Attending Online Design and Branding Courses in the COVID Era

With a bright-eyed, positive outlook going into 2020 I was looking forward to exploring some conferences and courses related to design and branding. Well, COVID quickly stomped on that. When I was forced to switch my search to online-only it was a bit daunting to know where to start. I am sure many of you are in the same situation so I thought I would share my experience with my first two online courses this summer. Here is how it went.

Course Structure

A colleague and I settled on Future London Academy’s Future of Branding Week and Future of UX and Product Design Week as the two courses we would take this year. Some quick stats:

• Future London Academy (FLA) is based out of (you guessed it) London, England
• Each course is spread out over 5 days — each day consisting of a 45 min presentation, 10 min break, 30 min Q&A, and 15min breakout sessions
• Future of Branding Week was live for the Presentations and Q&A
• Future of UX and Product Design Week was only live for the Q&A (course materials were released a few days in advance)
• Classes were recorded so you can watch anything that was missed
• Approximately 100 people from all over the world attended each course
• Price was £399 per course (about $680 CAD)

Course Content

The presentations flowed nicely from day to day showing that FLA had taken time to curate the speakers and subjects to work within the theme of the week. Online courses likely have an advantage over in-person conferences when it comes to booking speakers as the time commitment is a lot lower. I was impressed by the high quality of the presentations. They were less about what they did and more about how they did it.

Our host (Ekaterina Solomeina) was up-beat and did a good job of mediating the Q&A portion of the course. These sessions added a lot of value to each presentation. The speakers had thoughtful answers that went beyond the main course material.

The course interface on the FLA website was well thought out and easy to use. Each day was separated into sections for quick navigation of the recorded videos and presentation slides were provided for download.

Networking

As a partial introvert the networking part of conferences always makes me sweat. I am sure I’m not alone in this. That being said, FLA’s approach was actually pretty manageable for someone like me.

After each Q&A we were randomly placed in groups to talk about the presentation. Our host would provide a starting point to get the chat going. They were only 10 minutes which I think could have been expanded — usually the conversation just got going when time was up. Once we jumped back into the main group some people shared what they had discussed for another 5 minutes or so.

It was an interesting way to interact with people from all over the world doing a similar job as you in a totally different culture. I am curious to see how this part of the course could be expanded in different ways.

WhatsApp was our means of communication outside of the Zoom calls. It worked for major announcements, but wasn’t great for discussions after the presentations. There were too many people in the course for this platform to be effective for information sharing and general discussion. Maybe a group on Facebook or Discord would have been better.

A spreadsheet was also provided where attendees could put their LinkedIn or Instagram info which was helpful. Interesting to note that some people requested an Instagram column to be added after the week had started. Maybe LinkedIn is less global?

Tips on Learning

I liked the live aspect of the course and tried to stick with the schedule whenever possible. It kept me engaged throughout the week. I’ll admit I was one of the lucky ones whose timezone worked with the live session times which was a huge help. Not sure I would have been as enthusiastic at 3am! The UX course only had the Q&A as a live session which worked pretty well too but I preferred when both the presentation and Q&A were live to keep the day flowing.

It was really useful to have a co-worker attending. We would meet in the afternoon every day and discuss the speaker and subject while it was fresh in our minds. We also planned on presenting what we learned to our team, so having had discussions throughout the week put us in a good place to start work on the presentation.

Make sure to be involved in the questions as I found it tended to be the same few people asking them each time. This was a very valuable part of the course with some thoughtful answers from the presenters. I am guilty of sitting back and just seeing what other people asked but I think asking questions yourself is a good way to remember the subject matter.

Ekaterina also suggested to read about Fixed Mindset vs Growth Mindset in the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck. This approach helps you stay motivated to keep practicing your craft and continue growing in all aspects of your life.

Conclusion

Overall it was a great learning experience with Future London Academy and definitely made me a fan of online courses. I was really impressed by the quality of speakers and how the course was run. I recommend a course with at least a partial live aspect if you can get it as it helped me keep on track with the learnings and stay engaged. Recorded course material that you can access afterwards is crucial as well. I look forward to seeing how these courses evolve as more and more people stay home for their continuing education. Thanks for reading!