How HeatSpring Turns Industry Experts into Course Creators

While the clean energy industry navigates political uncertainty, one constant remains: the demand for skilled, capable, and confident professionals continues to grow. At the 2025 NABCEP Conference, SunCast Media host Nico Johnson sat down with Brick Maier, HeatSpring’s Director of Enterprise Learning and Development, to explore how the industry can train this workforce faster and better.

In this clip from their conversation, Nico and Brick explore a fundamental question: how do you transform subject matter experts into effective educators?

Brick works daily with industry professionals who have deep technical knowledge but feel overwhelmed by course creation. His approach? Don’t start from scratch – leverage what experts already have. From slide presentations and webinar materials to smartphone footage from jobsites, even transcripts of informal conversations can all become valuable learning content.

Brick has developed a systematic method to analyze existing materials and transform raw expertise into structured educational experiences, saving our instructors significant time and effort. In the video below, hear how Brick guides experts through this process, breaking down the barriers between having knowledge and sharing it effectively.

To hear the full interview, visit SunCast Media.

To learn more about teaching with HeatSpring, head over to our Teach page.

Transcript below.

Nico:  The task of creating a course – how have you gone about helping creators get these ideas out of their head into this pattern matching thing of curriculum that is not natural to many of us who maybe have learned a thing. 

I’m of the belief and I know that you are – that everyone can share something. There’s something that you’ve learned to do that you can turn into a course,if you just knew how. So talk to me a bit about how you guys are making it easier. 

Brick: Yeah. There’s a lot of different ways you can approach working with different instructors, and it depends on how much scaffolding they need, you know?

Have they ever taught before? Have they done webinars? Do they have a deck? PowerPoint deck. And so what’s the starting point? How have you organized your expertise and knowledge?

If they have some of those things, we want to start there and analyze them. I can help build out, like if they give me anything they have prior to a can kickoff call, I can organize that in a way that’s just a quick outline of a syllabus and even breaking out different ways of teaching.

Because sometimes if someone hasn’t taught before, they might think, hmm, I guess I’m just going to build a PowerPoint deck and then I’ll just narrate that and that’s teaching.

In online formats, that can be true. But I try and open up the idea that you can do PowerPoints. You can do something like this, like podcast format is such an effective way to informally draw out expertise to conversation and dialogue, especially when you have two near peer experts who can meet each other with their experience, and you question each other. I’ve seen that on your podcast. Some of yours can turn into mini college seminars, because of the density of the information. 

Those are really great places to informally draw that out. That transcript turns into an asset that can be analyzed and turned into course outlines, even PowerPoint slides. 

So those are things that can accelerate, but it just depends on what their domain of expertise is. I have them think about podcast formats, screen sharing if they’re doing software-based things. If they’re in the field and they have footage on their phone or if they have drones, the real world photos and videos are so valuable for adding context and anecdotes.

Those are some of the ways I think about it.