This was not a magnanimous gesture. You fought with the students for months, when it was clear things weren't working. It wasn't until the story blew up in the media that you agreed to cancel the ISAs.
And then to be released from their ISAs, you demanded students sign a contract agreeing not to sue Lambda School.
The ISA is only one part of what they “paid” to attend. The other thing is months of opportunity cost, loans, etc. An ISA release does not make one whole with regard to those other losses.
Austen's lying again. Students fought hard to get the ISAs cancelled. They should have been working towards learning and job searching instead, not fighting a pathological liar and terrible organization.
My guess is after pressuring students to go away, Lambda School (or its lawyers) realized this and agreed to settle rather than fight it in court and risk having to pay 3x as much in addition to their legal costs.
I’ve heard similar statements many times from bootcamps and it’s never sat well with me. It’s one of the major contributing factors that drove me away from working at a bootcamp.
While nothing is wrong about stating this, I’ve always thought student first. When a bootcamp fails its student(s) in this manner, money is lost. That is nothing relative to what the student loses - time, money, effort, and relationships. If there’s one common thread I’ve seen from the students I’ve taught, it’s that they all sacrifice a lot to try and change their lives.
What hurts the most when the system fails these students is that sometimes, they can’t just go back to what they were doing before. That’s why messaging around expectations [from both sides] needs to be crystal clear. This attention to detail is paramount in a bootcamp, but it often meets opposition with the business model and/or the “move fast and break things” mindset of a startup delivering a product [curriculum].
That I’m still reading stuff like this so many years after bootcamps have become established makes me lose faith that things will really change for the better.
* being graded by a student 2 months ahead
* being taught by someone hiding under a sheet
* being paired with a student who hadn't been participating in the curriculum
It seems like there was more going wrong for this student than just a curriculum change.
There’s also an instructor in every cohort, so your TA (we call them TLs) is more of a first line of defense. We brought in the strongest design students to be TAs which is why they weren’t very much further in the curriculum - in fact they actually had a different curriculum. An exception to the rule caused by curriculum change.
*being taught by someone under a sheet
We brought in contractors to help teach the new curriculum, and one hadn’t adjusted the light in his room for video conferencing and couldn’t see the screen for sunlight, so... improvised. Normally there are weeks of practice lessons and training, so this also the result of a rush.
Someone who hasn't needs to be trained because it's not like a physical classroom at all.
And of course, teachers need to improvise every day, but if they're not used to doing it then they need coaching on that, too.
For example, whenever I teach remotely, I mail a good pair of wired, directional-mic headphones to every student. I also send them PDFs outlining how to position the light in their room.
I do that because they are unfamiliar with the subtleties of remote interaction and it's going to ruin everyone's experience if students have barriers to participation and feedback.
Huh? The guy under the sheet was Christijan Draper, the UX program manager who's been with Lambda School since May 2018. Why are you lying?
Anyone who has worked in the industry knows that most software projects fail for human reasons, not technical ones.
Like, who was going to be opening up Photoshop or In Design or Figma or whatever? Who was going to be slicing designs into HTML/CSS? Who was going to be implementing interactive prototypes and putting them in front of users? Who was responsible for ensuring that communication between the UX side and the technical side was happening effectively?
Who were the product and project managers (in title or de facto) and were they clear that this was their job?
In your interview with Vincent Woo, you said that "reviews were fine" for the UX cohort and then they suddenly fell off the cliff once labs began. This story more or less explains why: the students were strung along (intentionally or not) with the promise that it was labs that matters.
Once in labs, they find out: https://twitter.com/watsonwaswrite/status/123090468067232154...
If that was the promise, why wouldn't LS move heaven and Earth to make sure that labs was a home run? Why wouldn't LS ensure every student in the group project was crystal clear on expectations? Why wouldn't LS do a dry run version of the capstone project across cohorts to control for unanticipated group dynamics? Ensure that everyone in the web and UX cohorts has worked with at least 5-10 different people cross-functionally before capstone time?
