Hello everyone. It’s been a very long time since I posted anything. It’s a very long story that I’m fairly sure nobody cares about, but what may be of interest to some in the blender community is a course I’m building.
It’s a free course for beginners, called “Blender Fundamentals” and it’s a series of small short lessons to bring newcomers from zero-experience to well rounded in the “basics” (a fair bit more actually) of blender and mesh modeling.
It’s setup to be usable in a classroom setting, as well as an individual e-learning course.
I have a reasonable amount finished but I could use some feedback from the community. Both from absolute beginners and more experienced users, bonus points if you’re educators as well.
I’m struggling a bit with some of the content at the moment.
For example, I’m a bit stuck for the most effective way to teach extrude/inset/bevel. The tools are simple enough to explain, but to come up with lightbulb-moment practical use cases for the many ways to use them is another story.
I’m also refining the structure for the last modules. Right now everything is text and images. I will add video later once the text versions are done.
If anyone feels generous and would like to leave me with some feedback, I would greatly appreciate it. Or if you’re looking for a new course that is (hopefully) structured in a fast and easy to understand format to level up your skill, please feel free to take a look:
https://coursing01.madebymichiel.nl/courses/blender-fundamentals/
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While I think this ‘textbook lessons’ approach is very good and it’s great to have explanations concerning every detail of Blender, most newcomers trying to learn Blender (or any piece of software) simply don’t know the value of this and will find it rather boring. I’m basing my opinion on both the learning and teaching experience. Most people prefer taking a course that will teach them something specific and will give them specific results. This is why the famous ‘Donut Tutorial’ is so successful - it is easy enough, approachable and people have a specific goal in front of them to achieve. This is much more attractive than working on abstract concepts like scaling, rotating, navigation and so on.
One more thing: there are sooo many Blender courses and tutorials out there. Standing out simply isn’t easy. In my opinion it’s much better to target more specific groups of people (like the CG Cookie does with their courses) rather than trying to reach out to everybody with the more general stuff.
P.S. I’m assuming that this fundamentals course is just a start for you and you probably plan on creating more courses in the future and earn money for your effort.
Really hope this helps! 
Hey Reuf_Novalic, Thank you for taking the trouble to reply. Some good points there that I will take with me.
Yes, I plan on doing more courses and to get a little bit of money for some of them at some point. I have a ton of ideas that I want to get out there.
To be honest, I might end up doing less “simple scene” modules and doing more focused, specific courses for those (like you mentioned) because the main course has many exercises that by now the simple scenes aren’t really that useful anymore… I think. I’m still adjusting the existing exercises and wondering where I should split the last modules up into their own course. They are already way bigger than I planned to do.
The idea behind the blender fundamentals course is a bit that it’s a baseline. For skills that will allow students to get up and running on their own projects, and for techniques in the other courses. It’s also for me to get experience in building a good course setup.
I’ve bought and done a fair number of courses myself over the years, and one thing I never liked about a lot of them is that many of them use more of an artist than an engineer’s approach. You basically end up copying what they do often without knowing why and end up with something that approximates what they’ve done, but it’s very hard to replicate what makes their example work into your own projects. I’ve noticed this both on some archviz courses and character courses.
There are a lot of really good courses (Angela Guenette’s Blenderella course comes to mind for characters, it’s awesome and still super relevant) but what I’m trying to do is to get a system for courses that helps students build their own projects from scratch rather than copy mine.
I’m still struggling with this. Here’s a post I did on my main website that hopefully gives you a bit of an idea of what I’m going for if I would build a character course: https://madebymichiel.nl/2022/10/lowpoly-character-base/
But it’s one thing to build something that I want, it’s quite another to build something that works for others. So I need feedback to see what others want, if they like what I’m building. So I’m quite glad you took the effort to give some feedback. I might make the next course a bit more “project” based after all. Or maybe make one course with 2 aspects. Part one where I show the why, and part 2 where I use the why in the tutorial project.
What do you think?