually as Free or Premium tracks. Please do not upload an existing track as a course lesson.
How Courses Generate Revenue
Courses generate income through Plays on their lessons within their classroom.
The revenue that Insight Timer shares with teachers comes from subscriptions. This underscores the importance of offering exceptional premium content exclusively to subscribers. The more subscribers we have, the greater the revenue available to support teachers.
We allocate a significant portion of our teacher revenue to Course Plays, making Courses an excellent avenue for teachers to earn a meaningful income. For more information on how teachers can earn revenue, please check this article.
Are there any pre-requirements?
Free Audios
You should have at least 2 free tracks published and the average rating of each track published should be at least 4.5.
Having free content is a good way to promote yourself and let users listen to some of your content before committing to your course. It will also help your teacher profile on the app look more complete. During your course, you can also recommend students listen to some of your free practices as a way to integrate these teachings and skills from your course into their everyday lives.
Credentials and Qualifications
Before recording a course, please make sure you have the relevant qualifications, accreditations, or expertise to support the topic you will be covering. Please upload all the relevant certificates or documentation to your Teacher Dashboard > Publisher profile > Accreditations.
Payment Details
Please make sure you have added your PayPal account details to your teacher profile.
We reserve the right to reject any courses that do not meet any of the above requirements or that don't adhere to Insight Timer's Guidelines for Teachers.
What Is The Format Of A Course On Insight Timer?
- Insight Timer Courses must include a written title, description, short introductory audio, and an image. We encourage lessons to be recorded in an interactive approach, encouraging students to participate in the course classroom.
- Every Course's curriculum should have a minimum of 2 pre-recorded audio lessons with their own written titles and descriptions. We kindly request that each lesson have a minimum duration of 5 minutes.
- At the end of each lesson, there is a written survey where teachers ask students a reflective question with four possible answers.
- Each Course has an interactive classroom designed to engage with students, allowing teachers to connect with students through audio or text responses.
Audio Quality
As premium offerings, audio files for Courses must be in mp3 format and studio quality. We strive to keep not only the content quality thoughtful and well-crafted but also the audio quality as part of our promise to premium Member Plus users. Since Courses are paid products, typically users are also more discerning of the overall quality of content.
Kindly ensure that there is no extra noise in your recordings that can disturb the user, like flipping pages, objects falling, dogs barking, people talking in the background, footsteps, and similar external sounds. This will also help your course get better ratings and reviews. Please find more information on how to create high-quality audio here.
Can I Upload or Offer Extra Resources, Such as PDF's?
Insight Timer's course format does not support the uploading of PDFs or any supplementary materials. Kindly avoid sharing or mentioning any external resources (e.g., providing links to additional PDF resources), products, services, websites, books, courses, social media, retreats, email newsletters, or requesting personal data from students.
How Can I Upload A Course?
To upload your audio course, please follow these steps:
- Log in to your Teacher Dashboard
- Click on the Courses tab
- On the top right corner, click on Create a Course
- Start completing the form with the required fields
IMPORTANT NOTE: We recommend you please read our Guidelines For Teachers before starting working on your course. This will prevent your course from being rejected and will speed up the reviewing and publishing process.
The Course form has 4 parts:
Details, Promo, Lessons, and Review
Part 1: Details
You will be prompted to fill up your course's general information: title, subtitle, description, language, category, benefits, origin, and practice.
Here are some recommendations to consider when entering your course's details:
Title
Make sure you use relevant keywords. e.g., “Master Mindfulness At Work”. Please write in initial case, capitalizing the first letter of each word. Your title should not have more than 80 characters.
Subtitle
A short paragraph introducing the skills and benefits provided by your course. It will be displayed as a "teaser", or "tagline", when your course is recommended to users in several sections within the app, like the home screen and the Plus tab. Use this space to "sell" your course in one sentence or paragraph. Be concise!
e.g., "Incorporate mindfulness and emotional intelligence into your working day to enhance focus and productivity."
Description
An overview of your course and what students can expect, including the course's main teachings and outputs, its tools, and types of practices. It will be displayed in the "About" section.
- Set clear expectations in your description, so students can decide if it is the right course for them. This will help you reach the right audience.
- Add any prerequisites if the course is a continuation of a previous one or requires prior knowledge.
