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Ask HN: Can we build a web dev school from free content?

6 points by abbasmehdi ↗ HN
I was recently talking to my little cousin who is contemplating what to major in college. At some point during our conversation it occurred to me that in order to learn web development from the bottom up one does not really need to go to university and get a "degree". All the knowledge and information required exists for free online. The only problem seems to be that it lacks the hand holding and curation of a structured university program. Do you think it's possible to put together a syllabus linked to free content online that might take a high schooler and turn them into a well rounded web developer? Do you think we can curate a set of lessons and tests to serve this purpose?

10 comments

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arkitaip
Sure you can, thousands of others have. Collecting a bunch of links is the easy part, creating the learning platform is not. To understand how difficult and resource intensive this is, check out MIT OpenCourseWare: despite massive resources, most of the courses suck as they are nothing more than online repositories for slides and other assets.
abbasmehdi
MIT is limited to MIT. Has a third party content aggregator tried this? They shall of course not be limited to a single content generating source.
sixtofour
This has been my experience with MIT OCW too. Or trying to figure out which textbook version applies to the course version that's online as opposed to the current registered class.

It's been awhile since I made an attempt, but at the time I thought it could use a little attention.

dreamdu5t
Are you joking? Every web developer I work with was self-taught using the web. Every programmer I've worked with depends greatly on free information and documentation found through Google.

The easiest way to teach yourself is to BUILD SOMETHING and figure it out as you go along. Don't worry about what to learn, just go do something and when you run into a roadblock then seek out the answer. Repeat until you're skilled.

abbasmehdi
I am talking about university-replacing, curauted list of courses and subjects. Every web developer you know went to university. They have that base. Im talking about high school kids.
vga15
As others have stated, most devs have gotten a large chunk of their knowledge from the web. Google is their school.

However, I believe you were asking about those that want a more 'structured' university-like approach. Although these exist, I'd certainly say there's room for the 'google of education', or the 'wikipedia of programming' etc.

The most VITAL factor for structured learning is the result at the end. How will the world know that I'm any better than when I'd started? Any organization that can serve as a single authoritative credential node, to be referenced in my bio, would certainly be sought after. Much like the MCP, Cisco certifications etc.

I'd imagine an initiative quite like stanford giving out certificates for its AI (&other) online classes, would be interesting. Or perhaps similar to paul wilmott's CQF certification for quants.

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To sum it up, there's tons of free content that can be used. What's important is structure, and being an authoritative, well-respected provider of credentials. Also, the organization should have strong credentials themselves, and build awareness constantly. Tests would certainly feature heavily in the process. They could leverage startups and other universities to get there quicker~

stc
I think you absolutely can. I am actually paying off the debt I incurred while attending a four year college with development skills I have picked up from mostly online resources, some in person classes/lectures, and a handful of oreilly books. I am also working on a tool to help myself track my own learnings and am trying to think of ways to turn it into a roadmap other people can use which seems to be in the area of what you are referring too. I have a rough working version here http://courseslate.com .
hv23
We're working on the content curation problem @ Polymath-- http://www.whatispolymath.com. We have a short video up explaining our approach, and should have a beta out soon. All feedback welcome!