Life and Times of Online Classes Vol. 1

Last month, our team introduced Online Classes to the Skillshare community — project-based classes that happen online/offline. It's been an exciting time as we've been working on improving the overall learning experience, curriculum, and product!

We've spent the past six weeks talking to users, experimenting, and pushing out improvements. Here's a short list of all the changes:

Discussions The epicenter of collaborative learning is the ability to talk with other students and the teacher. We've been making constant improvements:

• Collapsed replies

• More scannable main page
• Follow/unfollow a discussion
• Images
• Permalinks

Groups Over the past 6 weeks, two things bubbled up from the students based on interviews and observations:

1. Students were creating online workshops to meet with each other via Google Hangouts.

2. They also wanted to stay with the same groups throughout the course.

So, today we're excited to launch "Groups!" Now, when you sign-up for a hybrid class, you'll be able to collaborate in a small group throughout the class. You'll be able to do the following:

• Join / Create a Group

• Create workshops online or in-person to get feedback on your project (coming soon)

• Have smaller discussions to ask questions, get feedback, and share resources (coming soon)

Navigation We've cleaned up the navigation around the website. We started by combing the discussions (formerly known as the classroom) into the overall class. We've also added a drop-down for your current and upcoming classes.

We're excited to continue to push our improvements and updates to the online learning experience. We have some exciting things coming up in the near future for projects so stay tuned!