A digital design school bridging education
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Tiago Pedras

The New Digital School - A design school with no teachers, curriculum or assessment

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The New Digital School is a digital design program that aims to cut the crap out of traditional design education. It's completely student-centered and industry-led. Students learn at their own pace through masterclasses by renowned professionals and real projects with partner companies. No one-size-fits-all curriculum but real work experience.

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Tiago Pedras
Maker
Hey PH, I’m Tiago, and I founded The New Digital School because after 10 years of teaching in traditional academia, I was too frustrated with how badly we were preparing our designers and developers for their future. Other teachers around the globe were equally concerned. Design education is broken. Most universities can’t prepare you for a career in digital because of old methodologies and obsolete skills. At The New Digital School we’re doing what we think really matters. We want people to learn what’s relevant for the industry, to love what they do and feel ready to continue working straight away. A couple of highlights about TNDS: * 🎯 Choose your desired skill-set. Focus on UX Design, Front End Development, UI Design, Digital Product Design, UI Development or others. * 💪 Learn more than just hard-skills from industry leaders from Shopify, InVision and many others * 🚀 Build a strong portfolio with real client work or launch a personal project in a supportive environment, with expert guidance. * 👯 Engage and participate in community-open events to raise your profile, network and understand how you can become a better professional. We’re building this for the global digital community so your input is very very important for us! 🙏 Thank you 😁
Lyondhür Picciarelli
@tiago_pedras this is such a great project. Best of luck with the next term Tiago. I hope I can pay you guys a visit early next year (got relatives in the north, pa!).
André Luís
@tiago_pedras @lyondhur loled at "pa"!
Lyondhür Picciarelli
@andr3 muito fixe pá! :)
Tiago Pedras
Maker
@lyondhur thanks a bunch for the good vibes! You'll be more than welcome here in the north for a Francesinha 😁
joão Alexandre
@tiago_pedras Parabens! Sucesso.
Paulo Fonseca

I've been following these guys from The New Digital School since their beginning and also participating on their events, masterclasses, workshops and the like. Last time I was there, I was invited, as an industry expert, to review the portfolios of the students that were preparing themselves to find a job in the Digital Design market. I regularly interview and hire Designers for our company and as a Digital Designer myself, I think I can recognize talent when i see it. And in this case, I was genuinely impressed with the levels of quality and professionalism that this students could pull off in only one year of studing at TNDS and that was the exact moment that I started to truly believe on the concept of this school. Despite all of the different things, when compared to traditional schooling, TNDS really does work. It works so well in fact, that actually, one of the current students will probably get an offer from our company when they finish this school year.

Pros:

This is the future of Digital Design Education! The concept, methods and ways are all appropriate to train the Designers of the future!

Cons:

Just a little bit more of experience under their belt and the world is theirs.

Sara Noronha Ramos
Maker
Paulo, you're amazing. Thank you for your continued support and motivation boosts. Cheers! 🙌 ✨
João Andrade

I'm a student from the 1st class of TNDS and i must say that I'm really proud to be a part of this amazing and innovative project. It was time to make some change in education and make us better ready for the challenges that we will face on our future jobs in this industry, so the The New Digital School is an example that we are capable of doing that, and must of all, it's an example on how to do it well!

Pros:

The way you could define your journey throughout the year makes your education unique and a perfect fit for each one of the students

Cons:

Its hard to make people, that are accustomed to the "traditional" education, believe on this process.

Sara Noronha Ramos
Maker
Thank you, João! This is the most valuable kind of review we could get: from our students. 🙌 ✨
André Luís

This is the best training and experience a designer aspiring to great things can get. And being in Porto for a while is a blessing!

Pros:

Innovative and tested method of training designers for the real world and not what it was 10 years ago.

Cons:

Hard to grasp concept at first.

Daniel T Santos

I am priviliged to mentor the leaerning design team at The New Digital School, by challenging them to stay focused on their mission and support them to keep pursuing their purpose and long term vision.

Pros:

The hands on approach to digital design process, mentored by world leading experts, and applied real client projects.

Cons:

Both industry and potential students aren't yet fully aware of their existence

Sara Noronha Ramos
Maker
Daniel, as always, your support means a lot to us. Thank you, for everything 🙌 ✨
Mayra Kapteyn

We had the luck to be the selected client for one of TNDS Design Sprints. The output of this week is valuable work that is being implemented on our platform as we speak.

