Reply To: Your CG routine – how do you keep up the pace ?

[Kent Trammell]

I’m really glad to see a thread about this. It’s been a pain point for me as an instructor and for CGC as an educator. In fact the majority of members tend to lose motivation and bail after a few months. Which is a bummer to me personally because I love CG and I do my best to teach clearly and passionately to pass along my love for the medium.

Some weeks go really well and I can complete several exercises or course, and then it also happens that there’s couple of weeks where nothing really happens. 

The crew has been discussing this reality for a while now. Our data suggests most members are hobbyists, which makes sense that “I don’t have time” probably means “I’ve got other stuff I’d rather be doing.” Whereas we’d like to think most members are like @zickkie in that they’re trying to develop professional-level skills. With this approach, members show signs of being motivated and passionate, able to make it through courses, interact with the community, answer questions, apply what they learn and post images/video of their work to the gallery. Not that there aren’t understandable peaks and valleys through the learning process.

But I think you hit on something, @tbrbn that keeps bouncing around in my head:

The motivations is almost always there, but I find the hardest to both get started and to go eventually complete a given course, without being distracted by other tutorials.

I’m starting to wonder if our “buffet” approach to offering training is more negative than positive. A huge collection of courses can be distracting and overwhelming, as you imply. It makes me think that reformatting course offerings into guided learning flows is best. I.e. Learning Flows on steroids.

Do you think that could help keep you on pace and motivated?