Review of RLI Fast Track DVD

So I had heard of this FREE Permaculture Design Course and I obviously knew it was too good to be true. But I signed up with my email address anyway, just to see.

Of course it wasn't free. Apparently the Regenerative Leadership Institute offers all the videos of their course for free online but if you want to get a certificate, which isn't necessary but can offer more validity to your consultancy, it will cost you $495. So much for free. And now I get about two emails a week from them offering all sorts of other things, sometimes more free things.

About a week ago I received an email offering a copy of their Permaculture Fundamentals Fast Track DVD for free…well, free after $9.95 shipping and handling. In hindsight, it may have been a mistake to give them my credit card, but I've been dying to know what kind of content this place is turning out. In the email they sent, it was stated that this was a limited run of discs to those of us who are on the mailing list and that the full cost of this specific DVD will be $130 when all is said and done. I find that to be a pretty heavy price considering the quality that lies within, but I'll get to that in a minute.

So I watched the video. It was longer than I originally expected. There are three crude chapters in the menu with no titles. The first chapter seems to cover the first chapter of the Permaculture Designer's Manual almost word for word at some points. This first one was only about 30 minutes, so I assumed the entire DVD was about an hour and half. I was mistaken. The second chapter is a whopping 1:48 and the second chapter comes in at about 1:31. So we are talking nearly six hours of content for $10. I got a deal to be sure, if the information wasn't already something I knew and had read and if it wasn't presented so poorly and in such a lackluster fashion.

This is what I encountered when I first put the disc in my drive:

From Permaculture

As you can see, it isn't exactly professional looking. That's ok though. A fancy menu means nothing if the content is garbage, right? Well, that's where I hit another issue. There were several things wrong with this video's content as well. Mostly technical stuff: it's rather poorly produced, there are no transitions between cuts, the "teacher" lists no credentials and (after a little research) has no discernible internet presence to verify her ability or qualification to "teach". These are just a handful of the issues I have with this particular video.

Here is another screenshot from the first chapter of the disc:

From Permaculture

So hopefully everyone can see the very first problem with the way this video was shot. They put this woman and her easel right in front of a backlit window, causing her to become silhouetted against the beautiful sunny day outside. This gets better and worse as she shifts back and forth nervously and the camera struggles to reset the white balance. She isn't completely in shadow, but there should have been some lighting behind the camera to illuminate her face for this recording.

She introduces herself as Sandra Wolf and after a small amount of google and Facebook searching (using "Sondra" and "Wolfe" or "Wolff" as an option) I found absolutely nothing about this woman. Regenerative Leadership Institute doesn't have a bio about her on their site and there is no mention of her anywhere else on the web that I was able to find. She doesn't tell where she received her training, nor does she provide any other information about herself except that she teaches permaculture.

She doesn't seem to have a solid script from which she is drawing her information, which makes her speech a bit bumpy and rather difficult to engage with. The transitions between scenes are also very rocky and clearly not well planned. There are several times where the editing that has been done interrupts the movement of the presentation; either Sandra stumbles and waits for the camera person to stop the tape, or the transition cuts off her first words in the next topic.

So, now that I've completely dumped on the production quality of this video…let me mention the very minor good points.

The first reasonable part of this entire production was the price I paid to get an introduction to permaculture. I grabbed this DVD when I got an email from Vladislav Davidzon, the founder and CEO of RLI. I figured a "free" offer that only costs me $10 is worth it, as long as I don't get scammed! So far, $10 is all they have taken from me. I had no expectations, so disappointment wasn't originally playing into this either. The eventual $130 price tag is, in my opinion, far too much for what you receive. It is obvious that this is the first three chapters of a much longer course covering the entire Designer's Manual, and as I was watching I made the correlation between purchasing this for $130 and purchasing the first three chapters of Geoff Lawton's course for $260 (Geoff doesn't offer this, but his course was double what the RLI wants for their certification course). I loved the Geoff Lawton course and I feel that my money was well spent, but in spite of the quality and content of his lectures, the first three with no follow up or offer to discount future learning would make it overpriced as well. I say this with the experience of watching many of the videos Geoff has released for free and getting as much, if not more from those than I did from watching this DVD.

The second decent thing about this disc is the material they cover. For someone who has never heard of permaculture the first three chapters of the designers manual are a good basic primer. They cover the intro to the definitions of permaculture design, as well as the ethics and principles that provide the foundation for everything we do. That being said, the Designer's Manual can be found on Amazon for around $100 just about any time. Sandra provides a few examples to help explain what is being discussed, but this video series is essentially just her reading the first three chapters of the book from a large easel pad. Between reading the book personally and looking up designs of swales and hugel beds, I was probably able to get the same amount of information and understanding on my own with the internet. There are people who enjoy this type of long talking explanation of things, I'm just not one of them. There are nearly no images on the pad, and the rare occasions that they show up, they are too small to see clearly. This could be a great intro to the course and to permaculture in general if it was to remain within an accessible range for customers.

So there we have it. Even with no expectations, I was somewhat disappointed. I've been watching the RLI for some time now, wondering what is happening and what kind of content they are providing for "free". Now I know. I've linked the site for the Design Course below. Thank you for reading! I hope I've been of some help to anyone who was looking at this with any interest.

http://www.regenerative.com/program