Intro to JavaScript, Intro to MySQL and HTML5/CSS Are Now Instant Enrollment Courses

By jeffrey | Published: February 20, 2012

We’re continuing to convert our courses to our new instant enrollment format so you can get in and start learning whenever you’re ready — without having to wait for courses to start. (You can get more info on the transition here.) If you live in Madagascar and want to start learning at 4 in the morning your time, we have you covered.

We’ve added a few new courses to the format in the last week:

These instructor-led courses are now open and available to you as soon as you enroll. And don’t forget our free instant-enrollment course, Create Your First Web Page. This course is an excellent way to get acquainted with the CodeLesson format and see first-hand what our courses are like.

Posted in Courses, HTML, Instant Enrollment, JavaScript, MySQL | Leave a comment

New: Instant Enrollment Courses on CodeLesson

By jeffrey | Published: February 13, 2012

Strummin' DroidOne of the most common bits of feedback we’ve received since starting CodeLesson is that students don’t want to wait for weeks or months for a course to begin. While some students say they like having the structure of definite start and end dates for courses, the majority tell us that they want to start learning as soon as possible.

We think this is awesome and we want to accommodate it, so we’ve worked hard over the past few months to streamline our student signup flow. As part of this, we’ve added a new kind of course that we’re calling an Instant Enrollment course. These courses have no set start dates (they start as soon as you sign up). Beyond that, Instant Enrollment courses provide the same advantages as our other courses. In particular, since all of our courses are instructor-led, you can ask questions and get feedback on your coursework from a real human expert instructor. And our courses are available 24 hours a day, so you can schedule coursework alongside your busy daytime schedule.

As of today, we have two instant enrollment courses, one free, one paid:

Both of these courses are now available immediately, so you can get in and start learning as soon as you sign up. You can click on the links above to sign up and get started learning immediately.

Our intention is to add more instant enrollment courses in the future. Is there a course from our catalog you’d like to see in the new Instant Enrollment format? Let us know in the comments below.

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Create Your First Web Page: A New Free CodeLesson Course

By jeffrey | Published: February 7, 2012

HTML5This week we officially released our newest free course, Create Your First Web Page.

This course is intended for anyone who’s never coded before. In the course you’ll learn the basics of creating an HTML web page: editing markup, structuring text, creating links and adding images. That’s it. It’s a very short course intended to provide the bare-bones basics. If you do well in Create Your First Web Page, you’re prepared to go on to our deeper, more structured courses such as Introduction to HTML5 and CSS, Introduction to JavaScript, or Web Programming with PHP Part A.

Create Your First Web Page is intended for anyone to complete in about two to four hours. You can go at your own pace in this course. You can do the course at one sitting or break it up over successive days, and you’re free to take as much time as you need to complete the course activities. The pace is more relaxed and less structured than our regular courses, but there are still online readings and hands-on coding activities, and there’s still an instructor available to answer questions if you get stuck.

But perhaps best of all, this course uses a new continuous enrollment format. That means the course is available to you as soon as you sign up for it; you don’t have to wait for the course to start because the course is always in session. (We’re hoping to bring continuous enrollment to some of our other courses soon.)

Last but not least, Create Your First Web Page serves as an entrée into the CodeLesson format. If you’ve been thinking about taking a CodeLesson course but you weren’t sure whether our instructor-led online format would work for you, wonder no more. You can enroll in the course here and kick the tires to your heart’s content.

Posted in About Us, Courses, Web | Leave a comment

How to Add a CodeLesson Course to your LinkedIn Profile

By jeffrey | Published: February 6, 2012

If you’ve completed a CodeLesson course, you’ll probably want the world to know that you’ve successfully accomplished the work. You can do this by listing your CodeLesson course on your LinkedIn page. Here’s how to do this.

First, on LinkedIn, go to your “Edit Education” page. You’ll see a form that looks like this:


In the “School Name” field, type “CodeLesson”.

Leave the “Degree” field blank.

In Field of Study, type the name of the course you completed (such as “Web Development with PHP Part A”).

In Dates Attended, select the year you completed the course in the second dropdown (leave the first dropdown blank).

Leave the remaining fields in the form blank.

That’s it! Here’s what the Education section of your LinkedIn profile will look like when you’re done:

 

Posted in Certifications, LinkedIn | Leave a comment

Discounted Holiday Bundles

By jeffrey | Published: December 9, 2011

Occasionally we pick out two or more CodeLesson courses that seem to go together and extend discounts on those courses; we call this a bundle. (Our students call them a darn good deal.) So to commemorate whichever end o’ the year festivities you’re partial to, we’ve added a few new bundles to our list. Most of these are valid through December 31, 2011, only.

Ruby Language and Ruby on Rails together: save 20% on both courses. Our next session of Rails is scheduled to start soon but you’ll want to take Ruby Language first unless you’ve been coding with Ruby on your own for a while.

HTML5 and CSS and Web Publishing with WordPress together: $100 off. Web Publishing with WordPress also starts soon but you can take both of these courses concurrently if you like.

HTML5 and CSS with Introduction to Django together: $50 off.

HTML5 and CSS with Introduction to JavaScript: $75 off.

