{"id":48451,"date":"2019-11-05T06:00:01","date_gmt":"2019-11-05T11:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=48451"},"modified":"2019-11-05T10:12:33","modified_gmt":"2019-11-05T15:12:33","slug":"music-class-part-1-learnmonthly-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=48451","title":{"rendered":"Music Class Part 1: LearnMonthly.com"},"content":{"rendered":"

I mentioned a few weeks ago<\/a> that I signed up for a music course at LearnMonthly.com<\/a>. The course was taught by Andrew Huang<\/a>, who is one of my favorite YouTube creators<\/a>. The class ended today. I’ve turned in my final project and I want to talk about what I learned, what I made, and what I think about the LearnMonthly service. (But not in that order.) If you stick around long enough, I’ll inflict some of my music on you.<\/p>\n

For those of you who are new to the site: I’ve been dabbling in music for a few years. It all started with my Bad and Wrong Music lessons back in 2014<\/a>. I make music digitally and I don’t play any real instruments. I’m entirely self-taught. Music is a side hobby and I have no plans – or potential – to do anything with it professionally. Even after all this time, I’m still very amateurish in my work. Maybe this means I don’t have any aptitude for music. Maybe it means I do have some aptitude but it takes a long time to get good. Maybe I’ve hit a plateau due to odd gaps in my knowledge.<\/p>\n

In any case, I signed up for this class because I really loved the introductory lecture on YouTube<\/a> and I wanted to fill in some of those knowledge gaps. As far as that goes, I got what I wanted out of the course. I’m going to complain about the website here, but I want to make it clear up front that I don’t have any problems with Huang’s lectures.<\/p>\n

First up, let’s talk about…<\/p>\n

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Monthly<\/h3>\n

I don’t know what to make of Monthly. Their website<\/a> has no corporate information, no contact info, no About page, and no information on leadership. They don’t even have a mailing addressThis is interesting. What happens when you need to sue a company like this? I suppose you could track them down via payment information?<\/span>. The only thing you can do is create an account to sign up for classes. As of this writing, they have just six classes. Three are for creating music, two are focused on drawing \/ painting, and one is on filmmaking. The business plan seems to be to partner with creative influencers to create an online course. The creator provides video lectures and Monthly provides the classroom framework.<\/p>\n

Obnoxiously, the site obfuscates prices and curriculum until after<\/b> you’ve created an account. For the curious, the music class I took was $280 for a 30 day course. The course consisted of about 14 hours of lightly editedThis isn’t the meandering ramble of a livestream, but it’s also not as tight as Huang’s typical YouTube videos. Overall I’d say the videos are pretty good in terms of information density.<\/span> lecture videos, walking students through the process of creating 3 different music tracks.<\/p>\n

I’m going to take a wild guess and assume that Monthly is a new startup and the team is still building the website and figuring out how everything needs to work. I’m also going to assume that one of the company goals is to add value to the creator’s lectures. There are already plenty of ways that a famous person can put video content behind a paywall, so it seems reasonable that Monthly ought to be aiming to do more than just host videos and process payment information.<\/p>\n

Classroom Interactions<\/h3>\n

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The best thing Monthly could offer besides a paywall is a set of tools for facilitating communication between students. It seems like this is the intent, but the features are either missing or underdeveloped.<\/p>\n

There’s no way to know how many other people were taking the course. I’m going to assume it’s in the hundreds. The system divides students into classrooms, which are called “peer groups”. My group had 23 people. This seems like a good idea, but there’s nothing in the system to support these groups. You can go to the page for your peer group and see a feed of posts from other students, but those posts come from the general student pool and not just your peer group.<\/p>\n

Imagine you’re at a wedding and there are hundreds of people standing around. You’re informed that a dozen of these people are at the same “table” as you, except there aren’t actually any tables<\/b>. Your group is scattered among the crowd and there’s no way to tell if someone is at your virtual table except to look at their nametag and then consult the list of names for your group and see if they’re on it.<\/p>\n

After a while you’re going to start wondering why anyone bothered assigning people to imaginary tables, since they have no bearing on behavior or organization.<\/p>\n

Some random observations on how the site functions:<\/p>\n