Banjo Picking Skills Course To Be Used for Daily Challenges end of May

[Michael-K73]

That is odd, Steve. But adding the former “challenges” is a new thing in the Skills course section. Regardless, it will be a week of everyone taking those lessons at the same time. So you get the comments each day.

-M

• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by  Michael-K73.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by  Michael-K73.

[SteveinCT]

I appreciate your thought about a potential bonus of having comments. it’s possible they did the same thing with another Skills course in Daily Challenge for last week of April. A question like mine would usually be answered by an Administrator, who could explain, and I don’t think I’ll get that courtesy….to me, if TAC plans to double dip Daily Challenges with existing Skills challenges, then, to add real value to a separate ‘Skills” section, TAC would develop each current 5 day challenge so that more content was added, i.e., a level one 5 day for beginners, followed by an intermediate 5 day, and an advanced 5-day….

[jumpinjeff]

Not sure if you are aware @SteveinCT :this is the community support section of the forums. If you are posting here the community at large responds to your post. To get a response from the admin use the question mark icon on the left margin. That will pose your question or concern directly to the admin.

[SteveinCT]

Yes, Jeff, I’m aware that this our community space, and i made an offhand comment about where are the administrators to help. About 12 days ago, I had sent directly to Levi another question I had, and it ended up in the huge Forum section ‘Website Known Issues and FAQ” and I’m still awaiting a response from Levi. I notice many members are frustrated by the lack of administrative response.

[Marty73]

👍👍👍🧙‍♂️😎

[dr_dave]

Hi Steve. Many of the courses in the Skills section first appeared as 5 day challenges for a week of daily lessons, then later showed up as courses. Sadly, from my point of view at least, a few of the 5-day challenges have not been added to the Skill section.

It seems we have a special 5-day challenge for one of our weeks during most all 5-week months. I thought that might be because there are typically just four variations of Friday Key Chord lessons: KC major, KC minor, KC accidental and KC mixed.

Just as Tony is not making up new lessons for each day, he’s not continuously developing new 5-day challenges. He uses one from what is now called the Skills Course section. Occasionally he’s inserted a song challenge, using one of the songs from the song vault. I don’t know if he’ll reprise that, now that the Song Vault has figuratively been cast out into the darkness, no longer welcome in TAC space.

Your comment about “double dipping” suggests you think you’re not getting full value. I don’t feel cheated when they use an “existing” Skills Course as a week of lessons. It is good content. I had just gone through the banjo course again about a month ago, but I am game to do it again.

Until the recent “re-decorating” project, all the daily lessons were in libraries. All the lessons were available all the time, neatly organized by daily category. I liked that availability and I miss it a lot. Perhaps you would have also considered that “double dipping,” since the daily lessons for each month were being pulled from a pool. They still are being pulled from a fixed pool. We just no longer have a pool pass.

The lesson content has been fairly static for quite some time. Only a handful of challenges have been added since I joined nearly 4 years ago. Maybe we will still see a new challenge introduced occasionally, but at best I expect that to be a really rare thing. The program is what it is. Either you like it or you don’t. I’m a life member, so I’m still using the dailies.

[Alisa]

Not intending to put salt on your wounds, but when you still had a “pool pass,” what was the total number of lessons in it? Is it enough to fill six months, one year, two years of daily challenges? How often do the dailies repeat themselves?

[dr_dave]

There are roughly a year’s worth of daily lessons in the pool. The rotation is not fixed, and occasionally lesson weeks have repeated within two months or less (at least it seems that way), but this is quite rare. On average, you’ll hit the same lesson week about once a year. I think @Michael-K73 keeps a journal of which lessons occur day-by-day, so I suppose he might have even better data on when given lessons occurred than TAC HQ keeps for themselves.

Occasionally people comment about the daily lessons not seeming to follow a progression. They don’t. You’re always in the middle. Although the Tuesday through Thursday lessons relate to each other, they might not have a strong relation to the Monday lesson and they generally don’t have a relation to the Friday Key Chords. Throughout a month, however, the Key Chord lessons are related to each other, all tied to the same key.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by  dr_dave.

[Alisa]

Thanks! I noticed the Tuesday-to-Thursday connection but only understood the week 1 to 4 progression today, so thank you for that insight.

I guess if you “favorite” every single lesson for a year, you’ll have the pool back, but it won’t be organized, and your favorites page might take 2-3 hours to load 😂

[dr_dave]

Thanks. I got a laugh out of that. I am trying to remember to favorite every lesson so I’ll at least have access theoretically. It would seem to be a simple matter to restore the libraries, but it is apparent there is some reason they do not want to do that. Maybe another couple pages would make their website too large for their contract with their host? I don’t see a downside to making the content accessible to the members to use as it best firs their needs, but maybe they had a bunch of people paying for only a short time and downloading all the tabs or lesson videos and consequently they believe there was lost revenue. I guess I’m just trying to rationalize why we had our pool passes yanked.

[Alisa]

I think it could be about preventing content leakage. TAC is trying to expand aggressively; lot’s of youtube advertisements (that’s how I got here). Maybe they calculated that adding many new members will increase the chances of people signing up, downloading all the tabs, and then opting for the “60 days money-back guarantee”.

It can also be a strategic call: if you give people access to everything at once, there is a chance they will binge through a lot of it, get saturated, and quit. If you only release content in small pieces, you’re leaving them wanting more. In the new version of the 50 minutes sales pitch, Tony speaks about how being overwhelmed by content can make progress slower, how the TAC program will decide for you what to play, and when. Perhaps they did some analytics on the old website and concluded that not enough people were doing the dailies and instead were doing random lessons. Or always the same lessons. This might be their way of directing everyone’s attention back to the dailies, so everyone is doing the same lessons on the same day and new lessons every day.

Whatever it is, they clearly made a conscious choice of removing content as part of an expansion. If the expansion works, most users will be new users, unaware of how things were before.

[dr_dave]

I am interested in what new users are thinking, how they’re enjoying their experience and how the new business model is working out for TAC. It was very interesting to watch the growth of the TAC staff and the way TAC developed over the time I have been here. There were four members when I joined, but Maggie left TAC staff very soon after I joined, leaving Tony, Levi and Noah to operate as a trio for quite a while before staff numbers started ramping up.

The changes launched recently were significant and perhaps very necessary from a business perspective. That’s something we members are not entitled to know, but I do hope for the sake of Tony and Levi that their new business model is sustainable.

[SteveinCT]

Thx, Dave, for those of us who came in after the mid-April changes and not on a lifetime basis, your institutional memory is valued.

Yes, my use of the term double dip is a pejorative. If I wanted to repeat Banjo Skills challenge, I can do so at any time, so I have a different take than you on benefits of repeating the Banjo Skills course during a Daily week. If anything, the Skills challenge courses posted are too brief, there should be further amplifications of each subject, as I had suggested.

I know of at least one online guitar instruction site that updated format, but also produced plenty of new content videos too. I knew something was up about the TAC choice of “evergreen formatting” of daily lessons during the recent “Making Grains” week. The guitar lick lesson that week was “Tribute to Mr. Rice” and in the video recorded years ago, Tony P. gushed that his guitar hero is Tony Rice, and he was paying tribute to Rice’s great flatpicking skills. Given Tony P’s tribute, and Rice’s renown in the acoustic guitar world, you’d think the administrators at TAC would have added an R.I.P. somewhere–either in the text below the video that day, or even an add to the video–noting that Tony Rice had passed away last December 25, at age 69.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by  SteveinCT.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by  SteveinCT.