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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?
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
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.