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Rise of the Online Code Schools
Barence writes "When it comes to programming, the classroom is moving online. A new wave of start-ups has burst onto the scene over the last year, bringing interactive lessons and gamification techniques to the subject to make coding trendy again. From Codecademy — and its incredibly successful Code Year initiative — to Khan Academy, Code School and Udacity, online learning is now sophisticated and high-tech — but is it good enough to replace the classroom? 'We are the first five or six chapters in a book,' says Code School's Gregg Pollack in this exploration of online code classes, but with the number of sites and lessons growing by the week that might not be the case for long."
They sell you their prestige, their accreditation, their confirmation that you at least showed up to class for four years and jumped through the basic hoops.
These online schools will give you knowledge. But it's always been possible to get that outside of the traditional classroom anyway. There are plenty of self-taught programmers out there (and in plenty of other fields to).
But the thing they're lacking right now is the ability to give you a piece of paper that will get you past HR to a job interview.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
The for-profits are trying to do that, or rather, they're trying to offer placement services, i.e. sell your CV to recruiters. At least the for-profits have every reason to fight for the prestige of their online classes.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Regular universities can and do sell you a great deal more than that, including:
- research opportunities
- highly skilled mentors and teachers
- a real-world community of people studying both the same sort of things as you, and wildly different sorts of things
- regular social contact with relatively capable and intelligent people of the appropriate sex (for straight guys, be aware that a significant majority of college students are women, so the odds are very much in your favor)
If your goal in life is to code 8-10 hours a day and use the rest of your time to watch TV, movies, or play video games, then you're right that university is basically useless. If you have any ambitions beyond that, then take the regular university degree if you can at all manage to do that.
I am officially gone from
Meh, if one approaches a brick and mortar university as 'no knowledge, just prestige' then one is wasting their time and money...... and they have only themselves to blame. A good school has incredible resources for learning...
I think a lot of it comes down to culture and values. Keep in mind that a surprising number of tech people are anti-education and anti-intellectual.. so things like research and learning from skilled people are not just of little value to them but are actively scoffed at. The pattern of the 'self taught programmer who makes millions and shows all those ivory tower intellectuals how it is done!' is a powerful myth that people latch on to.
- regular social contact with relatively capable and intelligent people of the appropriate sex (for straight guys, be aware that a significant majority of college students are women, so the odds are very much in your favor)
I sure screwed that one up... I went to a tech-oriented college with a male-to-female ration of something like 6 to 1... I wonder at times if I should've picked a different school... Like maybe that fashion design college in Portland, that might've worked better...
learning is now sophisticated and high-tech
How so?
In the 80s I watched videos delivered over cable, and they still are... Of course the deeply underlying protocols that the endusers have no interaction with have changed from FDM NTSC of educational PBS broadcasts to weird internet codecs over a docsis modem, but whatever its not like the end users will tell any difference... 75 ohm coax goes here, video comes out there...
Interactive gamification was done by my kindergarten teacher, its nothing new.
We are the first five or six chapters in a book
My experience in taking some classes is its more like the first five or six classes in a thirty two class undergrad curriculum. Everybody wants to offer freshman classes like intro to programming 101 and first semester calculus, no one wants to offer what I would actually be interested in, like upper level undergrad or grad school classes.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I've been in the game development industry for 18 years now having had the honor of being a major part of great projects like League of Legends and Ultima Online. My original training from the university was COBOL on big iron mainframes but as soon as I started coding professional, I knew I wanted to be a game developer. The public Internet was only accessible if you knew a local ISP and could get your Trumpet Winsock or equivalent configured correctly, Linux was just a quirky, novel whisper, Windows was still 3.11 and a TERRIBLE gaming platform, game publishers controlled the funding (and thus controlled the developers) and games were, for the most part, sold in boxes at brick and mortar store.
Despite having only had one semester of C in college (and never even heard of C++), I would rush home each night to hack away learning game programming from Andre Lamothe's Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus on my Gateway P90 (The Cow!) and landed my first job pretending to know C++ with a crappy demo I created for the interview.
