Github is the beloved platform of coders. But for newcomers, the site can be confusing. I, myself, have written about my sleep-deprived frustration with Github Pages (issues that I easily cleared up in the morning). But on Thursday, the community made onlining a little easier with the unveiling of the Github Learning Lab.

For coders, Github is kind of like Instagram, Etsy, and Reddit all rolled in to one. Any programmers reading this have already cringed at the comparison – similes don’t begin to do the platform justice. Put simply, git (which creates gits) is a system to save and store different versions of code you write. Github is, well, an online hub in which you can upload, deploy, and share your gits. You can also collaborate with other coders and test things out.

The new Learning Lab will bring you through the basics of the process. While many tutorials that bring you up to speed use written instructions or pre-recorded video, the platform has created a bot to help you out.

Here’s how it works. In a dedicated repository (a kind of folder for your code (‘repo’ for short)), a bot will take you through some basics. When you’ve completed a given task, it will also go over your work and provide comments on how you did.

The lessons offered by the bot are as follows:

Introduction to Github

When this article inevitably fails to give a good idea of what happens on Github, this is the place to start.

Communicating Using Markdown

Markdown is the lightweight language preferred on Github for making and/or suggesting edits to code. It’s designed so that it can easily transform into HTML (the basic language for the content of web design) with software that’s also called Markdown.

Moving your project to Github

In most cases, you’ll write all your code on your personal computer and, intermittently, send it (or push, as the lingo goes) to your remote Github repo. There are many ways to do this, and many ways to fail to do this.

Github Pages

This is one of the coolest services offered by the platform. By downloading some free software, you can not only push your code to its own repo, but you can also deploy it as a website. This way, you can see your code in action.

Moving your projects to Github

With larger operations, it’s not always a matter of pushing your git to a remote repo. It can involve some heavier lifting.

If you run into a wall with the bot, there will also be a community forum for new coders getting to know the lay of the land.

There’s never been a better time to learn to code. Whether you become a professional in the tech industry or keep things more on an amateur level, there’s a strong likelihood you’ll be using Github. Speaking from personal experience, the platform is an amazing resource. But like almost anything with coding, it can be frustrating at times. With the new Learning Lab, however, that frustration should soon dissipate.

Cover Img Source: Ben Sholzen, Flickr.

The post Github Gives New Coders a Hand With a Bot-Led Learning Lab appeared first on eLearningInside News.

In mining, there’s something known as rock burst. It happens in deep mines and tunnels around the world. Deep drilling causes the rock to shift and buckle. Shards can unexpectedly burst from the tunnel walls, injuring or killing miners.

Code Burst is a story about a violent, unexpected shift in the structure of the global economy. It focuses on a coding bootcamp called Mined Minds and involves the growing skills gap, the tech industry, the increasing obsolescence of higher education, and one married couple who either tried to make a difference, or tried to make a buck. This is a story about trust.

In previous episodes, Code Burst introduced the coding bootcamp Mined Minds, discussed how its media coverage has defied accuracy, and went over how the initiative came about.

Since people have begun to criticize Mined Minds, the main point has been that they promise the moon and fail to deliver. Certainly that is cause for concern on its own. But that argument has often been compounded by another point: Mined Minds receives state and federal dollars. That changes things. If it’s true, that means that the coding bootcamp isn’t just affecting their students; they’re taking a toll on taxpayers.

Last week, I discussed how Mined Minds got started. This week, I’m going to quickly bring the story up to the present and discuss their expansion into West Virginia. From there, I’m going to spend the rest of the episode on how Mined Minds makes money on their non-profit end.

The Word Gets Out

In 2016, Mined Minds began to receive national coverage from the likes of CNN, PBS, and WNYC. People outside of Pennsylvania heard about them. One of those people was West Virginia senator Joe Manchin. He invited Mined Minds to a local job fair and, following enthusiasm from learners, asked Mined Minds to set up in his state   . As far as I can tell, his office took strides to facilitate this process.

CBS reporter Weija Jiang reports, “Manchin helped Mined Minds establish headquarters near West Virginia’s capital using money from federal grants.”

According to Max Garland who reports for the Charleston Gazette-Mail: “The Kanawha County Commission funded the development of Mined Minds’ Clendenin office, where West Virginia graduates work as apprentices.”

“The commission voted in February to spend up to $40,000 on the office build-out in addition to $900 a month for rent for two years, the Gazette-Mail previously reported.”

“Mined Minds has also been teaching software development classes at the West Virginia National Guard’s Mountaineer ChalleNGe Academy. The academy purchased two 120-hour classes from Mined Minds costing $24,800 each, documents obtained by the Gazette-Mail show.”

“In a statement, Maj. Gen. James A. Hoyer, adjutant general for the West Virginia National Guard, said the WVNG’s relationship with Mined Minds “has been productive and successful and that it does not forsee any changes” in that relationship despite the lawsuit.”