- Be as specific as possible addressing your target audience. e.g., "This course is intended for parents of children with special needs."
- Set realistic and achievable expectations when sharing benefits and skills that your audience will receive by listening to your course.
Category, Benefit, Origin, and Practice
Be sure to categorize your course properly. It will boost discoverability and ensure it is recommended to the right audience, primed to listen to it and to like it.
Please note that proof of accreditation will be mandatory if you select a specialized category, and/or use trademarked practices or terms, such as, but not limited to, Neuroscience, Psychology, MBSR, ACT, the Wim Hof Method, Transcendental Meditation, ACIM, Max Meditation System, Goenka, Deepak Chopra, Dr. Joe Dispenza, Alan Watts, SOMA meditation, Carl Jung, José Silva (Silva Method), OSHO, or similar disciplines.
Part 2: Promo
In this section, you will be prompted to upload an image, an intro audio, and your publisher intro (please make sure it is written in the third person).
Image
To illustrate your course, please upload an image that complies with our Image Requirements.
Intro Audio
Intro audios are a great opportunity to 'sell' your course. Since they are accessible to everyone, they help users decide whether they should start your course.
A 2-3 minute audio is ideal for introducing yourself, explaining the content and purpose of your course, identifying the target audience, and outlining the benefits and skills that students will gain from it.
Feel free to browse courses here and check out the intros.
Part 3: Lessons
A course should have a minimum of 2 lessons. We recommend that lessons be outlined with an introduction, discussion, and practice. Here are some tips to help you structure your lessons:
- Start with an introduction to provide a clear and engaging overview of the lesson, outlining what students will learn and what outcomes they can expect.
- Introduce a theoretical component to give students a solid foundation and deeper insight into the lesson.
- Offer an optional guided practice session, enabling students to put their newly acquired knowledge into action.
- Pose reflective questions for students to consider in their journals post-lesson, fostering deeper personal insights.
- Give a teaser of the upcoming lesson to build anticipation and maintain student engagement.
Each lesson must have four (4) parts:
- Audio lesson: In mp3 format, studio quality. We kindly request that each lesson have a minimum duration of 5 minutes.
- Title: Make sure to include keywords and to write in Initial Case, capitalize the first letter of each word.
- Description: to ensure that your course is clear, informative, and appealing to potential students, we recommend including the following details in your lessons' descriptions:
- An overview of the lesson and what students can expect to learn.
- Information about tools and resources that will be provided to support learning (i.e. journal prompts, guided practice, etc).
- Benefits of taking the lesson (such as greater self-awareness, decrease in stress levels, improved sleep)
- Acknowledgments or references to any sources or contributors.
- We kindly ask that each of these descriptions be a minimum of 150 characters in length to provide enough detail and context for potential students.
- Survey: At the end of each session, there is a written survey where teachers ask students a reflective question with four possible answers. Every answer should be correct, as it is not a knowledge quiz, but a moment to reflect on the lesson's teachings. See examples here.
Examples of Lesson's Title and Description
Examples of Reflective Questions
Part 4: Review
Use this opportunity to make sure you have:
- Filled up every required field
- Uploaded the lessons, audio, and descriptions in the correct order
- Reviewed the grammar for any spelling mistakes
- Checked the image has been cropped correctly
Click on 'Submit' once your course is ready for approval.
After submitting your course, you will be able to share its link directly with your audience.
However, the course will only be visible on Insight Timer once it has been reviewed and approved by our team. It may take up to 5 business days for this process. We will notify you as soon as your course has been approved, and please allow 2 to 3 hours for it to become visible on the app.
We notify teachers whenever a course is published or rejected. Please make sure to regularly check your inbox, including your spam and junk folders for email notifications about your course submission.
Once your course is approved, you can respond to reviews and comments in the classroom through the teacher dashboard on your computer.
Managing Your Course's Classroom
Every course has a classroom where students can ask questions. This interactive environment serves as a place for students to engage with the teachers and share their reflections on the course.
Teachers must follow our "no promotion policy" by refraining from posting any promotional content. This includes any mention and links to products, additional supportive materials, services, websites, books, courses, social media, retreats, email newsletters, and other platforms, as well as contact details.
Requesting contact details from students is not allowed for any reason.
If you have any questions or need clarifications, please don't hesitate to contact us at [email protected].