Reminder! These discounts are good through December 31, 2011, so you’ll want to snap them up tout de suite.

Posted in Django, HTML, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Ruby on Rails | Leave a comment

Clojure Madness!

By jeffrey | Published: December 7, 2011

It’s great to see strong interest in our Introduction to Clojure course, the first session of which launched this week in conjunction with the publication of Clojure in Action. Amit Rathore, the author of the book, is the instructor for this course.

Amit has agreed to do another session of the course next month. The next session of Introduction to Clojure will take place on January 30. You can sign up here to take the January session of the course or view more information on the course here.

As with all of our courses, the CodeLesson format is time-shifted, delivered online, and instructor-led. Our courses have structure with assignments and deadlines, but you can do the coursework whenever you have time — so it’s perfect if you have a busy daytime schedule or if you’re located in an out-of-the-way time zone. And the instructor can help you out and answer questions if you get stuck.

Finally, note that the price of this course will increase on Monday, December 12. So if you’re interested in learning Clojure in January, you’ll want to take advantage of the introductory price at your earliest convenience.

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Year-End Discounts on CodeLesson Courses

By jeffrey | Published: November 25, 2011

We just posted some tasty year-end discounts on some of our online, instructor-led courses.

Some of these discounts will go away after the US holiday weekend (that’s November 28 for those of you who don’t celebrate Thanksgiving Classic). Here are the deets:

Web Programming with PHP Parts B and C Bundle: $690. Go beyond the basics with PHP Web development.

Introduction to HTML5 and CSS: $100 off our basic HTML5 course.

Introduction to Web Programming with PHP Part A: $100 off of our basic PHP course.

Introduction to Programming in Python: Take $100 off our introductory Python course.

 

Posted in HTML, PHP, Python, Web | Leave a comment

Call for Volunteers: CodeLesson Computer Science Education Week

By jeffrey | Published: November 3, 2011

As we did last year, we will provide a free week of web-based CodeLesson learning to high school students as part of Computer Science Education Week. This session will take place on CodeLesson for five days next month (December 4-10, 2011).

At this point, we’re looking for volunteers to help out with this session. We need three types of help:

  • Original problem sets (relatively small and simple coding exercises in the Java programming language). Problem sets should be fairly discrete (they shouldn’t require a ton of setup or specialized background knowledge). It’s probably best if you stick to the language features found in the AP Java Subset. Our audience is comprised of students aged 14 to 18 who generally started learning Java on a part-time basis in the past year. Bonus points if your problem set implements a solution to a concrete, interesting problem. “Jane is piloting a moon module and needs help computing fuel consumption” might be good, while “create a object that generates Fibonacci sequences using threads” is maybe not quite as good.
  • Course monitors. Course monitors participate in the course message boards and answer students’ questions about the coding exercises, then evaluate the code that students turn in and provide written feedback. If you want to help out but you don’t have a lot of time, this is probably the best choice for you.
  • Sponsors. We’re making corporate sponsorships available for the first time this year. Sponsors will have a logo displayed on the course page with a link back to their site, and they’ll receive prominent mention in all of our communications regarding this event.

The number of students we can accommodate in the session will be a function of how many volunteer course monitors we get. Last year we had two monitors and we accommodated about 100 students; we’d love to increase that as much as we can this year.

Whether you’re passionate about helping the next generation of coders or you’re just interested in exploring online learning, this is an excellent opportunity to do so. We’re starting work on this year’s session right now, so please let us know if you’re interested.

Posted in CS Ed Week, Java | Leave a comment

We’ve Re-opened Enrollments in our Free Etsy API Course

By jeffrey | Published: October 18, 2011

We are chuffed to announce that after working like sweaty pack animals to whittle down the massive student backlog over the summer, sign-ups for A Gentle Introduction to the Etsy API have been re-opened.

The next session of the course will start in a few weeks, on November 28 (that’s the Monday after Thanksgiving in the United States). Best of all, this course is absolutely free. Big thanks to our pals at Etsy for sponsoring the course.

If you’ve been wanting to take this course, or if you’re just looking to have a look-see at what a CodeLesson course is like, here’s your chance. Sign up here and join the next session of the course!

Posted in Courses, Etsy | Leave a comment

Free Preview Week of iOS Programming Starts Today

By jeffrey | Published: October 3, 2011

With the session of our iOS Programming course that starts today, we are trying an experiment — we’re letting everyone who signed up for the course take it for a week, for free. Students who were signed up for this course should already have logins for the course in their inboxes.

The course runs for four weeks, so if you want to continue with the course after this week, we hope you’ll see the value in paying for it. But if not, no hard feelings, we did our best and hopefully you’ll come back for another course in the future.

(Of course, if you’ve paid for the course, none of this affects you — we’re looking forward to having you for the full four weeks of the full course.)

We’re doing the free preview week as an experiment, to help new users become familiar with CodeLesson’s instructor-led format, and to hopefully grow an audience for this new course.

We didn’t pre-announce this because we didn’t want the instructor to be mobbed, but it’s conceivable that we’ll do it again in the future (particularly if this initial experiment works). The easiest way to take advantage of future preview weeks is to register for the site and pick a few courses that you’re interested in.

Posted in iOS | Leave a comment