An effective course is…

• Short. Good courses have 25-30 tutorials that take not more than 10 minutes each to read. This ensures that the person coming into the field is not overwhelmed — learning should feel easy!
• Comprehensive. While it is not possible to cover everything in a short course, it’s good to mention most of the key ideas that a beginner needs to know. They should have a way to know what to search for, or links to good resources to topics that are advanced and are not being covered.
• Follows "The Least you must know" principle: It's easy to make a long course with everything you could know about a topic. It's much harder to condense a topic down into the least one must know about it. Think of it this way: if you were getting started in the field today, and only had a weekend to get familiarized with at the least what the field looks like, what would you like to read? Write that.