My experience with Domestika

Does it worth your time? After I took three courses, this is my general opinion about this online learning platform

Photo by Chris Hardy on Unsplash

Domestika offers virtual courses to learn about technical and soft skills of the creative sector.

The company was founded in Spain in 2002 as a virtual spot for designers to meet. Nowadays, it touts itself as a community of creatives and artists that are influencers and have worked in diverse creative industries like audiovisual, design, photography, video games, and writing.

Domestika’s courses characteristics

• Content is showed in videos and segmented into units, which last from 3 up to 20 minutes. Most courses have 4 units and the final project section.
• Many courses are offered in Spanish, but there are a few in English. All have subtitles in 5 other languages: French, Dutch, Italian, Polish, and Portuguese.
• The estimated time needed to finalize a course ranges from 1 to 3 hours (once more, from my experience). This time doesn’t add the self-study time.
• Its learning strategy draws on projects, in other words, you learn theory by resolving a problem or a challenge.
• There’s no use of quizzes or assessments; ending the course depends on the completion of the project.
• Before starting the course topic, you can learn about the achievements and influences of the course’s instructor.
• After finishing the course, you get a virtual diploma.

This year, Domestika has up to 8 million users. I became a member of their community last year when I bought a photography course, and the process was quite simple:

1. Activated my Domestika account with an e-mail.
2. Chose the course
3. Paid for it, and that was it. (An annual subscription is also available to access all courses, but I wasn’t interested in it).

Up to now, these are the 3 courses I’ve taken:

• Fotografía de retrato con luz natural (Portrait Photography with natural light)
• Introducción al UX Writing (UX Writing Introduction)
• Teoría del color aplicada a proyectos online (Color theory applied to online projects)

From that experience, below I share the elements I fall in love with Domestika, but also others that impacted negatively my learning experience.

What I love about Domestika

• You can learn about the expert influences and some of their professional anecdotes. That is much more expensive than what I paid for the course. It’s a bargain!
• Assigned projects dialogue with the current market needs so you can use them in your portfolio.
• The aesthetic and art direction behind the videos is intentioned, they played with color harmonies, and the videos have light design and varied planes. It’s pleasant to see scenarios where the instructor teaches you.
• The learning path suggested and the learning moments in each course are logical, sequential, and nurture gradual learning.
• Content segmentation is adequate for the time needed to develop the course.

What I don’t like about it

• Project feedback might be nonexistent if other students don’t comment on your publications. Even rare is if your instructor says something about it, which is general for all the projects you see published in each course.
• Answers for questions about a topic or the project might arrive when you are almost ready to download your certificate because the instructor’s interaction with the platform isn’t regular.
• The community promoted exists through followers, follows, and some comments. It has slow organic growth, though.
• There’s redundancy in the content of the navigation menu for accessing units.
• Regarding the additional resources, some of them has non actualized links.
• Forum navigation is cumbersome, so the experience of interacting turns out to be tedious. For example, you need to review all comments to find one you want to check.
• The certificate offered doesn’t use blockchain technology, which means it hasn’t a unique identification on the internet.

Conclusion

Domestika worths if you:

• Enjoy learning by doing.
• Want to learn from people that have worked in the industry you are interested in.
• Have developed strategies to self-regulated your online learning experiences.
• Have a budget that starts from 5 USD.
• Choose courses with reviews above 97%.

But, don’t go in there if you:

• Prefer to have an active feedback about your learning process and project.
• Need a professional, valid certificate about the skill you want to learn.

Thanks a lot for reading me! Greetings from the north side of South America!