Become an Instructor
You have spent years to learn what you know and you love sharing your experience with other users?
We are trying to make this as easy as possible for you, because we know how much work and preparation goes into creating tutorials and online courses. You should be able to think about the content, not about the right streaming tools, codecs, marketing, webdesign, tax, invoicing, privacy policies and other details that can and will eat up surprising amounts of time.
Formats
We have at the moment three main formats we support. However for future improvement we are very curious for your ideas what you would like to see on the platform.
1.) Live Webinars
At the moment we see live webinars mainly as replacement for the live workshops we used to host in our studio. Live means, that all participants are in the same room/video-conference and that this happens at a specific time. A Webinar happens in front of an online audience limited to max. 20 participants. For the post Corona future we want to offer ‘hybrid’ solutions, that work for local and remote participants and instructors alike.
We provide a Zoom pro account to run the live webinars without time limit..
The live webinars will be recorded, and reuploaded via a protected vimeo embed as a course*
- Participants of the live webinar can revisit the Recordings for min. 1 year
- Students that couldn’t attend the live webinar can buy access to the recordings at a reduced rate (as they lack the interaction of a live webinar)
2.) *Online Courses
We have set up The NODE Institute website as a wordpress installation using the LearnDash E-Learning extension, which supports the creation and distribution of classic elearning courses.
Learn more about LearnDash here: https://www.learndash.com
The main advantage here is that these courses – once published – are independent of dates and can be sold over and over. The structure is this:
Courses
A course has an introduction page, that is visible to everyone.
The actual content is structured in:
- Lessons (have again a welcome page) – Think of them as chapters, which are made up of:
- Topics (which are pages with the actual learning content)
- Quizzes (to conclude lessons with a test)
Learning content can be Text, Images, Links, (protected) Video Embeds and file downloads,
pretty much anything web.
This structure makes it very easy to convert existing tutorials into Lessons and break them up into Topics and start building courses from them. Existing Topics can be used in different courses, so that the work invested into a topic could be harvested in different contexts.It is possible but not mandatory to force users to take the lessons step by step (drip-feed).
Also, lessons can be concluded with quizzes that check the users progress – which will become important when we work with exams and certifications.
Certification / Learning Path
It is our aim to further individualise the pricing for whole courses in the future. However that only makes sense when we have full courses to offer, which isn’t the case yet.
We will offer (the “big”) courses in two variations:
- COMMUNITY
The first option is very affordable, offline and without individual support.
- PROFESSIONAL
The second option will be to take the course with individual support and an exam at the end that participants have to pass to receive a certificate about their participation and progress. This option will be more expensive to reflect the extra effort for support and the higher economic value of a certified training on the job market.
Certified courses will be curated by The NODE Institute and provide a clear and documented learning path from Beginner to Professional in three distinct, long term online courses for VVVV and TouchDesigner: Beginner, Intermediate, Professional
We invite every webinar/workshop instructor to recycle the contents they have developed for the webinar/workshop into topics, from which we will build the big, curated and certified courses. To that end, the LearnDash System allows us to have several instructors in a course and split the course revenues according to the percentage of their contribution to the course.
This is work in progress but we invite you to discuss and shape the idea with us.
3.) Community Meetups
We organise monthly VVVV and TouchDesigner community meetups and events. While we do them online at the moment due to Corona, we will host them as local/remote hybrids in the future to further interweave local and international audiences.
We are very welcoming for other software communities that want to host community meetings and encourage VVVV and TD users to let us them them to organise community activities.
4.) Individual Consulting
We would like to offer individual training and consulting sessions with our instructors for students as well as clients. For now we will handle this individual and manual. Let us know if you are available for one-on-ones, curated/booked workshops (e.g. at Festivals) or company consulting.
Learn more: https://thenodeinstitute.org/consulting