Growing Dissatisfaction with CGCookie

[smurfmier1985]

@wesburke Hi Wes 😊 my suggestion is about the sort of exercises CG Cookie provides. I would suggest to stimulate more doing your own projects for exercises, use the skill learned and actually create something unique. Maybe not for the beginner series, but for some of the intermediate courses and definitely for the advanced courses.

For example;

Johanthan Lampel did this awesome sci-fi environment course. It is training you to be able to create any game asset you want. He is modeling an animated door. What is the exercise? An animated door. Which mean you could follow along with the course, copy everything Lampel is doing, submit that, and get a pass. Not very challenging imo..

Why not ‘create your own sci-fi environment asset, with a movable part, but it can’t be a door’.

That way you are stimulated to actually use the skills and your own imagination, to create something unique. I think this is something you could definitely ask of an advanced blender head.

[Jonathan Lampel]

Thanks for the feedback @tobles ! I definitely see what you mean. @thebergh I really appreciate you explaining how you felt as you submitted your exercises – it really helps to show which parts of the experience we ought to focus on improving. There’s a lot we can do in this area that we will be talking about as a team, so please continue the discussion! 

@smurfmier1985 Good thoughts! For the next FPS course I’ll have you guys do something a bit different for the exercise than what I show in the lessons and see how that goes. 

[Matthew Fricker]

Not sure if this has been suggested yet , but I am in a rush and just wanted to add this in 

Why not make it mandatory to put a small critique in when you grade a submission ? You could set a minimum character count and that way everyone who grades them will have to say something about the submission to help out. This includes myself as I try to grade excercises when I can but I am terrible at just pressing the red or green button and moving on without writing anything – a habit I am working to change.

Just a thought but surely it will be fairly easy to implement and even if less people vote, it will have a bigger impact on helping the submitter I would say. 

[smurfmier1985]

@frikkr I think that’s a great start! 

But how do you make sure everyone doesn’t just write ‘good job’, without making the minimum characters count so high that you have to type super long stories every time? Which would probably keep people way from grading.. 

Just curious if anyone has any ideas on that? 🙂

[smurfmier1985]

@thebergh I still wanted to respond to something you said earlier:

I do feel CGC needs to be able to cater both the serious student and the doodler/hobbyist, or sooner or later all that’s going to be left is the latter.

But do they though? Have to cater both? As in provide different content / features aimed at one or the other? Considering the small crew they are, and how long it takes to create courses and such, that’s a hell of a lot to ask..

As far as I know (from what Kent tells during streams), they aim to offer high quality content that takes you from noob to finding a job in the industry aka the serious learner. And with that choice comes certain sacrifices (maybe less doodle members), but also opportunities!  (like growing a strong community of passionate artists) I think it’s good they choose clear path, with the small crew they are. Focus is key in providing quality content.

Doesn’t mean your typical hobbyist can’t enjoy CG Cookie, on the contrary! They have access and get to learn from this high quality content too 😊

I do think you have to be consistent though, and make sure every part of the learning platform follows the same high standards you set. Cater to your chosen audience.  

And as always the awesome Cookie crew is demonstrating they listen to their members and want to improve by engaging with us about our concerns here in this thread, which I applaud 🙌🏻

I do strongly believe meaningful feedback (from artists ahead of you in experience) is super important for your learning progress, so the more ways those can be provided / implemented the better. Especially on a learning platform like this. Yes, you have your own responsibility to practice what you learn, but if you don’t know what you’re doing wrong and keep practicing the same mistakes you’ll never get better. You’ll probably just give up in the end.. I believe @tobles mentioned this also.

Curious to see how this exercise thingy gets upgraded to the next level 😎

[Matthew Fricker]

@smurfmier1985 Ha good point…. well ….. “good job” is 7 characters long , and “well done” is 8 long , and “great work” is 9  , so lets just make it 10 character min… problem solved 😛 

[smurfmier1985]

@frikkr How about:

Good job !!!

😛

[Matthew Fricker]

@smurfmier1985 aaah , damn those exclamation marks , I forgot about them lol. 

