What I’ve learned teaching 15 years of design classes, online and offline

1) People are innately creative.
Even those you don’t expect, who don’t pay attention, who don’t understand how to operate computers or care much about what you’re teaching. Suddenly they produce something extraordinary, pow!

2) People learn when you make it seem easy.
I always know that I’m getting somewhere with a class when I hear students say to each other (or to me) that they didn’t think it would be as easy as this. It’s usually a sign that they are open and un-resistant to learning, and that they trust that something good is going to happen. Which, of course, is the precursor to it happening.

3) Uni-tasking is countercultural.
These days, sitting in a classroom to just learn one thing for a couple of days feels like a luxury. You’re given the space to focus on just one thing, and learn. People almost feel guilty because they love it so much.

4) Good things happen when people are allowed to fail.
In the unhurried classroom, people can create things without worrying about a deadline or their lack of skill. They are here to learn new things, and often the best part of learning is when something doesn’t work out.

5) People love to create beautiful things.
On a good day, with a following wind, this will just happen.

6) What happens easily in a small classroom is hard to replicate online.
Most of the elements that makes things work well in a physical classroom are hard to recreate with online learning. Why should a student trust you? Why should a student be patient and wait as you try to balance one skill on the top of another they learned earlier?

7) Online students want to be properly taught and guided.
Even with all the possible sources of learning available for free, students are still prepared to commit to, and pay for a good experience of learning.

Teaching and learning online.
With all my rewarding experience of teaching in a physical classroom I’ve been thinking hard how to re-create a similar environment online. In my experience, students learn the most when there is the right mix of both support and challenge, and when they can learn together. This is really difficult to achieve online — when a student simply buys an online course there is little room for collaborative learning or support. But my experience of both learning and teaching on Skillshare makes me think that it can be done, and that this is where the future of online learning lies.

A new type of course.
I’m piloting this new type of course — to give beginners a fully rounded design foundation — in January 2016. A small group of students will join together online for two months and learn InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, typography and graphic design theory. And together we’ll figure out if this type of course works. If that sounds like the type of thing you’ve been looking for, please sign up and join us.

This post was written by Peter Bone, founder of Designtuitive.com