I really enjoyed talking with Abby Glassenberg on the Craft Industry Alliance podcast about creating digital products and teaching online courses. Abby was an instructor at CreativeLive where she taught a workshop on Email Marketing for Crafters, and it was great going back to the days of CreativeLive with someone who had the personal experience teaching on that stage.

“The idea behind a CreativeLive workshop was that the people who were watching remotely should feel the cues as if they were in the room. They should feel the emotion in the room, they should feel what’s going on. And that is not a natural thing for a lot of online Edtech to focus on.

“A lot of education platforms focus on the information. They think if I’m pointing my camera at someone who has the right information, then that is my job. And for me, especially because I’ve worked with artists and creatives my entire career, most of the learning for me is not about the information, it is about the context. Especially the emotional context around the information.

“Because anything that someone wants to know, wants to learn, informationally, can probably be had for free with a properly worded Google search. There’s really nothing we’ve ever created or sold that’s not available for free in text form. But we, as humans, learn from watching others. We learn from stories and connection with people.

“And so for me, CreativeLive was built around the audience first and then created a space for the instructors. Where most learning platforms put the instructor on a pedestal.”