But seriously , I think a character count of 15 min would not be too much and still encourage graders to write something helpful . Also , some friendly guidelines may help to avoid those default phrases and I would like to think that most people who grade excercies do it to be helpful so they will take it seriously. And at the end of the day, any “well done’s” and “great work’s” that slip through will still carry a pass or fail vote – so they are no worse off than what we already have…..

[tobles]

Hey @wesburke,

please don’t apologize to me. Maybe my posts have sounded disappointed but I’m not THAT unhappy with CGC. When I started this topic my happiness with CGC was at an all-time-low of 98%. So I don’t think we should talk about a “let down” here :D. I made this post to get myself up to a full 100%, with the help of the CGC-community, by finding out if there even is a problem with CGC or if it’s me and my expectations.

Now to an idea of mine to maybe improve or let’s better say actuate the feedback for exercise submissions. In my opinion it would be pretty neat if people could kind of “subscribe” to a course to get notified when there is a new upload in the submission since I think there are people in this community that like to give a real feedback (I already made that experience), but searching out every upload or to even check if there is a new one is a nasty clicking through. If there would be a shortcut I think people would get more active. Furthermore, I think it would cheer people up to upload their results to the submission section instead of the polybook in the forum if there would be a number of interested subscribers shown in the submission area, so people know there are others wanting to give a hand and help with feedback. Basically like the RSVP to a life stream but to a course submission.

Cheers,
tobles

[Markus Berg]

@smurfmier1985 guess it’s my turn to clarify what I meant. When I wrote that CGC should cater both doodlers and serious students, I based that on what you wrote. That most members are just doodlers/hobbyists, and just a small minority are serious hard core learners. I would prefer if the doodlers were the minority. 

Also, I never commented anything on the courses themselves. And the reason for that is because I find them great. I have no complaints about that. There are lots of courses and smaller tutorials on here. The doodler can jump around and watch whatever they like, and the serious student can study more in depth.

Hopefully I was better able to explain what I meant. Otherwise, I’m sorry.

[smurfmier1985]

@thebergh yeah I got ya 🙂

[Phil Osterbauer]

I don’t know if my 2 cents are helpful or not. I agree the exercises need a bit of work. To me maybe its not so much the topic of the exercise. It could be to an extent but take the animation courses for example. Wayne’s video is showing you how to do a bouncing ball. The exercise is a bouncing ball. People still submit poorly bouncing balls because the exercise is about training your eye much more than showing you followed along with the tutorial. The only way someone can get better from there is to be guided through what they are failing to see. Its why good feedback is so important.  If we could promote those that are grading to provide better feedback I think the exercises would be more fruitful. 

Just to brain storm a few ideas, these are things that through my own experiences have been helpful in my learning:

Peer Buddies:

This was something that I saw being used at Animation Mentor. Basically as soon as you passed a class you had the ability to become a “Peer Buddy” where you would be paired with somebody new to the course. You could message back and forth/ get one on one feedback get tips on assignments. The help provided was based on what the newbie wanted it to be and the time the buddy could provide.  For CGC this could look like a badge or something. Once you complete a course you could apply to be a “mentor/peer” for that course and maybe upon approval that you understand the curriculum you’re awarded a badge and maybe highlighted as such in the course syllabus. That way newbies can see who they could message for help or advice. 

Feedback Friday:

This idea could take on many forms but the main point is its a single day dedicated to feedback of our works.  The one I  was a part of was a 24hr google hangout where community members could pop in and out as they pleased. You could either share your screen of the work you want critiqued or you could submit it to the host who could then share it to the other viewers. Because of it being a 24hr hangout you would need people to volunteer blocks of time to be the host and moderate. This was usually in the form of a sign up sheet on Google Docs. This takes a bit of dedication to keep it going; but once it catches on its a really enjoyable thing to be a part of. It wouldn’t be something that directly effects the exercise but it would help promote giving feedback and what good feedback is.

What ever is done I feel like CGC can only go so far to improve the exercises. With CGC’s size its really going to have to be the community that helps drive this area to be successful. 

[Paul Frank]

Some people want feedback on their exercises and some just want to get that thumbs-up and move on so I think feedback should be solicited by the users so the CGC team doesn’t spend their limited time doing deep-dive critiques on hundreds of modified primitives from the Mesh Modeling 101 exercise.

