Reply To: sad that office-hours are gone

[Austin Dunham]

I attended some of them, and I appreciate the time the instructors spent with us. . . but it did seem like there weren’t that many participants.  Even when there were participants, it seems like specific questions were sometimes difficult to come by, and often not asked ahead of time.  The answers were often specific to those who attended that session.

Maybe if the office hours were specific to a course?  I can imagine that after turning in something huge like Cubicity, Pothead, etc., that the instructors need a break.  Maybe the course wouldn’t even drop until the instructor caught that breather.  Then the office hours would be related to a new course a lot of students are taking.  You guys would be the best to determine the gestation period between when a course drops and when it has the most people taking the course.

I also don’t know how large CGCookie’s “truly active” community is.  Some of the participation woes may be a scale issue.  There are X number of people just taking the classes.  There are X number of “lurkers”.  There are X number of people willing to post, or to attend a live event.

Maybe workshops with specific projects going based off of specific classes?  They’d need a little structure.  The students would meat once or twice a week, and maybe the instructor is there every other week.  Not full community projects.  Something a bit less ambitious, but focused.  “Light this(these) scenes.”  Rig this character either from scratch or with rigify. . . 

I even like the idea of non-instructor led community projects, though coordinating that could be a bit of a challenge.  I imagine CGCookie would have to setup a framework that the students use.  I.e. Here’s the Google Drive you’ll use.  Here’s the directory structure you’ll use, etc.  Hopefully the framework would be easy to re-use for other projects, even larger instructor led community ones.

Edit: One other thing that might help.  I see a “What’s coming” section, but it doesn’t seem to have any history.  I don’t see the announcement that office hours stopped.  I found it easiest to see the office hours in Discord.  It could’ve been a little easier to see on CGCookie’s main site.

Some form of news, with a history, could probably help.  So would a calendar.  The calendar could have classes, community projects, instructor hours, etc. on it.

I like the playlists, which, now that I look at them seem to have gotten a bit of attention, but site organization might be something that could be improved, especially for expensive live events.