Code School

While sifting through the forums of Coursera's computing for data analysis class, I came across a link to site called Code School, offering a basic introduction to the R language. Since lectures in computing for data analysis are long and move from topic to topic quite quickly I figured I'd check it out to get some extra practice. I'd heard of Code School once or twice before, but I'd never taken a course with them and since most of their materials require a paid subscription, they don't seem to be quite as popular as other MOOC platforms like Coursera, Codeacademy or Udacity. I don't usually buy into the phrase "you get what you pay for", but Code School has among the best quality, polish and interactivity of any MOOC site I've seen. I was so impressed by the Try R course that I signed up for a free 2-day hall pass.



Code School is an e-learning site focused on teaching web design technologies such as Javascript, JQuery, Javascript libraries, Ruby, HTML, CSS and GIT. You can tell web developers and designers made the site because everything is highly polished, with a heavy focus on user experience. Courses are organized into digestible sections comprised of 5 to 10 minute videos followed by interactive challenges that put what you learned in the videos to use. In this sense the, organization is somewhat similar to Udacity. On Code School, however, the challenges are interactive problems more akin to Codeacademy, except with better design, fewer bugs and an extremely helpful hint system that keeps you from getting stuck for too long. The instruction quality is very good; the instructors are adept at explaining topics in a way that is accessible to the average person and they have slides for each course that act as notes for all the material covered.



Apart from the actual instructional content, Code School puts more effort into design and fun than any other MOOC platform I've seen. Every course has its own theme and even a theme song that they play at the beginning of videos. The challenge exercises are gamified, so you receive points when you get correct answers and you have to pay points to get the answers given to you, which gives you some incentive, however superficial, to find the solutions yourself. One of the main attractions of MOOCs is the price tag and since I managed to get through most of what interested me on my free trial, I don't plan to subscribe at the moment, but they have a lot of great content that is definitely worth a look and maybe even a subscription.