Using the site: flows, courses

Question

Judging from the type of exercise submissions, there is quite a bunch of people like me that were lured here by the introduction-to-blender course / flow.

But for this straightforward "let me join the blender flow and learn and complete it at my pace", the cgcookie could be much, much improved: it looks like this learning use-case was not considered much, even when redesigning.

I can't find my way around the site every time I come here and stumble searching for a place where I left off.

I'm currently doing the blender introduction to shading section, so I would expect to easily find:

1. The indication of the flow I'm in: "Introduction to blender" with some overview.

2. A link to the current exercise, e.g shading the toy truck,

3. A link to the next section / lecture, Fundamentals of lighting.

Nowhere there is any of that. There's a section "Where you left off" on the "Home", which takes me to "First steps with blender", the very first lecture of the very first course. Not really helpful.

How do ~you~ use the site? What do you do here? Do you just chill in the galleries and occasionally watch some random tutorial?

Answer 1 · 2017-08-14T17:22:31Z

replied August 14, 2017 5:22pm

I'm working through it too and have other issues that are bigger for me than navigation. Such as:

Huge assumptions about levels of knowledge and understanding in some of the modules. Try going into Fundamentals of Animation and things like 'squash and stretch rigs', Empties, deformation rigging are all dropped in from the get-go with no explanation of where they came from and how use create/use them. Really unhelpful for someone new to this. Even a simple opening assumption - "we have one of these but you don't need to understand what it is at this point" would at least provide some reassurance. Otherwise, it's hours on Google trying to find someone who will explain it.
There is a useful 'Ask a Question' tab on every lesson but the tutors very rarely answer them. There are questions going back to 2015 that still have no answers. Not a very supportive service.

Answer 2 · 2017-08-14T23:03:49Z

j

replied August 14, 2017 11:03pm

Just joined here and have been enjoying the first few fundamentals series for newbies!

One thing I'd love to see changed in terms of UI/UX is how the questions and answers tab gets opened up: Instead of loading a new web page, I'd rather have it open up inside the same web page. This would allow me to browse through the questions and answers more quickly, and also makes myself more likely to write an answer myself :)

Having to always click on "back" to get back to the lecture and to other questions is very tedious.

Answer 3 · 2017-08-15T21:03:28Z

j

replied August 15, 2017 9:03pm

Great addition! One extra suggestion: when clicking on a course to continue watching, please take us right to the course instead of the welcome page. The less clicks I have to make to get back to the videos, the better.

Answer 4 · 2017-08-17T15:02:32Z

replied August 17, 2017 3:02pm

Hi, Jonathan, thank you for your response to my comments.

I would, however, take issue with your answers that "there's no good way round" the need for pre-knowledge on some modules in the course, viz:

the course is entitled 'Introduction to Blender' so that anyone seeing this and subscribing may never have seen Blender before and might reasonably expect everything to be explained from the ground up. If you go through the comments/questions on individual courses you will see many comments in this vein - people not understanding stuff the tutor seems to assume they know. This issue seems to be causing aggravation for both staff - loads of basic questions - and students, many of whom may be deterred from continuing.
there are simple ways around this problem - produce materials that start right from the bottom; if people already know it, they can skip it - or (less attractive for students but easier for you) tell people at the beginning of each module what they are expected to know already. A good addition to the latter would also be telling them where they can learn these basics if not on CGCookie. At the moment, students are left high and dry with just Google to try and find answers to this stuff, and we come back with a collection of ill-matched information in our heads.

Regarding unanswered questions - a quick review just of section one under Introduction to Blender shows 40 unanswered questions (excluding those that are just comments). People need help!

Sorry to rant about all this but i think CGCookie is shooting itself in the foot with some of the basics that are simple to fix.

S