I understand why they are stopped, there was limited interaction and it's pretty time consuming for the teachers, but I really liked the concept. I also learn from how other student's problems are solved. But the different timezones is an issue. I need my 8 hours sleep. So I never been able to attend to Wayne's streams alas. Paul even got up at 5 in the morning to help me (thanks for that). My suggestion would be to keep the option to ask teachers directly for answers on the forum but for them to video tape those answers at their own time and put those video's on the forum. So we can still see how it's done. Might not be ideal because the student can't respond instantly. Thanks Kent, Jonathan, Paul and although I haven't seen you Wayne for trying the concept.
ps you can always come on discord's live chat channel to talk with us when we're on to talk about fun stuff!
Yeah Office Hours is a great concept. It leaves me stumped as to why people will constantly say, hey I'm stuck in Blender, I would like a one on one with the teacher, I need real time help, but then you offer it and people are like meh, I can handle my own, I'm a survivor. That's why human physiology is so hard, we will never understand what goes on inside the human head, we don't have the technology, Same as with a tiger.
It is sad. It was really helpful for me to get live help and feedback. :(
I to understand why the office hours is being dropped. I attended Wayne's several times and it helped a lot. Getting to ask questions in real time and ask for a further explanations was nice. It was also pretty neat to talk to someone who had been helping me for along time. Thanks for giving it a try.
I'm pleased to hear Office Hours were helpful for those who attended.
They were time-consuming, though I know each instructor was happy to do so to help elevate members of this community. Huge thanks to each of them for giving it a go!
If you happened to attend an office hour, please take a moment to share your experience on this 2min survey - https://form.typeform.com/to/kr1dzrgQ
I attended some of them, and I appreciate the time the instructors spent with us. . . but it did seem like there weren't that many participants. Even when there were participants, it seems like specific questions were sometimes difficult to come by, and often not asked ahead of time. The answers were often specific to those who attended that session.
Maybe if the office hours were specific to a course? I can imagine that after turning in something huge like Cubicity, Pothead, etc., that the instructors need a break. Maybe the course wouldn't even drop until the instructor caught that breather. Then the office hours would be related to a new course a lot of students are taking. You guys would be the best to determine the gestation period between when a course drops and when it has the most people taking the course.
I also don't know how large CGCookie's "truly active" community is. Some of the participation woes may be a scale issue. There are X number of people just taking the classes. There are X number of "lurkers". There are X number of people willing to post, or to attend a live event.
Maybe workshops with specific projects going based off of specific classes? They'd need a little structure. The students would meat once or twice a week, and maybe the instructor is there every other week. Not full community projects. Something a bit less ambitious, but focused. "Light this(these) scenes." Rig this character either from scratch or with rigify. . .
I even like the idea of non-instructor led community projects, though coordinating that could be a bit of a challenge. I imagine CGCookie would have to setup a framework that the students use. I.e. Here's the Google Drive you'll use. Here's the directory structure you'll use, etc. Hopefully the framework would be easy to re-use for other projects, even larger instructor led community ones.
Edit: One other thing that might help. I see a "What's coming" section, but it doesn't seem to have any history. I don't see the announcement that office hours stopped. I found it easiest to see the office hours in Discord. It could've been a little easier to see on CGCookie's main site.
Some form of news, with a history, could probably help. So would a calendar. The calendar could have classes, community projects, instructor hours, etc. on it.
I like the playlists, which, now that I look at them seem to have gotten a bit of attention, but site organization might be something that could be improved, especially for expensive live events.
I love the feedback, wardred ❤️ 🙏
You'll both be happy sheila5 and Wardred that likely next week, the site refresh we've been working on for a few months may get deployed! We're just doing some final checks, but offers a design upgrade and addresses a few lingering bugs we've been anxious to squash. Stay tuned!
W
I updated the coming soon page with content the education team has been baking in the kitchen. A few other things I hope to add in the coming weeks! - https://cgcookie.com/p/coming-soon-to-cg-cookie