I agree that the majority of the feedback will need to come from the community since the CGC team is heavily outnumbered. Maybe extending the XP system a bit could help incentivize community members to be more involved? Stackoverflow’s system comes to mind; it more often than not results in very thorough, high quality answers to community questions with an increase to the answer author’s point-based reputation as the reward.  For CGC, maybe forum topics can get a question [Q] tag and answers that get “love” or marked as “accepted answer” get the author an increase in XP (or reputation, etc.) resulting in an increased self-worth as an awesome member of the CGC community. Lists of weekly, monthly, and yearly (instead of all-time), top contributing users could help encourage some healthy competition on a regular basis.  Maybe just keep XP as is and publish the user’s “love” counts as their reputation for simplicity’s sake?  

It might be a good idea for the CGC team to add a short addendum video to each of the existing exercises, after enough have been submitted and critiqued, showing common mistakes as submitted by users. This has the benefit of not having to code anything extra up for the website and reduces redundant questions and answers.

Otherwise, I think live stream critiques are pretty useful, maybe just have those consistently on the same day each month.

[Jake Korosi]

A little late to this thread I suppose, but I did want to add my thoughts on the topic of exercises.

Firstly, when it comes to feedback.  I confess that most of the time I’ve graded, I haven’t left feedback; usually when I do it’s to express when I’ve found a submission to be strikingly well-done; but I suppose that’s of limited use really.  Mostly the problem that I need to overcome is that I’m self-conscious about critiquing peers’ submissions when I’ve very much a student myself.  I suppose you could say I’m afraid of giving advice that comes off as presumptuous.  It would be incredibly awkward to tell somebody they need to clean up the smoothness of a curved surface on their model, however objectively true that is, when I know that in a week I could be making a model that has the same faults and wind up being given the exact same advice by someone else.  I suppose you could call it a minor variation of Impostor Syndrome.

Secondly – some of those exercises it’s -incredibly- difficult to give advice for.  Let’s use an example that’s already been used to make another point – the Three Objects exercise.  As has been pointed out, from a pass/fail perspective this exercise is a no-brainer to *grade* – there are three instructions; if you have followed all three, you pass that exercise and it’s really that simple.  But therein lies the problem – okay, so if somebody fails that exercise because they only made two objects, or did not use Sketchfab, or whatever, your feedback can simply explain that.  But what feedback do you possibly give to an exercise that passes, beyond “good job”?  You have to edit three objects.  It doesn’t say how extensively.  It doesn’t say they have to be smooth-shaded.  It doesn’t say they have to be very elaborate nor very simple.  Anything you can tell a passing submitter for that exercise beyond simple support and a Welcome to CGC (it’s probably their very first exercise after all) would be entirely superfluous really.   And for that matter, if the exercise has failed – only one person needs to explain that there should be three objects and the submitter only made two.  Once the first grader points that out, what is left for the remainder of graders to add?  Just keep repeating over and over again that they needed to make three objects?  That’s not particularly helpful.

Thirdly – I can’t overstate how much I LOVE Wayne’s personally reviewing every exercise.  It’s really awesome!  It would be great if other instructors could do that sometimes, although I completely understand why they cannot.  But there’s also a rub…I know that when Wayne pointed out a mistake in my bouncing-ball exercise for example, my next few steps were pretty clear – take down submission, fix mistake, resubmit.   And I don’t think I’m far off in thinking that most animation students will do that.   So there’s the thing – if I come along and click on an animation exercise that’s awaiting grading and I see Wayne has already left his own professional-grade and typically quite substantial feedback in it…what on Earth of value do I have to add to that?  “Uhhh….good job?”  In the case where he’s found a mistake I don’t even grade those exercises quite frankly, because I anticipate the submitter will soon be deleting the exercise and resubmitting a corrected version.  Note; this is NOT a suggestion that Wayne needs to do anything different whatsoever!  But his participation in those exercises changes the calculus a bit, and that’s something that needs to be considered especially when we’re discussing things like minimum-required commenting for grading submissions.

[smurfmier1985]

@jakeblended good points Jake

[Author]

Posts