The subscription based Bluprint has been run separately from Craftsy for quite some time, though it originally started out as the Craftsy Unlimited plan. Abruptly, after the poorly handled changes in Craftsy's pattern designer marketplace, the powers that be (under NBCUniversal) announced that it would no longer use the Craftsy brand and all services would be offered under the Bruprint name.
If you read the woes of the majority of designers and pattern sellers as they scrambled to set up web shops a few days before Christmas as their patterns were removed from Craftsy, you know that these changes have been quite painful for the creative instructors and designers that had been working with Craftsy. Changes have been rolling out far longer for instructors than most Craftsy/Bluprint customers realize. They have been incredibly frustrating, confusing, and for most instructors, handled in the silence of professional courtesy.
This has left students in a pickle as well, as some classes no longer have an instructor answering their questions in their "forever classes." After seeing their income slashed by 80% on average, or their extensive class materials and even printed patterns given out for free, some instructors have parted ways with the arrangement. Their classes are still available, but the instructor gets nothing from them.
As instructors, we have been told that questions asked by subscription customers will not be shown to us, as if not having to answer students' questions makes up for lack of compensation. For the most part, we are instructors, teachers, people who share....we don't want to leave students hanging with their questions. Though we are also business people, parents, spouses, individuals with bills to pay.
I can't answer for other instructors, or even the powers that be at Bluprint, but what I do know is that I continue to answer questions, both within the class platform (assuming they show the question to me) as well as through my website, Facebook, and email. I do my best to provide the information without having to answer the same question thousands of times over, via my posts here and videos.
Yes, there can be thousands of the same question. Last year was the last time I was given a full student count and at that time it was 27,000 students for just the first class! Since then, they won't give us a student count or other basic metrics, citing that their status as a publicly traded company, we might be able to somehow calculate company earnings and conspire to do some illegal insider trading.
Some instructors have thrived under the new arrangements, with special types of classes and shows, and new instructors have also been recruited who have no expectations from how it was in the past. If it works for them and their students, fabulous!
In the meantime, if you own classes purchased outright, it appears you will continue to have 'forever access' to the classes, though you may or may not have an actively participating instructor. If you are taking classes as a subscription member, take advantage of all the answered questions that have come before you, as well as read the class materials. There's a wealth of information in these classes already.
If you are having trouble finding your forever classes on the Bluprint platform, clicking on the "shop" tab will take you to the re-branded old Craftsy site and your library of classes.
For my classes, I will continue to answer student questions if they are shown to me in my "Instructor's Dashboard." That is completely under the control of the Bluprint web gurus. There are far too many questions and answers to be able to search for new ones as they come up in the lessons.
While many things have changed in the time that I first started to work on my first Quilting with Rulers class with Craftsy, I am grateful that they took a chance in this rather unknown and less than photogenic quilting instructor to bring my ruler work technique on a stationary sewing machine to the masses. I was the only one actively teaching it then and Westalee was still in the process of finalizing their ruler foot prototype. Thank goodness for Janome and their ruler foot.
Changes that have happened in the industry also make it possible for instructors to create video content on their own that can rival what we could do before with these big professional studios. One of my disappointments with my classes with Craftsy was being left out of the editing process. So much content was cut out!
In March, I will ramp up video production to produce my new class on free motion quilting and I'm excited (and slightly terrified) to control all the content and production.
In the meantime, take advantage of my Facebook Live videos at AmyQuilts as well as my YouTube videos. By all means, watch my Craftsy/Bluprint classes, it brings me a few pennies and you get a well-produced class with plenty of content.
If you have additional questions about Craftsy classes, access to your class library, or your Bluprint subscription, check directly with them via this link as they know their platform and changes best.
How about you? Are you enjoying the changes to Bluprint? Are you enjoying my recent live FB videos (even if you just catch the replay)? How have my classes and videos helped you? Let me know in the comments. I love the conversation.