Pros:

This is preparing students in a realistic and innovative way to the digital industry. I've been so impressed with the level of the students.

Cons:

I can't wait for them to be discovered by the whole world and scale up

Sara Noronha Ramos
Maker
Mayra, it was such a pleasure to work with you. When can we see 29k here on Product Hunt? 😁 Thank you 🙌 ✨
Colin Sygiel
Speaking as a happy graduate from a web dev bootcamp, I really appreciate your approach here. Few questions: 1) Can the school be tailored for advancing existing developers like myself or is it intended for people with little experience who want a career change? 2) What is the schedule like? 3) Must you live in Porto for the full year? If so, how do you manage this with people who do not live in the EU?
Tiago Pedras
Maker
@ctsygiel Hey Colin, thanks for getting in touch. Regarding your questions: 1) As you know there is a very broad world out there, specially when it comes to developers :) Perhaps you could help us out by defining what you've learned so far, how advanced have your projects been and in what programming languages? Also, what other skills would you be wanting to learn to complement you as a professional? 2) Schedule is pretty flexible. More than a school environment you should expect sort of a startup/studio like of environment, where everyone makes their own schedule and the school's schedule tries to fit that. A few things are fixed on the calendar, like the masterclasses, which take a lot of time to book in advance according to our guests agenda. Other than that, pretty much all other workshops, working sessions, company visits, surf lessons, are booked according to everyone's agenda. A little caveat, obviously sometimes it's hard to book these to the liking of everyone involved :) 3) I can answer that with the example of Telmo, one of our student's this year. He's from Madrid but relocated here to Porto full-time. But despite that he travels back home regularly (flights from Porto are quite cheap) and he also takes the time to explore Portugal or attend an event elsewhere. Regarding people that live outside the EU, we work with them to help get student VISAs for the 12 months. Most of the process needs to be handled by the applicant but we've also just established a protocol with a company that does just that: they help foreign students move to Portugal. Let me know in case you have any other questions :)
Colin Sygiel
@tiago_pedras Super, thanks for the insightful feedback. I'll reach out with more questions when they come in ;)
Tiago Pedras
Maker
@ctsygiel my pleasure 😉👍
David Kampmann
I do have a big question. What is the cost? That is something higher education has become much more upfront and transparent about, for obvious reasons.
Sara Noronha Ramos
Maker
@mrkampmann Hey David! Thank you so much for taking the time to comment. The investment for the 1-year program is €6000, as stated on the applications page on our website: http://thenewdigitalschool.com/a.... We also have scholarships (https://medium.com/the-new-digit...) and an internships program to help the students recover their investment (https://medium.com/the-new-digit...). Please don't hesitate to comment with more questions or feedback. We'd love to answer/hear them 🙌 Cheers, Sara.
Tiago Craveiro

The New Digital School has been helping HUUB to apply design thinking methodologies to build a product that answers our clients needs. The school has been living inside our ecosystem, breathing from our complexity and helping us to apply the right tools to product development. We're very excited to see the end result in two weeks! Congrats to everyone involved: mentors, students and specially Tiago Pedras and Sara Ramos for the great 1st year!

And for anyone considering this approach to learning, be bold and apply!

Pros:

The New Digital School is an innovative and efficient approach to digital learning!

Cons:

Nothing! :)

Sara Noronha Ramos
Maker
Thank you, Tiago! Working with HUUB has been a pleasure. Let's keep up the good work together 💪
chantarellus

I'm really happy to be part of this aspiring project, as a student. Nowadays the traditional academia is broken, specially in the design field, that changes everyday.

At this school without teachers and curriculum, you have an open program that fits everyone's needs, with real projects and masterclasses about a lot of different topics, where you will discover all the actual trends, concerns and problems digital design is facing nowadays. More important than that, almost 10 months after the beginning of the school, I'm feeling confident and prepared to start a job as a UX/UI designer.

Recommend to all of you!

Pros:

At TNDS you will learn from the best people in the field.

You will learn everything about digital, but also about people and team working!

Cons:

This is the way for education in general, it just needs to scale

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