Hello CGCookie-Community,
lately when I was logging in to CGCookie I felt a something like a little of disappointment, but I wasn't sure what that was all about. People around here are nice, the staff seems nice too and there is a vast amount of courses in good organized flows.
Right now I'm working on the Modeling Realistic Characters with Blender course from the Modeling in Blender flow and I noticed like two things that may be the root of my problems.
1. After sculpting my character, a fit guy with defined muscles, I wanted to go and try myself out on a "regular" character with no well-defined muscles, let's say "straight" arms and legs and I reached the borders of my abilities pretty fast. Since the body has not so many striking features I had no idea how to sculpt that. After some failed attempts I tried to do some more defined muscles and that worked out for me, because that was what I was shown/taught in the course and I got the impression that CGCookie offers way too few practicing options. I think it would be great if there was a section where one could practice what he learned in a course and get a feedback from the staff.
2. This leads me to the second point. From what I've experienced so far there is very little presence in the exercise submission area from the staff so far. For example, I've made a submission for a course about 8-10 weeks ago, my submission was marked with exercise passed but there was no feedback to me. Not even from the tutor after I asked him to do so please. All in all I think I only received one feedback from a staff member after I asked him too. And the professional feedback is one of the reasons why I came here instead of learning from YouTube, etc. I am totally aware that the tutors have courses and streams to prepare but I still find there is a lack of presence in the field of feedback.
Maybe I'm just a negative Nancy and I'm just expecting too much.
So if anybody has an opinion about this I'd like to hear it. It would be awesome if someone could give me a different point of view or help me change my mind. I hope this doesn't sound too cantankerous or rude, I've written this with respect and I don't want to attack anybody with this. If this is unfair or offensive to anybody, I don't mean to.
Greetings
tobles
ssmurfmier1985 aaah , damn those exclamation marks , I forgot about them lol.
But seriously , I think a character count of 15 min would not be too much and still encourage graders to write something helpful . Also , some friendly guidelines may help to avoid those default phrases and I would like to think that most people who grade excercies do it to be helpful so they will take it seriously. And at the end of the day, any "well done's" and "great work's" that slip through will still carry a pass or fail vote - so they are no worse off than what we already have.....
Hey @wesburke,
please don't apologize to me. Maybe my posts have sounded disappointed but I'm not THAT unhappy with CGC. When I started this topic my happiness with CGC was at an all-time-low of 98%. So I don't think we should talk about a "let down" here :D. I made this post to get myself up to a full 100%, with the help of the CGC-community, by finding out if there even is a problem with CGC or if it's me and my expectations.
Now to an idea of mine to maybe improve or let's better say actuate the feedback for exercise submissions. In my opinion it would be pretty neat if people could kind of "subscribe" to a course to get notified when there is a new upload in the submission since I think there are people in this community that like to give a real feedback (I already made that experience), but searching out every upload or to even check if there is a new one is a nasty clicking through. If there would be a shortcut I think people would get more active. Furthermore, I think it would cheer people up to upload their results to the submission section instead of the polybook in the forum if there would be a number of interested subscribers shown in the submission area, so people know there are others wanting to give a hand and help with feedback. Basically like the RSVP to a life stream but to a course submission.
Cheers,
tobles
ssmurfmier1985 guess it's my turn to clarify what I meant. When I wrote that CGC should cater both doodlers and serious students, I based that on what you wrote. That most members are just doodlers/hobbyists, and just a small minority are serious hard core learners. I would prefer if the doodlers were the minority.
Also, I never commented anything on the courses themselves. And the reason for that is because I find them great. I have no complaints about that. There are lots of courses and smaller tutorials on here. The doodler can jump around and watch whatever they like, and the serious student can study more in depth.
Hopefully I was better able to explain what I meant. Otherwise, I'm sorry.
I don't know if my 2 cents are helpful or not. I agree the exercises need a bit of work. To me maybe its not so much the topic of the exercise. It could be to an extent but take the animation courses for example. Wayne's video is showing you how to do a bouncing ball. The exercise is a bouncing ball. People still submit poorly bouncing balls because the exercise is about training your eye much more than showing you followed along with the tutorial. The only way someone can get better from there is to be guided through what they are failing to see. Its why good feedback is so important. If we could promote those that are grading to provide better feedback I think the exercises would be more fruitful.
Just to brain storm a few ideas, these are things that through my own experiences have been helpful in my learning:
Peer Buddies:
This was something that I saw being used at Animation Mentor. Basically as soon as you passed a class you had the ability to become a "Peer Buddy" where you would be paired with somebody new to the course. You could message back and forth/ get one on one feedback get tips on assignments. The help provided was based on what the newbie wanted it to be and the time the buddy could provide. For CGC this could look like a badge or something. Once you complete a course you could apply to be a "mentor/peer" for that course and maybe upon approval that you understand the curriculum you're awarded a badge and maybe highlighted as such in the course syllabus. That way newbies can see who they could message for help or advice.
