Such a long time since I shared anything with you all. We've been crazy busy though.
The Team
Six months ago the team was Me, Nick, Nikki and Stan. Recently we added Tim Goddard to the team which we are really excited about. Once he's back from europe he plans to film a lot of new content so that's exciting.
But the Team is actually getting much bigger than that, we have a dragon staff teacher, a fire safety teacher, a hoop teacher, a juggling teacher, a silk fans teacher and a multi hoop teacher. Nikki is now the flowarts manager and has been onboarding all of them and helping them with their courses.
A huge part of the project got built in january and february which is the revenue share system which pays all the teachers. I'm so proud of that system, it's super accurate, really fair and takes me like 10 minutes to pay everyone, so that's great. The best part is that teachers are actually getting paid. It isn’t huge money yet, but it’s real money flowing back into the artists creating the content, which has always been one of the core goals of the project. Creating that positive feedback loop between students, teachers and new content is something I’m really proud of.
Full Members
Full Member subscriptions are starting to gain traction too, and people are sticking around, learning heaps of stuff and supporting the teachers. That’s been incredibly encouraging to see.
The Platform
Version 2.0 of the site was the big custom elearning platform, migrating all the data from the old system and designing the new one.
Since then I've updated Courses, Lessons and Places pages with search and filtering, and lessons have their own pages.
The progress system for Watched / Trained / Learned is all fully set up and people are using it a lot.
Lots of extra meta data has been added to the lessons like concepts, difficulties and durations. Which means you can search/filter for beginner isolation lessons and so on. Which is nice. So we have these two different systems for learning stuff, the courses are highly curated and linear and then lesson search allows you to just find a thing you want to learn, more user directed learning.
Loads of SEO work and some experimenting with paid ads etc.
Massive redesign of the homepage which took ages, I really love the animated section and the course grid demo section. Hopefully it explains a lot more about what the site is about and a lot of the unique features.
Content
So yeah, in six months we're massively tidied up the site and added around 8 new courses and over 400 new lessons from Nick, Nikki and Tim. Tim's content in particular has been an interesting experiment, clipping up the source videos into hundreds of atomic lessons that focus on individual variations and skills. And we have all these new teachers creating new courses that will eventually add another thousand lessons or more to the site.
And there's a lot more planned...
User Dashboards
Your list of what you've watched/trained/learned is due for a big upgrade, maybe some charts of your progress, drill into each course and see more details about it. Training lists and so on.
I want to build an XP system so you can all get the warm fuzzies about how much progress you're making. Maybe certificates or badges or something.
Teacher pages
Teacher pages so that all their courses, lessons and social links etc are all in one place. The teacher stats so they can see how which lessons are popular and who their students are.
Forums
This forum is going to be completely replaced. It's the only part of the site I didn't touch in the 2.0 upgrade. The plan is that you'll be able to comment on anything on the site, as opposed to having this separate forum for discussions. I have a plan of how i want to implement it, I just need to finish up some other priorities. But there'll be a central feed of everything and then various discussions all over the site. I might even sprinkle in some spherculism archive conversations that will give some context to the early days of tech poi etc.
Disciplines
Discipline pages like Poi and Fans and Staff etc, with all their related content on there
Lessons
Lesson pages will have a load of related content as well so it's easier to explore.
Concepts
Concept pages are going to be epic, so a page on say Isolation will show all lessons by all teachers in all disciplines on that concept as well as how that concept relates to others. This should fill the gap between structured courses and individual lesson search and help you deep dive into special interests. I'm really excited about building this but I keep having higher priority things to do. This is where the site stops just being a course site and really starts to define the Flowarts Knowledge Graph. Most of the underlying data structures are set up, I just need to design and build the front end.
Skills
When you learn a lesson on a certain concept your skill of that concept increases. This will be part of the new user dashboard. Similar to course progress but based on concepts.
Wrapping up
There's also talk about organising the first retreat :)
So yeah, just an infinite amount of work going on. As always the best thing you can do to help is to spread the word about Flowarts, every new member helps fund the work we're doing and make the vision a reality.
A huge thank you to all the Full Members, I really appreciate you all. This is all a crazy experiment and your votes of confidence are well received.
Big Love,
Matt
