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Ask HN: Making a course on development from novice to employable?

4 points by nicoschuele ↗ HN
I am considering creating an online course that would teach web development, from novice to employable. It would use videos, screencasts and texts. More than anything, I'd like to make it free.

Why? I have been a developer for the past 15 years. I started as a junior coder and arrived to an IT manager position in a large corporation. The twist here is that I never sat a single day of my life in a CS course. I am entirely self-taught, like many in the field. Over the years, I noticed that I have a passion for coaching and teaching developers.

At a high level, here's what the course should teach: HTML -> CSS -> Programming basics -> JavaScript -> Ruby -> Rails -> Advices on how to land a web developer's job. I'd intend this course to be a comprehensive set of skills needed to be able to apply for a junior dev position.

In order to build this course, I would need to take 3 months of unpaid leave. I would also need some trivial resources like some software licenses, a good microphone, etc. My idea is to start a crowdfunding campaign to first see if there's an interest for such a course and of course, to have the resources to work full time on it.

What do you think? How would you tackle this and spread the word about the crowdfunding project (no, I don't have a large following on Twitter and the likes)? Is the idea completely stupid, and why?

Thanks for your input! Before jumping in, I'm interested in getting some feedback.

8 comments

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shire
Not a bad idea, I'm sure you will get funded if you put this on kickstarter my only thing is don't go with Ruby on Rails or is that your main skill?. Ruby on Rails is not something a beginner will understand it really just seems like magic as opposed to PHP and MySQL. I definitely recommend you try PHP since that will give beginners a great opportunity to understand and follow along it also gives a high level overview of what is really going on under the hood of server-side scripting.
nicoschuele
Thanks for your answer. Kickstarter is not an option for me as I'd be required to have a US social security number. I don't have one, I'm Swiss. I'd go with Indiegogo. Crowdfunding is not my expertise at all. How would you go to spread the word about the campaign? I know my target audience doesn't lie within the pro coders crowd but rather within designers, start-up founders, people willing to make a career change and maybe CS students.

As for Rails, yes, there's a lot of magic happening but my goal would be to decompose that 'magic' to explain what really happens behind the scene as the goal would not be to teach how to copy code (like many, many online courses are doing) but rather how to write it. My main skill is C# and ASP.NET but I don't consider it either as a good starting point for a beginner.

PHP could be good as well but writing good code in PHP is very challenging for a beginner (in my opinion and experience). Also, PHP, even though it's used on loads of sites, is not a 'hot' technology anymore.

Lastly, I would like to have fun creating this course... ...and I'm having loads of fun writing Ruby!

shire
Hot technology? PHP has more jobs than Ruby and Python put together. Theres still a lot of legacy code. You teach a beginner Ruby on Rails he will have less of a chance finding a job than you teach with PHP. Only people using Ruby on Rails is mainly startups and I'm sure they are not looking for people who just started learning Ruby on Rails. PHP gives you a clear overview how you can embed code in an HTML and also use a database with it makes much more sense. I will definitely pay for it if you went this route but I got my fingers crossed good luck.
nicoschuele
Thanks for the comment. Actually, PHP, I don't want. For several reasons: I want to teach concepts used in real world situations such as test driven development, object oriented programming, MVC, etc... and for all of these reasons, PHP is not a strong candidate. I know there are more jobs opportunities for Java, PHP, .NET, etc... but my goal is also not to produce corporate drones but passionate people :-)
inetsee
I would recommend against using PHP as the language to teach to beginners. I would choose either Python or Ruby. Javascript would also be a possibility, although beginners might find Python or Ruby easier to learn.
raj564
you should sign up for your competitor's online bootcamps. See what they do, how they approach teaching the subject matter, etc... 2 years ago, michael hartl owned the marketshare for learning rails. Now, theres dozens of online courses teaching rails.

source: myself...I am an expert at "Learning Ruby/Rails"

nicoschuele
Thanks for the feedback!

In order to answer the various questions raised on all the outlets where I asked 'what about this idea?', I created a faq here: http://howtocode.io

Let me know what you think (I know it's ugly but the purpose is served)!