Feedback Friday:
This idea could take on many forms but the main point is its a single day dedicated to feedback of our works. The one I was a part of was a 24hr google hangout where community members could pop in and out as they pleased. You could either share your screen of the work you want critiqued or you could submit it to the host who could then share it to the other viewers. Because of it being a 24hr hangout you would need people to volunteer blocks of time to be the host and moderate. This was usually in the form of a sign up sheet on Google Docs. This takes a bit of dedication to keep it going; but once it catches on its a really enjoyable thing to be a part of. It wouldn't be something that directly effects the exercise but it would help promote giving feedback and what good feedback is.
What ever is done I feel like CGC can only go so far to improve the exercises. With CGC's size its really going to have to be the community that helps drive this area to be successful.
Some people want feedback on their exercises and some just want to get that thumbs-up and move on so I think feedback should be solicited by the users so the CGC team doesn't spend their limited time doing deep-dive critiques on hundreds of modified primitives from the Mesh Modeling 101 exercise.
I agree that the majority of the feedback will need to come from the community since the CGC team is heavily outnumbered. Maybe extending the XP system a bit could help incentivize community members to be more involved? Stackoverflow's system comes to mind; it more often than not results in very thorough, high quality answers to community questions with an increase to the answer author's point-based reputation as the reward. For CGC, maybe forum topics can get a question [Q] tag and answers that get "love" or marked as "accepted answer" get the author an increase in XP (or reputation, etc.) resulting in an increased self-worth as an awesome member of the CGC community. Lists of weekly, monthly, and yearly (instead of all-time), top contributing users could help encourage some healthy competition on a regular basis. Maybe just keep XP as is and publish the user's "love" counts as their reputation for simplicity's sake?
It might be a good idea for the CGC team to add a short addendum video to each of the existing exercises, after enough have been submitted and critiqued, showing common mistakes as submitted by users. This has the benefit of not having to code anything extra up for the website and reduces redundant questions and answers.
Otherwise, I think live stream critiques are pretty useful, maybe just have those consistently on the same day each month.
A little late to this thread I suppose, but I did want to add my thoughts on the topic of exercises.
Firstly, when it comes to feedback. I confess that most of the time I've graded, I haven't left feedback; usually when I do it's to express when I've found a submission to be strikingly well-done; but I suppose that's of limited use really. Mostly the problem that I need to overcome is that I'm self-conscious about critiquing peers' submissions when I've very much a student myself. I suppose you could say I'm afraid of giving advice that comes off as presumptuous. It would be incredibly awkward to tell somebody they need to clean up the smoothness of a curved surface on their model, however objectively true that is, when I know that in a week I could be making a model that has the same faults and wind up being given the exact same advice by someone else. I suppose you could call it a minor variation of Impostor Syndrome.
Secondly - some of those exercises it's -incredibly- difficult to give advice for. Let's use an example that's already been used to make another point - the Three Objects exercise. As has been pointed out, from a pass/fail perspective this exercise is a no-brainer to *grade* - there are three instructions; if you have followed all three, you pass that exercise and it's really that simple. But therein lies the problem - okay, so if somebody fails that exercise because they only made two objects, or did not use Sketchfab, or whatever, your feedback can simply explain that. But what feedback do you possibly give to an exercise that passes, beyond "good job"? You have to edit three objects. It doesn't say how extensively. It doesn't say they have to be smooth-shaded. It doesn't say they have to be very elaborate nor very simple. Anything you can tell a passing submitter for that exercise beyond simple support and a Welcome to CGC (it's probably their very first exercise after all) would be entirely superfluous really. And for that matter, if the exercise has failed - only one person needs to explain that there should be three objects and the submitter only made two. Once the first grader points that out, what is left for the remainder of graders to add? Just keep repeating over and over again that they needed to make three objects? That's not particularly helpful.
Thirdly - I can't overstate how much I LOVE Wayne's personally reviewing every exercise. It's really awesome! It would be great if other instructors could do that sometimes, although I completely understand why they cannot. But there's also a rub...I know that when Wayne pointed out a mistake in my bouncing-ball exercise for example, my next few steps were pretty clear - take down submission, fix mistake, resubmit. And I don't think I'm far off in thinking that most animation students will do that. So there's the thing - if I come along and click on an animation exercise that's awaiting grading and I see Wayne has already left his own professional-grade and typically quite substantial feedback in it...what on Earth of value do I have to add to that? "Uhhh....good job?" In the case where he's found a mistake I don't even grade those exercises quite frankly, because I anticipate the submitter will soon be deleting the exercise and resubmitting a corrected version. Note; this is NOT a suggestion that Wayne needs to do anything different whatsoever! But his participation in those exercises changes the calculus a bit, and that's something that needs to be considered especially when we're discussing things like minimum-required commenting for grading submissions.
I'd like to try to summarize the ideas, if I missed something or got it wrong please don't post a reply but send me a personal message, so I can update this post and keep it as actual as possible.
1. Introducing a minimum limitation of characters for an exercise submission comment.
2. Adding an amount of pass-votes for exercise submissions to pass.
3. RSVP-system for submission areas.
4. Creating a (new) reward system for community-activity.
5. Scheduling regular feedback-streams.
6. Adding a peer-buddy-system.