As a person who’s grown up in the digital age, I have often
heard the cry, “digital literacy or die.” Conventional wisdom – at
least today – is that in the way you know how to read and write English,
“you need to have some understanding
of the code that builds the Web… It is fundamental to the way the world
is organized and the way people think about things these days.” If you
buy that then you’ll want to start now.
But where should you go? I’ve been dabbling in the black
arts, although I am by no means a ninja coder, and am ready to report
back. The courses below offer everything from HTML to Python and beyond.
HTML and CSS are good, because they’re the basic building blocks of Web
design, and in my opinion, Python is useful, because it’s the most
universal in many respects. Others say Java is better to learn, because
its so prominent on the Web. I would rebut that you can learn Java from
Python. Potayto. Potahto.
In any case, each program below emphasizes different
pedagogical techniques and philosophies, and they are all mass market
in the sense that anyone is welcome. No previous experience is
necessary.
MIT Courseware Online
MIT has long been a pioneer of online courseware. One course is their Intro to Computer Science & Programming class,
thought by many to be the best, most encompassing intro computing
course offered. Taught by tenured MIT faculty, the online course is
structured via taped lectures, written assignments, and self-assessment
quizzes.
The course itself is quite rigorous as it was an intro
course for MIT students. This isn’t a sort of online class you can do
some parts and not the other. It requires a certain amount of
pre-existing math knowhow to be truly successful. The course description
says it only requires high school algebra as a prerequisite but I don’t
buy this. I remember being pretty stumped by the second assignment, and
I passed AP Calc with flying colors. This doesn’t mean the math is
terribly high-level, but that it probably requires a certain amount of
mathematical aptitude beyond algebra unless you want to spend the entire
course scouring forums for help. As with any MIT course, there is an
expectation that you not only know how to do a function, but why that
function is performed and from where it stemmed. After attempting to
follow this courseware for two sessions, I was officially stumped and
dropped it.
edX
MIT and Harvard partnered up to create edX.
It is a conglomeration of all of their available open courseware, along
with a new department for the two institutions to perform research
about the future of online courses and new pedagogical technologies. For
MIT courseware, you can watch the lectures anytime, read the
assignments, and self-assess. EdX has you follow the course in real time
and complete the assignments and exams to receive a physical
certificate from the program. It currently offers numerous classes in
more subjects than just coding and far beyond the purview of Computers
Science.
Codecademy
Codecademy.com
is something slightly different than the last two. It uses a curriculum
of exercises to teach the basics of coding in a variety of languages
(PHP, JScript, Java, Python, Ruby, etc.). It has a text box to write
different codes, and a number of tasks written alongside as a way to
teach different skill sets. It’s a useful program for people who want to
dive in to coding and learn the basics from a more pragmatic level. Wired.com, in fact, listed it
as one of the more successful venues for learning code. However, some
of the pitfalls lie in its simplicity: it’s a series of exercises, and
doesn’t teach you much beyond rote tasks. It attempts to provide some
context, but it just scratches the surface (at least for the beginner
courses). You are able to learn the commands, their meanings, etc., and
sometimes that’s just it. Codecademy teaches you these basics; and what
logically follows is the statement: “I learned code.” Beyond that, it
doesn’t teach a deeper type of literacy, other than learning helpful
coding tricks, for better or for worse.
Google University Consortium
Much in the same vein as Harvard and MIT, Google used to
offer various online courses for its progam Google Code University. GCU
has since retired, but Google has archived
its Python and C++ classes, along with providing ways to search for
other online university curricula. It is now displaying a wide range of
other courses not from Google, and calling it the Google University
Consortium in Google’s developers page. The offerings for coding and
computing are scant. All I could find was a course on “Programming with Go”, and when I went to begin that course it was a YouTube video.
PHP Academy
PHP Academy
is similar to Codecademy in that it’s a private, community-based site
working to educate the world on web development. Its methods are a
series of courses, that is, videos and forums for all who want to
participate. The appearance is more scaled down than Codecademy and
seems to target those who have some familiarity with coding. In that
regard, PHP generally approaches coding as something you already know,
or are at least familiar with, so its approach to literacy is that some
foundation of it is already there.
Coursera
Coursera has been getting some real press
these days. Started by a few Stanford Professors last year as a way to
offer online courses from myriad universities for free, it has courses
for credit and wide-ranging course offerings. In terms of computing, it
has an Intro to Programing course from the University of Toronto, which
is similar to what edX offers. However, Coursera offers other, more
specialized code courses. I signed up to take a Social Networking
Analysis course last year taught by a leading professor in that field.
Others include “Programming Languages” “Web Intelligence, and Big
Data”.
Coursera is similar to edX in that courses are on a real
schedule, with a curriculum, requiring a lot of your personal time. With
both Coursera and edX you are taking a college-level course, that level
of intellect is therefore required. In that regard it is leading the
brigade in the thought that not only digital literacy is important, but
that general education can be maintained through digital means. The onus
is not necessarily that everyone needs to know coding, but that digital
spaces can be used for positive, educational means.
P2PU
Mozilla has entered into the online courseware game with P2PU.
In the tradition of Mozilla, P2PU is completely open, and provided a
non-institutionalized, community-based education experience. It has a “School of Webcraft,” which includes “Webmaking 101” – a series of seven challenges aimed at teaching you how to start and code a blog.
The aim is less technical than, say, PHP Academy, and more
community-oriented. Take, for instance, the first two challenges in
“Webmaking 101.” In the first challenge you start a blog, introduce
yourself to your peers, write a “magnificent blog post,” and link
comments to your peers’ blogs. The second is to write simple HTML script
by hand. There is a different emphasis than the rote skill-work taught
in the other courses. Mozilla, in this regard, is working toward fostering a culture shift with digital literacy at the forefront.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy is, in some ways, an amalgam of Coursera and Codecademy. It claims to be working to
change education “for the better by providing a free world-class
education for anyone anywhere,” listing numerous subjects from computing
to the humanities. The “Programming Basics” course has a similar format
to Codecademy: read instructions and complete coding activities on a
text screen to learn the necessary skills. Like Codecademy it progresses
in a linear fashion toward mastering a basic repertoire. Khan has gotten scads of
the press coverage, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it developed a more
well-rounded curriculum around its original pedagogical style.
Codingbat
For a different approach there’s codingbat,
which is simply a series of live coding problems. This site is tailored
toward those with some previous knowledge of the subject, and has a
bare bones interface pleasing to any hacker-in-training. The problems
give immediate feedback to help improve skills, and were developed by
Stanford CS lecturer, Nick Parlante. The two languages offered are Java
and Python, and it now seems to be offering a theory course to teach
skills in “small” coding so as to have the foundation to do longer
pieces of code. The approach is educational at its core, but is
difficult to delve in for the completely uninitiated.
GitHub, et. al.
Frequently coders refer me to GitHub, Pastebin, or SourceForge.
These sites, like Codingbat, are not meant for the complete coding
luddite and require an aptitude for “learning by doing”, and knowledge
of how to navigate the confusing sitemap and specific terminology. There
is no curriculum or series of online lectures. It is are a repository
for coders to paste their personal code. Instead of a bottom-up
pedagogy, these sites gives you successful codes from the best
developers around. They are meant to foster community and keep
collaborative efforts vibrant in the community. Friends of mine who code
have told me that the best way to learn is to go on GitHub, study a
cool code, and go from there. It is completely different than anything
Coursera offers, and the end result, I think, is on the other end of the
computing spectrum as well.
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