Skip to main content

Would you like to take a pay-it-forward course?

Those of you who have seen my services section, will have noticed a virtual learning offering. I have been offering 2 courses: Java Programming Best Practices, and Object Oriented Design. Till now the fees for each course was $100 for a 6 - 8 week period. However, I have had the desire to work on the Pay-It-Forward model from a long time.

I first read about the Pay-It-Forward concept on Liegh Blackall's wiki. What it really means is every participant has the option to not pay the course fees if they volunteer to mentor future participants or volunteer in other ways towards development/maintenance of the course. What a wonderful idea. This way we can create a community of mentors and move towards peer-taught, outcome-based courses. (Just as an aside Mark Shuttleworth and others are planning some very interesting things using the concept of peer taught and outcome based courses to help school students gain analytical skills.)

Please send a mail to adaptives[at]gmail[dot]com, if you are interested in taking the course. I may not be able to mentor everyone who signs up immediately, but we will accomodate everyone a batch at a time. Please mention which course you would like to take, along with some background information about yourself, like whether you are a student or a professional developer, the technologies you work with, and your experience in the industry.

If you are planniing to take the "Java programming best practices" course, then you must be already be familiar with Java. If you are taking the "Object oriented design" course, a very basic exposure to OO concepts will help, but is not a prerequisite.

The primary prerequisite I request, is sincereity in learning, and sincerity in sharing your knowledge with future students.

Here is how we will proceed with the course.

When you sign up, I will mail you a document containing recommended reading. A lot of it are posts on this blog, and some from elsewhere on the Internet.  You should read every section, and reflect on it by writing a blog post on your blog. I will follow your blog and converse with you by adding my comments to your posts. If you have any questions/doubts, you must post them on the learning forum, where they will be answered by the community. If you wish, you can also announce your blog on the forum. This way you will get feedback from other participants as well. Periodically, I will mail you assignments, which you can mail back to me for feedback. I also have some mindmaps and other learning artifacts, which I will post on this blog, soon.

To sum it up, learning is grasping new information, increaseing your understanding by reflecting and practicing the concepts, and deepening your understanding by communicating with others. Teaching is also a very important aspect of learning, when you teach something, you retain the information for a longer time, and also increase your own level of understanding. The basic grasping of information will happen by reading the material I mail you. Reflection, and critical thinking will happen on your own blog, resolution of your doubts and queries will happen on the newsgroup, practice will be through the assignments, and to close the loop you will mentor future students, thus helping them as well as yourself.

If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to share them as comments on this post. 

 

Discuss this post in the learning forum.



Note: This text was originally posted on my earlier blog at http://www.adaptivelearningonline.net
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My HSQLDB schema inspection story

This is a simple story of my need to inspect the schema of an HSQLDB database for a participar FOREIGN KEY, and the interesting things I had to do to actually inspect it. I am using an HSQLDB 1.8 database in one of my web applications. The application has been developed using the Play framework , which by default uses JPA and Hibernate . A few days back, I wanted to inspect the schema which Hibernate had created for one of my model objects. I started the HSQLDB database on my local machine, and then started the database manager with the following command java -cp ./hsqldb-1.8.0.7.jar org.hsqldb.util.DatabaseManagerSwing When I tried the view the schema of my table, it showed me the columns and column types on that table, but it did not show me columns were FOREIGN KEYs. Image 1: Table schema as shown by HSQLDB's database manager I decided to search on StackOverflow and find out how I could view the full schema of the table in question. I got a few hints, and they all pointed to
Post a Comment
Read more

Fuctional Programming Principles in Scala - Getting Started

Sometime back I registered for the Functional Programming Principles in Scala , on Coursera. I have been meaning to learn Scala from a while, but have been putting it on the back burner because of other commitments. But  when I saw this course being offered by Martin Odersky, on Coursera , I just had to enroll in it. This course is a 7 week course. I will blog my learning experience and notes here for the next seven weeks (well actually six, since the course started on Sept 18th). The first step was to install the required tools: JDK - Since this is my work machine, I already have a couple of JDK's installed SBT - SBT is the Scala Build Tool. Even though I have not looked into it in detail, it seems like a replacement for Maven. I am sure we will use it for several things, however upto now I only know about two uses for it - to submit assignments (which must be a feature added by the course team), and to start the Scala console. Installed sbt from here , and added the path
1 comment
Read more

Five Reasons Why Your Product Needs an Awesome User Guide

Photo Credit: Peter Merholz ( Creative Commons 2.0 SA License ) A user guide is essentially a book-length document containing instructions for installing, using or troubleshooting a hardware or software product. A user guide can be very brief - for example, only 10 or 20 pages or it can be a full-length book of 200 pages or more. -- prismnet.com As engineers, we give a lot of importance to product design, architecture, code quality, and UX. However, when it comes to the user manual, we often only manage to pay lip service. This is not good. A usable manual is as important as usable software because it is the first line of help for the user and the first line of customer service for the organization. Any organization that prides itself on great customer service must have an awesome user manual for the product. In the spirit of listicles - here are at least five reasons why you should have an awesome user manual! Enhance User Satisfaction In my fourteen years as a
Post a Comment
Read more