Reflection — First 5 weeks of a new digital school
This week we had our second masterclass at The New Digital School. It’s also been little over 2 months since we opened this mad project we call a school. As you can imagine it’s been a crazy few weeks so there hasn’t been much time to pounder over things. But I figured it was about time we document our findings and share them with the world.
The road so far. In numbers.
From July 2016 till December I was directly involved in 124 meetings (~21/month). Since January 1st I’ve had another 34 (~23/month). Either via Skype or in person. And that’s not accounting for other less formal meetings.
Both me and Sara met with dozens of potential partner companies, spoke with representatives from 3 similar schools and people from 13 different countries. Overall it’s close to impossible to determine the amount of hours spent doing research, planning, negotiation, marketing, shopping, carrying stuff around, assembling IKEA furniture and talking on Skype. I alone received 1861 emails since I have an @thenewdigitalschool.com email account in early July 2016.
We received 100+ applications from countries which we would never had expected like Nepal, Algeria, Nigeria, Mexico or Argentina.
Overall we sent out 24 MailChimp newsletters in a total of 4632 emails. We had an average open rate of 55% which according to Mailchimp is well above the 13.52% average of the Education and Training sector.
Since the start we gathered 1622 followers on Facebook, 438 on Instagram and 499 on Twitter which is quite less than we hoped for. We presented the project at 3 national conferences and got interviewed and highlighted on national media 6 times which was more than we could have expected.
Lessons learned — Pre-launch
When you set out to put together a project like this you obviously have to know your grounds about some core things. But no one’s ever prepared for all the paperwork, bureaucracy and people management involved. Here are some of the things we’ve learned.
- The average waiting period for a student or working visa for Portugal can be of at least 2 months.
- It’s very hard to deal with visa related bureaucracy and the network of entities in Portugal related to it is incredibly complex.
- There are over 90+ alternative educational projects in Portugal alone.
- Everyone has a very strong opinion about education. Most people outside creative areas don’t understand the need for alternative methods of teaching.
- When launching new projects, you’ll get tired of explaining the same things time and time again. Still that’s the kind of training that forces you to self-improve and push forward.
- People will always be the wildcard in any project. If your business plan depends on people’s goodwill, then you can’t really plan ahead with much certainty.
- Dealing with failure, money issues and people’s personal health/financial/family/emotional problems is all part of the process. Most of the time it requires a strong stomach and a clear mind to cope with these.
First 5 weeks
In a very brief description, month 1 was quite difficult to analyse since we have nothing to compare it with. Since the 12th of January, we organised welcome sessions with team building exercises, welcomed Christopher Murphy as our first masterclass guest for a full week and witnessed the first days of students attending no-teacher sessions at the school. We hosted our first webinar with Aarron Walter and documented and posted on social media as much as we physically could. Most days leaving the new office at 8 or 9 in the evening.
Overall, we got our students highly engaged in discovering new ways of thinking and doing/building things. Sara brought an amazing set of social exercises from Hyper Island and Chris showed a whole new set of “lenses” and ways of getting creative. We had 3 company visits and 2 short workshops. TNDS1 (the first cohort’s codename) started their first individual projects in teams. In the end all of this allowed to discover themselves, each other and the staff (that’s me and Sara), as well as learn about creativity, UX, research, the Web, VR and Generative Graphics with Processing.
We had a birthday, a Mexican dinner party with a ping-pong tournament and ate cake every other week. Attended a Wordpress meetup, a photography exhibition launch party and a UX meetup. Went out for dinner at the end of our first masterclass and for lunch at the end of our second one.
Recently we welcomed our second masterclass guest Jeremy Keith and are about to host our second webinar with Gregg Bernstein from Vox Media.
Lessons learned — First 5 weeks
- There’s a lot people have to learn from each other once they open their hearts. The paths to get people to open up can be either incredibly simple or super long.
- Masterclasses are a great way to focus and inject a dose of excitement and motivation but we have to cope with the down effect that comes after the “sugar rush”.
- It’s very easy to put together a one week masterclass when you’re working with super professional guest such as Christopher Murphy but it’s very difficult to make sure that individual learning is actually taking place.
- As expected, pushing every student forward on their own path is a hard and time consuming task which requires the facilitators’ full attention every day.
- When that acute feeling of uncertainty hits you: just smile and wave…
- Experiences such as masterclasses will be compared and analysed in a natural human way of trying to find patterns and doing comparisons. There will be good things and bad things coming out of it.
- We had set out with a few ideals on the wall. “Tailor made learning experiences” and “90% of self driven learning” were two of these. It turns out they are indeed compatible but we have to adjust the amount of the second one in order for this to work: different people require more structure than others.
- People will always require a few guidelines in the first few stages to know what they’re supposed to do.
- Masterclass guests do have a lot to offer but there’s only so much people can soak in during the week. Reflection time is crucial.
- It’s very hard to promote an open environment and coordinate everyone’s calendar.
- Communication is key. It takes time though.
Plans and expectations
It’s still to soon to make proper assumptions but as you can tell from the lessons above there’s a lot to improve on. Particularly in communicating what sometimes is on our minds towards the students but also outwards to our broader audience. TNDS was never intended to be a private club so for us it’s very important to always have feedback from the broad design/web/ux/(…)/digital community.
Still, we’ve accomplished many positives. In very little time we’ve seen our students improving as professionals and as people. The environment we’re creating is based on mutual trust and that allows everyone to open up as soon as they feel things aren’t working.
We’ve also been approached by some very big corporations wanting to work with us and that immediately start meetings by saying how much they relate with this new vision. People always mention how something like this is needed which really warms our hearts and pushes forward feeling we’re doing the right thing.
As such, we feel it’s our duty to keep on listening, improving, documenting and sharing the whole process of putting together this learning project. Only this way will we be able to achieve our goal of building a new route towards change in education and career building in digital design.
Thanks for reading,
Tiago
