How collaboration will transform online learning
In a nutshell
Online learning can be amazing assuming you manage to stay motivated over the span of several weeks or months. Most people can’t. Especially while learning something as challenging as coding. It’s very hard when no one holds you accountable or helps you when you get stuck. We get it.
We are piloting a new way of learning where we pair two people, give them a real-world project with milestones and requirements designed to help them learn, and ask them to videoconference every week to collaboratively build a project through pair-programming.
We are starting with a course where you will learn how to build a production-ready backend (REST API) using Node.js and Express. If you find the course intriguing, go ahead and follow the link below to learn more about the course.
If you want to request other topics, click here.
Collaborative learning
Offline learning (colleges, bootcamps, etc.) is quite effective at helping you learn, even when it doesn’t have the best content or teachers. This is because it provides you with the support you need to stay engaged, focused and motivated. It provides a physical space, teachers, and a community of learners like you that will hold you accountable and will help you create habits that keep you going week after week. These offline learning providers charge a lot for that and they are only available to a few lucky ones in the world.
Online learning (MOOCs, tutorials, online bootcamps) on the other hand, is really accessible and affordable, sometimes even free, but it fails to keep people engaged week after week. In fact, only 5% of the people who start an online course typically finish it.
At Microverse, we believe online and offline learning will converge to bring the best of both worlds together — an affordable and accessible education that provides the best quality content with a high level of support based on collaboration, community and habit-forming activities.
We are starting by launching an online learning platform based on synchronous collaboration between peers that meet regularly to work on real-world projects.
What makes our methodology work is really simple:
- Having someone that depends and counts on you every week makes you less likely to drop out. It also helps reduce those moments of frustration. Shared joy is twice the joy, shared pain is half the pain.
- Every project is split into milestones. Every milestone has “individual tasks” that you need to complete before meeting with your partner, and “collaborative requirements” that you will build together. This enables you to get ready at your own pace, while providing an incentive (the next collaboration session) to get things done.
- Sometimes you will need to explain things to your partner. Other times the roles will be reversed. Explaining concepts to another person increases your understanding of a concept. The best way to learn is to teach.
- Learning through collaboration helps you get really good at some of the most important soft skills of this century (and of the tech world) — communication, teamwork and remote work.
For our first course, we started by choosing to teach Node.js, a technology that we love and that a lot of companies are choosing to build new software (jobs!), but we are already preparing courses for many other languages and even non-technical topics. We have also started collaborating with other companies and organizations to launch courses together. Interested? Send me an email.
Would you like to learn how to build a production-ready backend with Node.js doing pair programming with another developer? Click here to learn more about the course!
If you like what we are building, or if you think someone else will find it interesting, please SHARE this article. Thanks!
