Comment by freshhawk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freshhawk | Hacker News Reader

That's an excitingly ambitious project. I really hope you guys pull it off.

One (extended) question though:

The first course is "a cutting-edge class in web application development for mobile devices. Not only does it use texts focused on practical application and cover tech like PhoneGap, Jo, Sencha, jQTouch, and jQuery Mobile, but it is taught by a real-world developer with decades of university teaching experience".

That's not a university course, that's a trade school course. Look at the "textbooks". Probably a useful one but it's not CS. I know you say "We not only teach CS/SE theory at the highest level, but also provide the practical implementation that prepares you to excel in the workplace." but to be honest that seems like a lie. I don't have much experience with teaching CS but I have some.

The idea that you could teach a practical (necessarily complex) toolkit at the same time or alongside high level CS concepts seems absurd. Students have a hard enough time getting those high level concepts to click but now they are mixing trade school toolkit training in at the same time? Those two goals conflict with each other. It's like using gcc internals for a compiler course.

I am so onboard with the online, just in time, at your own pace learning thing. But I have to say that the copy on this page has seriously dampened by enthusiam.

You're called "Turing College" and the only course is a trade school mobile app course covering mobile app framework libraries (at least they'll have to come back in 6 months for the new version of the course) and say things like this: "We’re teaching you to be a rock star, not just look like one on paper". WTF? Was brogrammercollege.blogspot.com taken? And blogspot? really?

I hope my impression is wrong, but I'm not coming away with a good one from this page.

Thanks for the feedback on the copy. It's always hard to find that balance between being informal and jokingly reference overused terms like "rockstar", and being unnecessarily stuffy. We'll definitely take your comments to heart though as we refine the general descriptions.

The whole concept of being able to mix real world (trade school) courses with heavy theory is a tricky question. We have traditional theory heavy courses in the pipeline, but realistically, it is extremely difficult to bootstrap with theoretical courses. It's been tried before and typically fails quickly. Oddly enough, you can give away theoretical classes, and you can charge $10,000 a class for them, but you can't really sell enough at our $200-$400 price point to pay for the cost of developing the class. We believe you can teach both, and should teach both, but I'm well aware that we'll always have people saying you can't or shouldn't even attempt to do so.

Oh, one note on the textbooks for the course. Of course there is an image issue when you use Oreilly and Apress texts, but honestly, for that subject there just aren't any traditional texts that come anywhere near the level needed to teach the subject. Even those three have serious holes that Dr. Ostrowski has worked with the authors to plug in this course. If you know of a better text that we somehow overlooked, please drop me a note and we'll see if we can integrate it as we create V2 of the course.

Perhaps your use of the word "college" is currently misleading. As the OP says, you're really offering trade school classes. When you offer a comprehensive curriculum that includes a theoretical underpinning, that's when you're a "college".

Our first class definitely has practical application, but it is still taught by a PHD and covers more ground at a higher level than the current college or university standard.

If teaching applied material makes you a trade school, someone should tell Harvard: http://cs76.tv/2012/spring/

As for the use of the word "college", well, it's the most accurate descriptor of what we are building. We're not there yet, but we will be soon, and having to print a whole new batch of business cards is just too darn expensive. We could have chosen a more startup-ey name, but we hate startup-ey names. I could have named it after myself as well, maybe something like "Huffman Coding". We checked though, and that was taken.

While we're discussing it though, singularity university isn't a university, and clown college does not cover the theoretical aspect of clowning sufficiently. Also, University of Maryland College University is mildly redundant. And why do you park on the drive way and drive on the park way?

Since I started using the term "trade school" here I want to be clear I don't use it as a pejorative term, just a differentiation.

The bootstrap problem explanation makes it more clear where you are coming from. That makes a lot of sense.

I think a few things struck a nerve with me because I've had a lot of interactions with junior developers who identify with the HN crowd, the startup culture, rockstar programmer thing who show really strong anti-intellectual opinions about CS.

Then they end up reinventing the wheel poorly because they would never bother looking up the 30 year old algorithm that solves their problem on wikipedia, nevermind reading an actual published paper. Every time I have to throw away weeks of their work because they wrote their own crappy sorting algorithm or didn't google "bloom filter" I blame their educators and feel bad for them. Because it never occurred to them to think about the high level problem and see if maybe one of those ivory tower geniuses solved their problem already. Sometimes they know they could have but don't know where to start or feel intimidated by that part of the web.

I'm gearing up to do some recruiting for my startup so it's on my mind. "Turing College? sounds like my kind of people. 'Rockstar' programmer? sounds like those kind of people".

Maybe that's unfair and I shouldn't be so crotchety when I'm barely in my 30's. Some clarity on where you guys will fall on the theoretical/practical spectrum and how the theoretical foundation courses will support the practical courses in your curriculum would help people like me get on board.

Maybe some copy on your roadmap for the curriculum and your higher level ideas about how you'll be teaching?

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