And fine, maybe you "call an audible" — lord knows we had to do that at DBC. But why then wouldn't you then bring in 5-10 experienced project managers to facilitate things, communicate everything to everyone, and explain that this is what needs to happen to make the capstone a success for everyone?
Shouldn't asking and answering these questions before admitting a single student be table stakes?
The whole project seems half-baked from start to finish and this outcome 100% predictable.
Look at Dustin Myers and how he responds to criticism: https://twitter.com/dustint314/status/1156423191645917184
Look at Trevor McKendrick (Chief of Staff) and how he responds to criticism: https://twitter.com/TrevMcKendrick/status/108285421890879488...
Look at all of Austen's interactions on Twitter to students and how he gaslights them: https://twitter.com/Austen/status/1213711252175740928
Look at Ben Nelson (cofounder) and see how he only interacts with positive testimonials and discount negative ones: https://twitter.com/sunjieming/likes
Look at Ryan Holdaway and see how he only interacts with positive testimonials and discounts negative ones: https://twitter.com/Ryan_Holdaway/likes
Look at Ryan Hamblin - same thing: https://twitter.com/RyanleeHamblin/likes
There's a clear pattern here. These are key people in staff who should be listening and responding with empathy to the horrifying student stories throughout Lambda. All negative dissent is squashed by dividing and siloing students. They are made to think their issues with the "school" are due to some personal deficiency.
It is no wonder that negative student accounts rarely get amplified or even created. I was personally scared to write negative reviews for fear of being admonished by their "Student Success" team. There's been rumors circling of students removed from Slack after they complained about the quality of education. Leadership and key members of staff are all complicit.
What I see is definitely not behavior I'd want in instructors.
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/02/lambda-schools-j...
Did you not read the scathing letter? If you want to address these issues - why don't you publicly post the letter and address every single damning issue highlighted if you are so confident? There were things outlined outside of just "bad instruction" and "misaligned expectations". Do better.
[0] https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-01-08-online-coding-school...
I can see you’re obviously beyond frustrated and angry. I think it’s helpful to a point to “air dirty laundry” but when it appears to be someone out for retribution it really ceases to become appropriate for HN.
Not only that, but they are apparently pushing students to join their coding programs prior to completion of prework/entrance tests: https://twitter.com/CHERdotdev/status/1231661150619652096
For-profit education like bootcamps deserve to be scrutinized and regulated. There are real consequences to poor educational outcomes.
It started with misaligned expectations. We worked with a lot of hiring partners to create a UX curriculum that would be easiest to jump into a first UX career from, and it was clear in doing that research that a research-first perspective with less emphasis on design is what would get students hired faster in a field that can be notoriously difficult to break into (relative to software engineering). We hired experts in that aspect of UX design, which can be terribly broad.
Partway through the data started to show that half of the class was pretty happy and about half was not. Usually it’s not split like that - there’s always an outlier student or two but not half totally happy and half frustrated, so we started to dig in.
Two things happened:
1. We realized half of the students were expecting a design-heavy experience, and we hadn’t communicated well enough what to expect. There were pieces on design, but you wouldn’t come out of this curriculum as a UI designer, and students were expecting that.
2. We decided to try and help those students who wanted the UI emphasis, hired more folks, and started creating curriculum in a pretty rushed manner to help them reach their goals. In retrospect that was a huge mistake; there simply wasn’t enough time to build a full design-heavy curriculum in flight, and the students who wanted design-heavy curriculum were very disappointed.
That cohort was (rightly) frustrated because we tried to do too much too late. I recognized that was a risk going into those curriculum changes, but took on the risk because the most important thing is making students successful and happy. In retrospect it was the wrong call.
I wish like hell that I could go back and make everything perfect for that cohort of students; there are about 20 of them and I’ve spent time one on one with every one. We brought in more people to work with them one on one and that curriculum is much better now, but understandably 5 or 6 students in that cohort had lost their faith in our ability to deliver and opted to leave the program. Of course, we cancelled their ISAs; we lost a ton of money training these students and they don’t owe us anything, but that’s the right thing to do. We promise an awesome experience and in this instance didn’t deliver. We tried to do too much in too short a timeframe and missed the mark.