Fast forward 18 years. Nearly unlimited bandwidth and online distribution capabilities, cheap hosting, many open platforms (from the point of view you don't have to get Publisher buy-in or permission) like Windows, Mac, Linux, Facebook, Android, iPhone for which to develop and run games. High quality game engines, tools and backends are available (Unity, Allegro, SDL, Apache, Glassfish, JBoss, MySQL, Flash, CSS/Javascript, etc). Even funding is now democratic and open with Kickstarter and YCombinator and not gated by publishers. The only limitation is one's ability to inspire people with a great idea. And for those wanting to delve further into hardware, we even have Arduino.
For me personally... I'm on the verge of launching my own personal cross-platform MMO built from the ground up that will run on just about any and every possible comuting platform on the planet and have the potential to reach anyone and everyone around the globe. I never would have dreamed that was possible 18 years ago! It's breathtaking...
Truly an amazing time to be an aspiring engineer!
Runesabre
Enspira Online
The teacher is dead. More and more we see that the best way to learn is by doing, having a teacher or prof stand at the front of the classroom and ramble on for hours is not an effective way to learn. When it comes to programming, you need to take a hands on approach, sitting in a chair and listening about how you should write code and how you should structure code will never be as effective as sitting down and programming.
When I learned C we had a prof stand at the front of the room and ramble twice a week for 2 hours, I came out of that class knowing 0% of the C language. I didn't start learning it until I sat down and started to program. Think about trying to teach a student about embedded programming without having them sit down and write embedded style C. I would be surprised if many / any students get there first, second or even third project to work out of the gate. Now instead take the same student, give them an Arduino and tell them to make a motor run, in the same amount of time that you will teach them on the board, they can have a little motor running and they will have acquired a million times as much knowledge.
Would you teach a chef to cook by having them sit in a classroom and never touch an oven? Would you have a firefighter learn to put a fire out by never having them hold a hose? It's pretty clear and obvious that learning by doing is a far more effective method of learning then the old outdated method of sitting there where your talked to.
They sell you their prestige, their accreditation, their confirmation that you at least showed up to class for four years and jumped through the basic hoops.
These online schools will give you knowledge. But it's always been possible to get that outside of the traditional classroom anyway. There are plenty of self-taught programmers out there (and in plenty of other fields to).
But the thing they're lacking right now is the ability to give you a piece of paper that will get you past HR to a job interview.
Reread the article, and you'll find that even the people working in the online education sector don't agree with you. (Well, Thrun might do.) Codecademy's Gregg Pollack talks about them giving the basic skills:
“Self-guided learning can only take you so far. At some point you need to be put in an environment where you’re working with somebody on projects and being mentored. There’s certainly a piece of the puzzle there that we’re not dealing with yet, that a lot of these online self-guided tools aren’t dealing with yet.”
Note how quick he is to point out that "we" doesn't just mean Codecademy, but everyone in the online learning space. My experience with online learning is limited, but the Udacity course I took (CS253 Web Development) seemed more like a worked example of a programming project than a genuine university course. Plenty of good information, but mostly closely directed to the task at hand, with little scope to genuinely explore alternatives. As a degree-qualified coder, I found it pretty useful, but I could see all the decision-points that they skipped -- a newbie wouldn't. That leaves us with the usual curse of the self-taught/boot-camped coder: they only know one single, blinkered way of doing things. (Sadly many physical campuses are walking blindly down the path towards single-technology bootcampship, but that's a different rant.)
My dream for online learning is to see it become a super-powered replacement for the traditional first year, teaching basic skills quicker and in more depth and breadth than tutorials and traditional homework alone can do. Injecting a technical element into even the artsiest degree scheme, so that we overcome the curse of the technologically and statistically-illiterate hordes who make our management decisions while still leaving them plenty of time to cover the traditional material in their degree schemes.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
http://www.webplatform.org/ is an open source online code school for HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, SVG, new web APIs, etc. Some of the brightest minds and most engaging speakers at coder conferences are contributing to it. (Example: Lea Verou for CSS.)
