Pedagogical advice for the System Architect Essentials 7.2 course
Hello there,
I'm currently going through your course. For the most part, it has been going okay, but I think vast improvements can be made to speed up the learning process.
The videos included throughout are almost useless. They are typically too abstract to be useful and consists of the previous page worded in a slightly different way - I typically skip them. My instructor noted how previous versions had demonstration videos that go show the editor and some features. I think this format would work well for showing the 'exercise steps' for the exercise at the end of the module. Currently, I see a lot of text and it's hard to connect it what I'm supposed to do in the designer. A concise video with a simple narration would speed this up tremendously.
As far as the text portions, I feel like more can be done with less. It certainly delves into detail, but aesthetically the massive walls of text could be chopped and reformatted. For instance, many blogs have taken advantage of <aside> and <blockquote> to create expandable definition blocks, warning sections, etc e.g http://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/clock/ They use many different types of formatting and coloring to make keywords pop and be me memorable to visual learners. https://open.gl/context is also a decent example of turning what would be a massive wall of text into a varied set of readable chunks.
Hello there,
I'm currently going through your course. For the most part, it has been going okay, but I think vast improvements can be made to speed up the learning process.
The videos included throughout are almost useless. They are typically too abstract to be useful and consists of the previous page worded in a slightly different way - I typically skip them. My instructor noted how previous versions had demonstration videos that go show the editor and some features. I think this format would work well for showing the 'exercise steps' for the exercise at the end of the module. Currently, I see a lot of text and it's hard to connect it what I'm supposed to do in the designer. A concise video with a simple narration would speed this up tremendously.
As far as the text portions, I feel like more can be done with less. It certainly delves into detail, but aesthetically the massive walls of text could be chopped and reformatted. For instance, many blogs have taken advantage of <aside> and <blockquote> to create expandable definition blocks, warning sections, etc e.g http://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/clock/ They use many different types of formatting and coloring to make keywords pop and be me memorable to visual learners. https://open.gl/context is also a decent example of turning what would be a massive wall of text into a varied set of readable chunks.
Beyond that, my other suggestion would be to reorder the course since the topics seem to be all over the place, going from one topic to a different one, and back to the first topic. Since each module is introduced as a self-contained module I find it hard to understand how it all works on a high level. Perhaps a video that walks through creating the smallest possible project that covers all the modules would help with this? The public resources I found were pretty bad compared to open software (Such as video/text walk throughs for video game engines).
Thanks for your time. Keep in mind I focused on what could be improved and not what was done well.