Looking for a creative way to make money online

It shows that you're already ahead of the pack by asking this question. Most never do.. even people who have been involved in business or even marketing for that matter for years.

Since you've considered selling courses already, your unique feature could be to teach in more detail about an aspect of coding that other courses haven't explored, or it could be your teaching style, forms of media used, follow up support etc or many more things.

The key is to match your unique feature with what your customers want or need. I would suggest looking through the reviews on other courses, particularly the three star reviews and below and research if there's a trend in the reviewer's complaints.

When I was selling kindle books on Amazon I started with recipe books because I love cooking. By reading through some current listings I discovered that the biggest complaints of self-published books in this niche were that the books were printed in black and white, didn't use photos, and had difficult recipes.. so I called my books Simple Color Cookbooks to stand out in a crowded niche of self-published authors.

You can do the same with your courses.. or anything else.

Cool! There's some great (and free) info out there on WF and elsewhere on how to strategically position yourself to get gigs on platforms like Upwork (Danny Marguiles (sp?) comes to mind among others) ... may be worth checking some of that out as well if you've not already...

The most valuable experience you'll learn from these platforms I think is this:

If you don't provide a unique feature to your service, it becomes a race to the bottom and all about price, competing against people in the third world who will work for 3-5 dollars an hour. That's what most people experience on these platforms.

In saying that, there are also many very well-paid freelancers who get paid 10-20x more than the $5 an hour crowd.. even if their service is not that much better. They did need to work their way up with cheap jobs to get started, but once their reputation was established, they pivoted their services to towards clients who pay more, and learned how to sell to that market.

I have one friend who writes for 2c per word, and another who writes for a dollar per word. Both are competent writers, and the person who gets paid 96 cents more per word isn't fifty times better at what they do. The person earning more is just singing a different song to a different type of client.

I hope that helps someone.