What (exactly) is The New Digital School
Explaining how a school works is a no brainer even for a small kid. It’s a system that’s been around for centuries that you can trace back to the Industrial Revolution and the Prussian education system both in the 18th century. We’ve all been through it and know for a fact it doesn’t get that much different from place to place and hasn’t really evolved much.
In his most recent book Creative Schools, Sir Ken Robinson explains how most schools are composed of a curriculum, an assessment system and teachers. Trying to explaining how you can have a school that has none of those is quite difficult. But once we explain the benefits of it most questions fade away.
Definition
The New Digital School is a 10 month program based in Porto, Portugal. Focused on all things digital but for now mostly centred on the Web. Yes we did removed all of those 3 elements in it’s tradicional format but we’re not crazy. Instead we want to replace everything in a traditional school with 400 hours of Masterclasses with a second to none guest faculty, including great names from InVision, Shopify, Spotify, among others. Experienced creatives and web veterans who will share knowledge, stories, advice and lot’s of experiences while creating a hands-on environment around topics of expertise like UX, UI Design, Frontend Development, Personal Management and many other including soft skills topics.
How it works
There’s no fixed curriculum, only overarching topics. We believe this is the right environment for people to absorb more and better knowledge at their own pace, with their own point of view of things. Plus we have over 20 slots for webinars and workshops that we’ll adjust according to the students needs, tastes and interests.
On top of that expect mentoring and coaching sessions but even better than that: live projects with partner companies. Students will work with real briefs and our partners companies have amazing problems to be solved from connected cities to improving personal mobility in the cities of the future.
During the remaining time, our in-house facilitators will be there to help students with whatever they need, guiding, steering them towards information or connecting them to the right people.
The space is free to use as your own co-working space. You can still keep your freelancing activity or work remotely from our room, enjoy the high-speed internet and even make use of the meeting room.
Outcomes
The time students will be in close contact with companies (through mentoring and projects sessions) will allow for soft-hiring opportunities. We want company and HR representatives to have direct contact with students and be allowed to make suggestions and influence their path.
In the end students will receive a certificate but more importantly their CV will become their passport. Proof as they went through training with industry leaders, worked in real projects and received mentoring from experienced veterans.
We don’t just want to close the gap between school and the industry: we want to overlap both ends.
Different ideas always trigger a lot of unique questions
That’s just creativity and the human mind doing it’s thing :) Most of the details can be found on our website http://thenewdigitalschool.com
- FAQ page
- The Campus [medium post]
- The Manifesto [medium post]
- The Launch Event [medium post]
Applications close as of December 1st
In case you’re interested in applying, writing about us or simply wast 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.
