The Future of Web Education
The other day I realised that it’s been 10 years since I started teaching. I never thought I would become a teacher. It just happened. But I remember that from day one I had defined I would be as successful as much I was able to create passionate new designers.
The Box
One day — it must have been my second year of teaching — one of the students came to me saying “I have this really cool idea for my personal website!”. He was a Industrial Design major. “As you know much of what I work with is in 3D. So this is going to be my website!” he said, as he held a cardboard box in front of him. “When you arrive at the website you’ll see this page” he said, as he pointed to one of the sides of the box. “And when you click each one of the menu items, the whole box will rotate, swirl around and stop on the page you choose.”
Back then the only viable way to do it would have been using Flash and even that would have been tough for a beginner. So after the initial shock I asked “but do you know how to build it?”, to which he replied “I haven’t got a clue!”.
Was he wrong in wanting to do it? In having no constraints in his creative process? I think not. But at the time I dissuaded him not to do it and go with a more standard approach. He tried hard but eventually quit my class a couple weeks later. To this day I regret I didn’t act differently and instead just pushed him back to the norm.
Unplanned outcomes
A few years later, a completely different story happened. In 2014 I was teaching an HTML and CSS module which I was able to finish one class earlier than planed. So I suggested my students we did a free-topic class. One of them said he had an upcoming project and asked if we could talk about estimating projects. Both me and the rest of the students agreed to do it.
The week after we spoke about estimating, time-tracking, project managing. But most of all they wanted to know the stories of real clients and projects and how they went well, bad or how we sorted things in the end.
Unlike most keynote-based or live-coding classes, this was THE class with the highest attention rate ever. Students were highly engaged in learning, in wanting to know more and there mustn’t have been a single one who got distracted for a second.
Time to think about it
Let’s consider these two small situations. How is it that following or defying the classroom norms affected the outcomes to such extreme reactions? Looking back I’ve had countless situations that influenced the future of these designers. And not one very positive outcome rose from sticking with the norm nor from formatting students.
Year after year I witness companies and industry leaders state how badly prepared new applicants can be when applying for jobs. So what’s wrong with design education?
Digital design education is broken — Andy Budd, Clearleft
Well the thing that troubles me the most is that we have no idea how the web will look like in 5 years time, let alone in 30 or 40 years. And still we’re insisting in teaching fixed knowledge, using limiting techniques, while focusing on technologies that will soon become obsolete. All of this instead of teaching people how to keep learning while providing strong moral values and design ethics.
If you think about it even further, the old traditional academia was never designed for the 21st century. It was conceived under the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution. A time when standardisation and conformity where key factors for success. If we maintain that standard way of teaching we’ll continue to educate students out of their creativity, limiting their potential for success and our industry’s power to change the world.
A New Digital Future
By giving students the possibility to define what they wanted to learn I had set the cornerstone to a completely different vision on how to teach. Little by little I experimented with shifts in the teacher-student paradigm, with different inputs and outputs to and from the classroom, used gamification techniques and much more.
After a while, and with the help of many great friends along the way, this journey finally saw the birth of a new project: an international web design school, built by the community and for the community. A school that would harness all of the students’ creative power to create the designers of tomorrow. We called it The New Digital School and we’re starting it in January 2017 in Porto, Portugal.
It has no fixed curriculum, no assessment or a traditional faculty.
It’s completely student-centered and the students will defined what they want to focus on, boosting the best in each one while guided by our guest industry mentors.
There’s no traditional assessment because the employers of today care for experience and experiences, not grades nor degrees. So we’re asking industry partners to brief real projects to students. Promoting out of the box thinking and providing real-world experience.
And last but not least, every month we’ll host as masterclass with an amazing list of guest lecturers like Vitaly Friedman from Smashing Magazine, Jeremy Keith from Clearleft, Aarron Walter from InVision or Stanley Wood, Design Director at Spotify.
Why we’re doing this?
We have one of the best jobs in the world. And we’re never alone while at it. Web designers and developers get to stand in the shoulders of giants, making use of open sourced knowledge and tools. This is one of the powers of the web community: sharing knowledge and continuing to learn and absorb.
There is a need for change though. The need to bring further respect to the work of web creators. The need to raise the status of the design profession, improve the ethics of our industry and push forward the boundaries of what we do.
If we make sure we don’t waste time with bad and shallow education we can help create new and better equipped designers. I believe it’s not a single teacher’s responsibility to help with that mission. That role belongs to every single one of us. As a community.
Different ideas always trigger a lot of unique questions
In case you’re interested in applying, writing about us or simply want to know more about it, feel free to tweet us @newdigitschool or email us at hi@thenewdigitalschool.com. We’ll gladly setup a Skype call.