“Mined Minds has also had apprenticeship pay reimbursed through the Charleston-based Human Resource Development Foundation or the HRDF, a nonprofit workforce government agency of the West Virginia AFL-CIO.”

“The HRDF reimbursed the pay with a portion of a National Dislocated Worker Grant it received from WorkForce West Virginia, said HRDF deputy director Amanda Filippelli. The grant was for HRDF’s “Job Driven On-the-Job Training Program,” which reimburses employers to hire and train dislocated workers.”

“There were six Mined Minds employees who had a portion of their wages reimbursed through the program, according to Filipelli. She said she didn’t know the total reimbursed to Mined Minds, but that it could’ve been up to 90 percent of those employees’ wages.”

“Filipelli said it seems like Mined Minds has good intentions, even with recent issues.”

“’I don’t know enough about the situation, but it sounds like it’s unfortunate,’ Filipelli said of Mined Minds. ‘If some [participants] are back to job-seeking status, we have other programs we could help them with. We hate to hear when anyone feels they are treated unfairly.'”

I’m not exactly sure how many institutions partnered with Mined Minds in West Virginia, but it seems like the number’s at over a half-dozen at this point. They have their own spaces in Clendenin and Beckley, W.V., and they’ve offered their bootcamp to learners at the National Guard’s Mountaineer Challenge Academy, Chapman Regional High School, Bridge Valley Community College, and elsewhere. It’s very possible there is overlap there. When Mined Minds partnered with CCAC in Pennsylvania, for example, students joined their regular class at their Waynesburgh Location.

In other words, they’ve seen significantly greater success in West Virginia, at least in terms of number of institutions willing to partner with them. But it’s unclear how many they have trained so far. Laucher has claimed that they can train 200 learners a year, but it seems like, after over two years in operation, they’ve barely trained 100 people, if that.

“Receiving” vs. “Subcontracting”

I may as well transition to funding, because I’ve basically already been talking about it the entire show.

While a lot has changed in the coverage of Mined Minds, one talking point has remained pretty much consistent the entire time: the co-founders Amanda Laucher and Jonathan Graham offer their program for free. They haven’t received any federal grants, but they have partnered with organizations that have received federal grants.

Or in the words of Amanda Laucher, “This was 100% funded by us. It was something that we did in our spare time to start out. But when we realized how big the problem actually is, we both quit our jobs to do this. It’s all our time and our money.”

When I began this reporting, I had no idea what that meant. Like, did organizations allow them to use their space? Did they divert some volunteer hours towards their cause? Did they help them advertise? Did they hire them as consultants? Did they pay them directly?

If we trust the reporting from the Charleston Post-Gazette, then several of those possibilities are confirmed as true. As they report, Mined Minds received access to a space from a local commission, the National Guard paid them to educate two learners (and that, by the way, was at a cost much higher than most coding bootcamps), and another job development agency supplemented their interns’ pay by as much as 90%.

Based on the detail of the Post-Gazette’s report, they seem more trustworthy than some. They claim they have documents backing up their figures. But I’m still going to reserve my trust of their story. For this next segment, I’m going to rely purely on what I have overturned myself.

The most notorious grant attributed to Mined Minds so far has come from the Appalachian Regional Commission. The ARC is a federal body, and they allocate federal funding to achieve a number of goals in the Appalachian region.

In June of 2017, they announced their new round of what are known as Power Grants. According to an ARC statement:

$1,489,945 ARC grant to Washington Greene County Job Training Agency, Inc., in Washington, PA, for the Appalachian Region Code (ARCODE) Initiative. The ARCODE Initiative will teach high-demand skills in software engineering and development to displaced workers from the coal sector in southwest Pennsylvania and West Virginia. It harnesses and combines the software training expertise of Mined Minds, a proven software development training organization, and CentralApp, an international software solutions developer. The two will work together to provide courses and certifications needed to qualify for high-demand technology jobs, enabling participants to work locally for companies that can be located anywhere in the world. Mined Minds will provide a supply of certified tech talent that program partners and others will be able to hire locally or contract for short-term, labor-intensive projects. CentralApp trainees who obtain certifications will have access to CentralApp Talent Exchange and will Page 4 / June 2017 obtain work from its customer base of thousands of active Salesforce customers, systems integrators, and consultancies. The project will train and place 71 workers in computer tech jobs at seven or more companies.

From the beginning, Mined Minds says they haven’t received any federal grants. Amanda Laucher has reiterated this again and again. Early on in my reporting, I managed to get Laucher and Graham on the phone.

Henry Kronk: “One thing I still don’t understand is, you guys say you’ve funded this all on your own, but haven’t you received a substantial amount of federal grants? I’ve heard at least of the ARC giving you guys $750,000 [the figure is actually about $700,000].”

