In March I taught my Skillshare class “Learning HTML through the Lens of Typography” twice. The class was design to demonstrate the underlying organizational principles of HTML and CSS to people who are already familiar with design and typography.

I think I did ok. The feedback I’ve gotten was fairly positive overall. I did learn a few lessons about teaching though, and thought I might share it.

Lesson 1: Start Where the Students Are

I began the class with an exercise where we derived the principle of mark up through looking at an invitation, and dissecting its structure and semantics.  Structure and semantics are ideas which all designers understand.  Using that as a starting point, I was able get the class to derive something that looks like a mark up language, which made explaining HTML much easier.

Lesson 2: Give Students a Goal to Work Towards

In my first class, I naively imagined that I could improvise my way towards a CSS design. I am afraid the result wasn’t stellar, and I didn’t demonstrate the power and application of CSS patterns very well.  For my second class, I explicitly prepared a target design to work towards, based on a transcript of a Ira Glass video.  The target design gave students a better mental anchor for understanding CSS, and improved the CSS portion of the class.

Lesson 3: Use a Consistent Toolset

I had intended for students to use real tools for working during class, to get them as close to a real workflow for web development as I can.

I failed to do that in the first class, since I didn’t have a good handle on how to demonstrate yet. As an experiment, I demonstrated HTML and CSS using Dabblet, which allowed students to follow along, no matter which browser or operating system they were using.

I tried to have students use text editors in my second class, in order to approximate a real workflow. It turned out to a huge hassle since very few student had a text editor, and the sheer variety of what people were using made debugging difficult. Even though it is not a real workflow, Dabblet turned out to be better as a tool for demonstration and experimentation. In my next class, I think I might revert to using Dabblet, and mandate the use of Firefox.

My next Skillshare class is Wednesday April 11th.  I’d love it if you’d join me for a third iteration.