AIE Quietly Launched An Online Course

This one can possibly be filed in the “things I should’ve already known” category, but AIE is now offering online courses, after a recent soft launch — and without much fanfare, it’s already attracting students from all over the world.

There’s now a section on the Academy of Interactive Entertainment’s website for an Online campus, which offers a combination of live and saved videos for would-be coders, artists and (now) designers. It costs the same as a normal AIE course, and theoretically you have the same amount of access as an AIE student who shows up every day. You’d be able to ask teachers anything — though obviously this is limited in a practical sense, as the courses will appeal to rural and overseas students.

Those benefits extend to other areas though, too, such as being a candidate for AIE’s incubator program, which teaches entrepreneurial skills and guides new graduates through their first post-school project.

Interest so far has spread all the way to places like Brazil and Tunisia, and students are gobbling up content faster than it can be created. There is an element of being allowed to go at your own pace, so if you were some kind of learning mutant who soaks up knowledge like Neo, you could run through the content quite fast.

But in the words of Lea Michael, head of the new Online campus, “Certain subjects have prerequisites, so that does limit the speed somewhat. We’re also still in the process of creating a lot of this content, because it’s all quite new — some students are already at that point in which they’re wanting to enroll again, but we need to make the content for them to learn!”