Amanda Laucher: “It’s such a surprise to hear people say that. We’ve never received a penny from anybody. The ARC gave a grant to Washington Greene County Workforce Development [their name is Washington Greene County Job Training Agency] and we’re a subcontracter to them where they provide us an hourly rate to do the training.”

Are you beginning to see why these guys drive me crazy? In one sentence, they say they haven’t received any money from anything. And in the next they turn around and say they’re getting paid from a federal grant provided to a local workforce development board. And if that’s where you thought the confusion ended, you’d be wrong.

HK: “[I read that] at one point you guys were charging money for people to attend the bootcamp but for most people, that cost was completely subsidized by the workforce development board. Is that also a misunderstanding?”

AL: “We’ve never charged anybody money.”

HK: “I understand you weren’t charging people money, but a Pittsburgh publication reported that the cost of attending was subsidized by something called PA CareerLink.”

AL: “You’d have to contact them. We do do subcontract work for them [CareerLink] but that’s under an hourly contract. We’ve never had a charge for anyone in Pennsylvania.”

Jonathan Graham: “With CareerLink, they pay the Community College [of Allegheny County], who then contracted us as trainers.”

AL: “Ahh that must have been it. That money never went to us again. Jonathan was a W-2 employee for a local community college and they received that money.”

Since I began reporting this story, I have been trying to track down that ARC grant. The only problem is, no one wanted to talk to me about it. The ARC itself could only say that they provided it to the Washington Greene County Workforce Development Board. I got in touch with several people there, and I was directed to seek out their president, Ami Gatts. It took me a few weeks of leaving messages before I got her on the phone. I’ll play that interview later.

Meanwhile, After my only conversation with Laucher and Graham on the phone, I thought we were on decent terms with one another. But when I started discussing their operations with their employees and clients, they changed their minds. In passing, I asked everyone if they knew anything about the ARC grant, just in case.

On February 7^th, I received an email written by either Amanda or Jonathan. They write:

“We would prefer that you don’t bother our employees and contractors with questions you can easily ask ARC about. A 30 second phone call will easily destroy any notion that we received a pile of money from the federal government.”

If only that were true. Unfortunately, to faithfully report even a very inconsequential piece of information, it takes much more than a 30 second phone call.

The back and forth between me and Mined Minds got ugly. When I made my scrutiny clear, they lashed out defensively, and wrote insults.

Some Clarity at Long Last

And then, after trying to get in touch for weeks, Ami Gatts gave me a call.

Ami Gatts: “Well I can’t speak to what [Laucher and Graham] said. What we know is that they have invoiced us for about $160,000 towards the grant. I also know that they have come up with about $180,000 of in-kind match against the grant too. Again, I can’t speak to what [they have] said, but they have invoiced us for this grant. Their total contract is $702,000, but they’ve only invoiced us for $160,000.”

HK: “So pretty much how it works is you connect them with learners, they train them, and then they’re reimbursed for what a course like this would cost otherwise?”

AG: “It’s kind of hard to explain. They sent in a proposal for this kind of training.”

HK: “Are you familiar with the reports that have come and the lawsuit in West Virginia that claims that these guys aren’t really doing what they’re saying?”

AG: “Well we have seen some articles come out but, we don’t have any information … I wouldn’t know about that. I don’t have any details about it, no one has come to us for information. I know probably as much as you do.”

When Laucher said they had subcontracted with the Washington Greene County Job Training Agency, I thought they were performing consulting work for them. So yes, Laucher and Graham have spent a good deal of their own money on Mined Minds, but they also received funds from federal grants. Graham became a W-2 employee of the Community College of Allegheny County. State and local governments in West Virginia helped them set up shop. It turns out that the funding of Mined Minds is so piece-meal, that even the co-founders can’t keep it completely straight.

Still, that doesn’t explain why Laucher is so keen to hammer home the fact that they have completely self-funded from the beginning.

Another thing that Laucher told me again and again is that this could be easily cleared up. All of the grants and funding provided to Mined Minds are matters of public record. Anyone could look up their 990 tax forms. Any 501(c) non-profit in the U.S. has to disclose their funding in these forms.

The only problem is that their latest 990 was for 2016, which was only when Mined Minds got started. There wasn’t much to learn from it. They reported gross receipts of just over $10,000 with assets of around $4,000.

The Most Recent 990 from Mined Minds

But then, Laucher and Graham sent me their 990 for 2017 just last week.

It lists the following:

$383,739 dollars in program service revenue. They do not itemize this in their return, and the document doesn’t show where that money came from. The only explanation I can find is that it came from contracts like that with the Washington Greene County Job Training Agency, or with the West Virginia National Guard, etc. That makes for a gross revenue of $390,021.