It was only just recently created (October 8th), so it's pretty rudimentary at this point. They characterize it as being in alpha. But have a look-see. If you code or want to code for the web, it's well worth bookmarking and checking back from time to time. And if you really know the subject matter, it's a good place to contribute.
I know an awful lot of "self taught" programmers who are completely incapable of finding any solution that can't be googled for. They came up in the age of web based everything, self taught on php and javascript, and are used to everything being in a library or on stack overflow. Ask them to leave their narrow little box and they can't do it.
The best coders have formal training and the passion to code outside of their classes as well. Whether they're self taught or not doesn't matter, what matters is the additional practice and learning you get form doing more than just your assignments. That may be where the original myth of the self taught programmer comes from- there's a positive correlation between self taught and being passionate about programming. But the majority of the good ones still have formal schooling as well.
I'm self taught myself- I learned on TI calculator basic in high school then taught myself C++. And dear god was my code completely lacking in any real understanding of what I was doing. It was a combination of formal learning in college and practice done while in college that made me good, not being self taught.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
One of the biggest issues for current MOOCs is the large attrition rate (in the 90% range). Assuming that people signing up are at least average intelligence (on average of course), this suggests that average students are unable, for whatever reasons, to complete these courses. Part of it is that the instructors come from elite universities, are used to teaching elite students, and approach the MOOC in the same way, leaving the average student in the dust. Another part is that average students lack the motivation, discipline, as well as the smarts to learn complex concepts without a real-life instruction.
Research opportunities -- maybe at the PhD level, but the private sector doesn't like to hire software PhDs for a good reason.
Highly skilled mentors and teachers -- who are counting on their university pensions instead of learning what's happening in the real world of software development. I don't blame them for seeking safety, but let's not pretend that 90% of professors are "highly skilled mentors and teachers".
Real-world community -- of people who are just as lost. Might as well used Reddit.
Regular social contact with relatively capable people -- Based on statistical understanding alone, I must declare this point to be bovine excrement.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Rote lecturing as the primary education tool is hopefully on the way out. Teachers in the form of Coaches and Mentors are needed more than ever to help guide and inspire the future generations. I agree with you, this should be a hands-on, two-way interaction and for engineering, can definitely be that way even regardless of geography.
Runesabre
Enspira Online
The "Highly skilled mentors and teachers" had this point of view.
20% of the class will pass no matter what, so ignore those students. Do not answer their questions. It is not about improving them or preparing them for employment or future studies. The short tem goal is of getting the most students to pass the coruse. Providing any mentoring to those students who will pass anyways is a waste of time.
Then there are 20% who will fail no matter what. They will not grasp the material in the 10 or 12 weeks they have to work through it. Once again, ignore these students, since we are not willing to cheat on their behalf, we cant save them, they are a waste of time as well.
That leaves 60% of the class who may fail or pass. All of these students can be helped to the point to where they will at leat pass. Focus all of your energy on these students. If you do, you can have 75% to 80% of your class pass every course.
In my case, since I was in that first 20%, I got nothing. I was told my questions were not going to be answered because they would confuse other students. No recommendations on what I could study to further my understanding of the topic. No critique of my code. Any investment in me would be a waste of time.
As it turns out. I did not get along well with the faculty. For what I was paying in tuition and books, I wanted some value for it. I read the book already. The teacher just repeated what was in the book for the slower students and proctored and corrected tests to prove I had read the material. I expeted more value for my money that that. I kept pressuring the faculaty to share with me some of that "Highly Skilled" stuff they were so famous for.
I think this is a reflection of the institution I was attending. I think other institutions may be better, but I am not sure how much better.
Also, I went to college in my mid 40's. I have a world view that is jaded by 25 years of work experience. I was paying for the education myself and expected I would learn something more that if I just read a book on my own. Another issue is I have worked for bosses from hell, been fired, dealt with plant closures, family members dying, etc. I am not intimadated by a professor who is 2 years older than me, does not like me, and thinks no matter the quality of the work I turn in, that giving me an F will put me in my place. It is the other way around. If I did a half assed job like they were doing, my employer would fire me. I am paying a PREMIUM for their time and attention. They had better provide some value for it or expect to hear from me about it.
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