Re:Lambda School’s Misleading Promises
by auston on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @03:13PM
(#22369553)
Having worked on low cost online educational content & as a bootcamp instructor previously - I think there are a few forces that lead to suboptimal outcomes:
1. No or low admissions bar. Some students very simply SHOULD NOT be admitted to what is intended to be a 3 month course. They either don’t have the learning ability that is required to absorb all of the content in 3 months or the drive.
2. Curriculum pacing - pretty much every human learns different concepts at different pace. A lot of code schools are just trying to assembly-line their course & put people in one end and shove them out the other end in 3 months. If these boot camps offered remediation at a unit level, students on the whole would go much further much faster.
3. Curriculum focus - some people want to be data scientists, others want to write backend code, others want to be iOS developers, others front end. A lot of bootcamps really have curriculum hitting very broad strokes in that 3 month period: big-o, SOLID, html, css, npm/yarn/etc, command line interface, JavaScript, react, elixir, etc. etc. is too much to cram into 3 months IMO. This is a consequence of students hearing this buzzword soup from friends and internet & bootcamps not owning responsibility to serve students.
4. Outcome reporting is hazy at best - CIRR is IMO the best framework for reporting student numbers & should be used as the gold standard. However it should be enforced strictly, if a member doesn’t report CIRR numbers within 3 or 6 months of a cohort finishing they should be penalized in some way by being removed or fined or something. Students need good & recent data to make good decisions & it’s just not their these days.
There are more problems but those are the biggest IMO. There is still a huge opportunity in helping people learn to code but I think it looks more like learncodethehardway.com than Lambdaschool.com
1. No or low admissions bar. Some students very simply SHOULD NOT be admitted to what is intended to be a 3 month course. They either don’t have the learning ability that is required to absorb all of the content in 3 months or the drive.
2. Curriculum pacing - pretty much every human learns different concepts at different pace. A lot of code schools are just trying to assembly-line their course & put people in one end and shove them out the other end in 3 months. If these boot camps offered remediation at a unit level, students on the whole would go much further much faster.
3. Curriculum focus - some people want to be data scientists, others want to write backend code, others want to be iOS developers, others front end. A lot of bootcamps really have curriculum hitting very broad strokes in that 3 month period: big-o, SOLID, html, css, npm/yarn/etc, command line interface, JavaScript, react, elixir, etc. etc. is too much to cram into 3 months IMO. This is a consequence of students hearing this buzzword soup from friends and internet & bootcamps not owning responsibility to serve students.
4. Outcome reporting is hazy at best - CIRR is IMO the best framework for reporting student numbers & should be used as the gold standard. However it should be enforced strictly, if a member doesn’t report CIRR numbers within 3 or 6 months of a cohort finishing they should be penalized in some way by being removed or fined or something. Students need good & recent data to make good decisions & it’s just not their these days.
There are more problems but those are the biggest IMO. There is still a huge opportunity in helping people learn to code but I think it looks more like learncodethehardway.com than Lambdaschool.com