On CodeLesson, technical professionals learn software engineering skills that apply to their jobs every day. Part of the inspiration for CodeLesson came from our experience with university computer science programs, which are useful and vital, but are commonly focused on the theoretical rather than practical. They’re great if you’re looking to become a researcher or a systems programmer, but maybe not quite as good if you want to build applications.
We also haven’t seen universities provide consistent support for emergent languages and technologies (like Ruby, Node.js, iPhone, and Python) that professional developers — and hiring managers — are asking for. Some campuses offer the new stuff, but it’s hard to find everywhere, which is why the CodeLesson format has a lot of value to offer, since we can reach students anywhere in the world.
We were curious to learn more about how .edu users were using CodeLesson, so we delved into our student database to see if our theory is playing out in practice. Here’s what we found:
- Students from five of eight Ivy League universities are on CodeLesson today (Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, and Harvard)
- We have students from five of 12 Pac-12 campuses (Berkeley, Colorado, Stanford, Washington, and USC)
- Students from five of 12 Big 10 campuses are on CodeLesson (Indiana, Illinois, Ohio State, Michigan, and Minnesota)
- There are students from four of 12 ACC campuses on CodeLesson (Duke, UNC, Virginia, and Virginia Tech)
- We also have students from big technology schools like MIT and Carnegie Mellon.
A note about our methodology: We discovered this data by querying .edu email addresses in our user database (so it’s likely that a few staff and alumni may be mixed in along with active students). It’s also likely that there are college students and alums who have registered for CodeLesson without using their .edu email addresses. But it’s still an interesting result that validates our idea that CodeLesson can be a useful compliment to a college curriculum for technical professionals or aspiring geeks.
