For the 70th episode of EDUKWEST I talked with Jeffrey McManus of CodeLesson.
As you might know, I’ve started talking about how I the interest shift away from languages and toward the Sciences, and I wanted to give you a more precise idea of what some start-ups in that space are doing.
CodeLesson provides hands-on, instructor-led training through its interactive courses.
As Jeffrey explains to me, in programming there have been only two opposite approaches so far. Either one studied Computer Science, very useful of course but in his opinion too focused on the theory only with no practical instruction, or you had to learn how to code on your own. There were forums of course but the students were still highly dependent on themselves.There was nothing really in between these two ways on could go.
What CodeLesson want is to provide its students with real-world tasks and challenges without ignoring the theoretical basis, however.
CodeLesson’s students are both private people but also from the corporate world. It’s interesting to see how this niche is developing very quickly with new start-ups almost every week. Maybe it’s the new thing but I think, programming in general is ideal for this kind of asynchronous teaching and learning.
The problems are relatively small, a students can take in a lesson via video/screencast, sample code etc., and the teacher can easily see where a student has a particular problem based on the code he handed in as homework and also grade of course.
Different from learning languages for instance, the student can be more self-contained while taking a course, and the instructor comes in a fixed points which will be sufficient for the majority of students.
Getting a better understanding of the challenges when learning code thanks to interviewing Jeffrey, I believe that formalized, hands-on instruction with student autonomy and input by the instructor at the right point are going to be the way many more people will learn.
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Additional Links:
| Homepage: | http://www.codelesson.com |
| CodeLesson on Twitter: | @CodeLesson |
| CodeLesson Facebook Page: | facebook.com/codelesson |
| Jeffrey McManus LinkedIn: | Jeffrey McManus |
