Fair warning: This is a bit of a long-winded post but I am genuinely excited about the introduction of PCMech EDU.
Yesterday I got to see the back-end of how PCMech EDU is going to work, and said honestly it’s going to be a kick-ass system.
I will give kudos where kudos are due, Dave is putting a monster effort into it. He’s a darn good coder and the system is going to be a well-oiled lean mean teaching machine. Of that I have no doubt whatsoever.
As far as I’m concerned I’m looking forward to contributing to EDU on a very frequent basis. In my earlier corporate years I trained more than a few help-desk new hires routinely. Just a few days ago I received an e-mail from a former co-worker that I trained that says he still refers back to the documentation I wrote for him – two years ago. It was great to hear that all the effort I put into documentation years ago is still being used today.
My advantage now is that I get to put all my video/audio chops to work in combination with documentation skills – so you can expect to see a ton of video and audio in there in addition to the course materials.
Dave and I both approach education materials in the same fashion, that being real-world Plain English style.
However this is not to say that all course materials available will be solely for novices or experts-only. A very common complaint (not for PCMech but for other education web sites) is that what’s presented is either way too simple or way too difficult.
That being the case, there will be different materials for different skill sets all across the board, including the intermediate levels.
A small example of an intermediate level course:
The importance of continuity in video.
Videography is going to be included in EDU because (aside from being requested) there are many people using online video today, with more than a few creating short film-style presentations that want cinematic feel even if they only have a simple camcorder to do it with.
Continuity is something that, once learned properly, provides a much better overall presentation. Your vision, so to speak, is communicated much more effectively when your continuity is in check. It requires no special effects and no fancy software. It’s a method of shooting and editing to give the effect of one fluid motion in video.
If that sounds confusing, not to worry. The course materials for it will explain it Plain English style to take all confusion out of it.
This is just a very small example of what’s going to be available for education materials in the EDU system.
