Free “Mobile Web Development” course starting this week!

I’m a big fan of free online education, and one of my favorite learning tools is Udacity. They offer free college level courses, mostly in the field of computer science. Their courses are interactive and served in small chunks, so you can follow at your own pace. Good stuff! Their Interactive 3D Graphics course was where I learned the basics of WebGL and Three.js, which really helped me begin contributing to Gazebo and eventually getting this internship with OSRF.

This quick post is to express my happiness about a new course launching on January 6th: Mobile Web Development. Because well, that’s exactly what I’m doing for my internship at this very moment! I hope the course is everything I expect it to be 🙂 And it will be perfect if it solves all my problems for me 😛

On a side note, I’m a bit disappointed that Udacity is starting to offer paid courses as well. I’m not very well informed about their reasons for it, but it seems like their original business model has been considered a failure. I’d just like to put it out there that for me, the original Udacity is great. Of course, I already had a degree when I took my first courses, so I can’t really vouch for their efficiency in substituting higher education…

But if I may throw in my two cents, maybe they shouldn’t be trying to be an “online university”, but something completely different. For example, I bet their metrics consider me a failure, since I haven’t taken many final exams and skipped a lot of homework. But that’s because some of them are long and I feel like I got the idea, so I’m able to move on without putting time into proving that I got it, you know? So yeah, I’m not sure how they originally planned to make themselves sustainable, but maybe they could think of new ways to define success…

Anyways, looking forward to the course starting next week! And I’m saying in advance that I probably won’t do homework, since I have lots to do for the internship 😛