As the semester ended, I had to reflect a lot on how to restructure this year's courses.
While researching educational offerings in design, I noticed several exciting offerings I want to share with you. Here's my article on educational discounts to help you in design education.
It is very easy to adapt a complete digital design agency setup for educational purposes. Nowadays Adobe Creative Suites isn't the only tool to help students process their tasks. Despite my affinity for AI tools, I won't talk about those for now, as they are too novel for many educators to incorporate them into their classes.
In my case, I'm talking about the tools most digital or brand creatives use to work with clients.
One would look for miro or mural as the tools used to do digital workshops. For UI design, one might also consider Figma and Sketch. Or you might search for more specialized tools such as autodesk offerings, UX research tools or even access to contemporary building tools, such as webflow or marvel.
And believe it or not, most of these offerings are free for educators. Of course those are also free for students, but to fill a course with life, the educator has to care for the contents within the overall curriculum.
I was quite impressed and thankful for all the offerings, so I wanted to share some recommendations with you. Note: this is not sponsored content, but my personal choice and experience. None of the tools are incorporated by me for future classes yet. It's a collection of options to test.
Miro Educational Program / Mural for education
The Miro Educational Program seems quite extensive. There is a great deal of scalability with 100 Team members. Teachers Training webinars and special forums should also be of assistance to inexperienced teachers.
Though I didn’t test it, there’s also an educational program from Mural called Mural for Education. Their offering sounds similar. So if you are already a Mural user, opt for Mural.
If you don't know mural or miro yet, both are incredibly powerful tools to do online workshops, brainstorming sessions, or work together in general. Some even use it during their daily stand-ups. Both tools help you get rid of post-it pollution. In teaching, it is great to learn about students' expectations, show them mappings, and share group work in projects. I am personally not a fan of digital brainstorming. The non-digital approach seems better to me. All whiteboard tools help to prioritize and share thoughts, but for collection I trust talking and writing, depending on the method being used.
Figma and sketch for education
Figma is known by most designers already. The fun part about figmas educational offering is the additional ability to use FigJam, the whiteboard solution by Figma. After doing the registration you are eligible to use figma for 2 years with functionalities similar to the professional account and FigJam on top.
Sketch is the predecessor UI tool before Figma became the most popular tool (while Adobe XD always being around too, also having some advantages such as native lottie support). Finally, as of March 2023, Sketch also offers a free educational account.
As all those mentioned tools battle each other, it's quite difficult for me to give a clear recommendation, which tool to choose. If you are used to Adobe, Adobe XD could also be a fine solution, but currently Figma and Sketch are the benchmarks. So for me the use of variable fonts is a must as teaching the use of fonts includes the use of variable fonts. For those purposes Figma or Sketch are better.
The main disadvantage to know about Figma is that you need to be online. Traveling by train and trying to work in Figma (or also Miro as mentioned before) sucks if there's no proper network coverage.
Webflow
While doing my research I imagined some courses I did on Interaction Design, Interface Design alongside a project to develop at the end of the sessions. The former curriculums included teaching programming languages such as PHP.
Background in teaching interaction design and doing projects
At that time most implementations needed to be done via WordPress as a free solution as all other attempts to get free educational access to a Content Management System were unsuccessful. WordPress is not an ideal solution. However, the question is, does it really make sense to tell students how to create their own theme, play around with PHP files and do some surface stuff? Most likely, if they want to create their own website and develop it further to learn more about themselves.
Regarding the overall curriculum students mainly learn classical disciplines and during bachelor studies most students find more fun with typography or graphical design. When it comes to interactive disciplines, the learning curve is steeper for the same reason that there are also tools to learn, languages to learn,... and the theoretical knowledge of usability and interaction principles tends to get lost on the way.
Why not simply provide students with a tool that does what WordPress combined with some advanced site builder does? Et voila, there's an excellent offering from Webflow to accomplish that.
Webflow educational discount
Okay, someone might ask, why not wix or squarespace which might be both easier to handle than webflow? Without comparing the tools in detail, there's a simple fact: Webflow is completely free as of March 2023. Others offer discounts. Of course webflow is a crazy tool with many capabilities, but I prefer a certain degree of complexity for educational purposes. I would recommend Canva for graphical purposes, as they also have free options for students... but no. Students need to learn something using those tools. It's kind of a playful experience to learn CSS, more about HTML, interactivity, responsiveness and so on. I guess webflow could be an excellent tool for teaching web development.
Honestly I got a bit nervous while checking out, as I registered 20 seats for testing purposes for now (which is the approximate number of students) and I saw quite a large amount to pay, which finally got eliminated by a discount code. Looking forward to testing it in class.
Other resources for educational discounts in design disciplines for free
These resources above reflect the typical setup for a digital design agency and allow flexibility. Below are a few additional links that may be helpful for 3D on the production side or extended research tools for user science as well.
UX research educational ressources
Condens and UXPressia are both free offerings, which I have not yet evaluated. Some of the functionalities could also be done with one of the whiteboard solutions mentioned above, and Condes offers some advanced documentation functionality.
3D
Speaking about 3D, I would mostly recommend Blender to get started. Many students who use Cinema 4D, Maya or 3D Studio Max would say, "Waaa blender", because its interface isn't as polished. So autodesk, the company behind Maya and 3D studio max, also offers a great free option (for one year).
Other educational offerings to be aware of
