The Art of Photography: Open2Study & Harvard on Alison

I have previously written about Alison online training. Per the post, I did not much care for the platform because I felt that the courses there were simply repackaged material from elsewhere. I am not certain that the new that Harvard University has released their photography course on Alison changes my mind about the platform.

My reservation is that like the other course I found on Alison, the Harvard University course will just be repackaged set of lectures. Not something tailored for Alison itself.  I could be completely wrong and just picked the wrong courses to sample when I was trying out Alison. I mean, I found at least one course on Udemy, which is my preferred online learning platform, that was an unedited repackage of what appeared to be a one day course on Unity. If I didn't know that the vast majority of Udemy courses are created natively for Udemy, I would get the wrong impression of the platform as a whole.

However, the reason I am not keen to give Alison a second chance is that I am already doing an "The Art of Photography" course through Open2Study, which is an Australian website offering courses through the Open Universities of Australia. They have a mix of free and paid courses. The paid courses lead to recognised accreditations. I am not as interested as official accreditation. So I am doing the month long free short course. I am enjoying it, and I also feel more connected with fellow students because of the Google Plus community.

As for why I am not interested in getting official accreditation. There is the question if photography accreditation is worth paying for given that the industry is in decline. But mostly I am not looking to do photography professionally. I am more on the series hobbyist side of the spectrum. I am happy to take photos for my own amusement, shoot friends and family or personalised photo gifts, perhaps a few paid jobs through platforms like Airtasker, although a quick look at Airtasker clearly shows that photography is a field awash with professionals, nothing more than that. 

Online Training Website

Despite my resolution to post more, I clear have not. Obviously, this is an issue and I am going to start remedying it by posting something, hopefully useful, at least once a fortnight! For my first topic, let's talk online training website.

Online training is one of the greatest things about the internet. Lifelong learning is more important than ever and thanks to the internet, easier than ever. Or is it! Well, yes, it is but I think it is important to find the right way to learn.

To that end, I looked into a few online training and tutorials related to digital photography. I, of course, am an avid photographer but I have mostly been taking photos in automatic mode with point and shoot cameras. This is okay for photos I take merely as a memento but not ideal when I do want to capture a scene because it invoked a particular emotion in me.  If I had a dollar for all the times I took a picture of a fairly ordinary scene because I was feeling something, only to come home and realise that I had totally failed to capture it, I would have money enough for a lot of different lenses.

There was also the time the photographer for my brother's Bangladeshi wedding reception was in a car crash the day of the wedding. Thankfully he is okay but it did mean that we didn't have a photographer for the wedding. So I stepped in as the unofficial official photographer. Most of the photos were okay but a few too many had blurry parts. Also, I was shooting by trial and error, which is a silly thing to do when you have a wealth of knowledge just a few mouse clicks away!

As a result, I decided to look into some online training. I tried reading some photography tips and tricks websites, as well as watch some YouTube videos. But I do better under more structured teaching environments. It can't be too structured, I need time and space to go off and try things on my own, but completely informal makes me procrastinate too much.

So far, I have tried taking online photography courses through Alison and Udemy. I also had a poke around Lynda but decided to avoid triggering the free trial at the moment.  Alison was completely free, but you could pay a fee to remove ads. But honestly, I do not think Alison is worth even the effort of disabling AdBlocker. The courses seemed cobbled together with the photography course I was looking at literally being a recording of a university lecture. A particularly bad recording I might add. Making it a complete waste of time. I ended up asking the Alison support to delete my account because I could not see myself ever returning.

On the other hand, Udemy has proven to be much more useful. The photography course I am taking is currently offered for free. Yet it is clearly a planned lecture designed for an online environment. As such, I am getting much more out of it. I would definitely recommend Udemy to others. I certainly hope my photography becomes more intentional, and less at the mercy of whatever the camera decides to capture after I finish the course. We shall see.

I would like to point out that all three website I mentioned also offer extensive courses on programming, software design and other computer science topics. Even for these, I would recommend Udemy with the caveat that I haven't tried Lynda. I would like to try Lynda at some future time and do a proper comparison between them and Udemy. But for now, I will be concentrating on Udemy.