Slashdot Mirror
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?
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
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...
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.
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.
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.