Former Students Say Steve Wozniak's $13,200 Coding Bootcamp Is 'Broken' and Sometimes Links To Wikipedia (9to5mac.com)

Last year, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak announced a coding program called Woz U that's designed with the goal of offering an affordable education. "Our goal is to educate and train people in employable digital skills without putting them into years of debt," Wozniak said last fall. "People often are afraid to choose a technology-based career because they think they can't do it. I know they can, and I want to show them how."

Now that a round of students have been through the 33-week program, a number of problems have appeared. Former student, Bill Duerr, called the program "broken," and that "lots of times there's just hyperlinks to Microsoft documents, to Wikipedia." 9to5Mac reports: "Duerr said typos in course content were one of many problems. So-called 'live lectures' were pre-recorded and out of date, student mentors were unqualified, and at one point, one of his courses didn't even have an instructor," reports CBS. CBS heard from over 24 current and former students and employees that reiterated Duerr's experiences. Instead of a quality program, Duerr said Woz U was comparable to an ultra expensive e-book: "'I feel like this is a $13,000 e-book,' Duerr said. While it was supposed to be a program written by one of the greatest tech minds of all time, 'it's broken, it's not working in places, lots of times there's just hyperlinks to Microsoft documents, to Wikipedia,' he said."

A former Woz U enrollment counselor said that at times he had to do things that didn't feel right: "Asked whether he regrets working for Woz U, Mionske said, 'I regret in the aspect to where they're spending this money for, it's like rolling the dice. [...] But on the reverse side, I have to support my family.'" According to Business Insider, Steve Wozniak said that he's "not involved" in the "operational aspects" of Woz U and doesn't know anything about the report this morning.

Comments

Why pay $13,000 when you can learn yourself?

[Ashthon]

I don't understand why anyone would pay that sort of money when you can buy a $50 book and learn from that. Not only is it much cheaper, but the ability to learn on your own is an essential skill for a programmer since programming requires continuous learning in order to keep your skills up to date. If you're unable to study yourself, and need information spoon fed to you, it's probably not the career for you.

Besides, you don't learn to program in a boot camp. All you're going to learn is the basic language syntax and features, which you can learn easily yourself. To develop actual programming skills you need to write software. After writing an application you'll likely find there were many things that could have been done better and you'll be able to use those lessons in your next application, thus improving your skills.

Programming boot camps are a con aimed at people who aren't actually interested in programming but who have seen the high salaries you can get as a programmer. Real programmers more than likely learned to program around age 13, and they did it because it interested them, not for the money.

Re:Why pay $13,000 when you can learn yourself?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not everyone can learn from reading a book, and sometimes having a place to go, or even just a webcast to watch, helps with the motivation to stick with it. For most people, learning from a book really only works if you have a certain base knowledge. If I pick up a book on Excel VBA programming, and I don't even know what a spreadsheet is, I'm going to have one hell of a time trying to learn anything, but if I already have a pretty good understanding of spreadsheets and programming in general, a book on Excel VBA will probably be quite useful.

As someone who reads /. you are probably above average when it comes to technical savvy. Picture some of your relatives who always ask you to fix their computer trying to learn how to code using only a book. Those are the people these programs are generally targeting.

Re:Why pay $13,000 when you can learn yourself?

[houghi]

I wasd not even thinking that. I was thinking how sad it is that 13.000USD is "affordable" for education.

13k for the piece of paper

[Anonymous Coward]

13k for the piece of paper

On the other hand, we know how to scale

[raymorris]

That's true.

It's also true that computer science and computer engineering people know how to scale things, through automation and other means. A very simple example is that a lot of courses in other fields still have quizzes and such grades by hand. Anyone with even half a clue about computer anything wouldn't generally do that. Open source software like Moodle provides very flexible quizzes which can adapt to the student. I'd rather watch a recorded lecture by one of the best in the field than a live lecture by just another guy.

We CAN have high-quality education in this field, more efficiently, which means lower costs to students. The OMSCS at Georgia Tech looks promising, for example.

We also have to remember that graduating school doesn't mean you stop learning. I study daily and I've been in the field professionally for 20 years. College should give us the background we need in order to build our knowledge in different areas, and the skills and interest to learn. If we expect to do an entire career worth of learning in 2-4 years we're going to be dissapointed every time.

Re: "I know nothing!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see, half the shit doesn't work, a quarter of it is cribbed, most of the documentation is just links to online docs, and the people in charge can't be bothered to be directly involved and just cash their paychecks.

Actually that perfectly describes how programming works in the real world.