Of that, none went to ‘current officers, directors, trustees, and key employees.’ Laucher and Graham didn’t take any cut of their income from the non-profit.

At this point, I think I can debunk two things. First, Mined Minds definitely receives taxpayer dollars. None of it was a check mailed from Washington, DC, but it did come from the people of at least West Virginia, probably Pennsylvania, and definitely in part from federal taxes paid by Americans throughout the U.S.

Second, and more importantly: according to the 990, Laucher and Graham aren’t getting any of that money. They’re not cutting themselves a paycheck from their non-profit operations.

Their expenses total $368,253, which is just over $20,000 shy of their gross revenue. Of this, $164,027 went to employee salaries. I imagine these employees would be others teaching the coding bootcamp, but the section isn’t itemized. All I can know is that these employees aren’t trustees, directors, officers, or key employees. Besides other small items, like employee benefits and payroll taxes, the rest of their expenses went to paying their apprentices for their for-profit consultancy.

At first, I thought this was cause for concern. Sure, they could use their profits from selling their bootcamp, but it seemed questionable to use money from a federal or state grant—which was intended for education—to pay their workers on the for-profit end.

But I spoke with Ami Gatts about this and she said that Mined Minds’ structure is not uncommon. Their learners need workplace experience, after all, and the ARC is happy to foot the bill, especially if it means that successful learners will go on to start their own companies and bring business to the region.

So regarding Mined Minds’ financials, here’s the bottom line: they’re operating within the confines of the law and within the terms stipulated by the government bodies that have aided their program.

The Importance of Public Relations

But despite this, Laucher and Graham generated a toxic public persona by simply misrepresenting themselves. Their own statements compounded the negative experiences of at least a few students and led readers to believe that something suspect was going on.

The case of Mined Minds should serve as a cautionary tale. In today’s media climate, actions don’t necessarily speak louder than words. Amanda and Jonathan clearly have expertise in the tech industry. But they are total noobs when it comes to PR. And as their story illustrates, a PR failure can have serious implications. One of the reasons West Virginia lawyers cited for taking on the case was that they read the negative reports from elsewhere.

From the beginning, I’ve asked the co-founders to provide their own version of the story. At first they were interested, but after our relationship deteriorated, they changed their minds. Again and again, they either refused to sit for an interview, or simply ignored my emails. Other reporters have also spoken about how, when they questioned Mined Minds in any way, they simply ran into a wall with the co-founders. They stopped talking and skipped out on scheduled interviews.

When people bury their heads in the sand, it looks suspicious. It looks like they have something to hide.

I didn’t have much trouble getting in touch with some other people involved in this story.

“West Virginia, as you probably know, is an underserved community,” that’s Adam Taylor. He’s based out of Beckley, West Virginia and he’s representing Ty Cook, Tori Frame, and what’s probably soon to be others in the class action lawsuit filed against Mined Minds.

“I don’t want to get into the politics of it, but it’s been underserved for a very long time to the benefit of the rest of the country. You get a lot of programs around here that report to have altruistic purposes. They come in and they say they want to do this, they want to do that, and some of them do. Some of them do mean well. And some of them don’t.”

“It especially stings with a case like Mined Minds where, on a personal level and on paper, it looks very good. You read about them and you think, this is probably moving things in the right direction and in the direction we need to go. But then you start to hear reports like by KDKA in Pittsburgh or what we’re getting into down here where it appears to be not so altruistic. So I can’t speak to a pattern of these programs nationwide, but it is something that’s not terribly uncommon down here, unfortunately.”

You have been listening to Code Burst. This program is produced as a collaboration between CKUT 90.3 FM and eLearning Inside News. Evan Dent and Tamara Filyavich helped me put this episode together. Alex Johnson, Julia Isler, and Katrina Gibbs read portions of the script. All of the music played on this episode comes from Daniel Monkman who is currently playing under the name Bloom. His LP containing these tracks is forthcoming. Tune in next week, and you’ll hear all about the lawsuit filed against Mined Minds. My name is Henry Kronk, thanks for reading.

The post Code Burst Episode 3: Taken for Federal Granted appeared first on eLearningInside News.

In mining, there’s something known as rock burst. It happens in deep mines and tunnels around the world. Deep drilling causes the rock to shift and buckle. Shards can unexpectedly burst from the tunnel walls, injuring or killing miners.

Code Burst is a story about a violent, unexpected shift in the structure of the global economy. It focuses on a coding bootcamp called Mined Minds and involves the growing skills gap, the tech industry, the increasing obsolescence of higher education, and one married couple who either tried to make a difference, or tried to make a buck. This is a story about trust.

Last week, I spent most of the episode introducing the coding bootcamp Mined Minds and going over their media coverage. It has been contradictory to say the least. This week, I’m going start from the beginning, lay down their backstory, and discuss what people close to the non-profit, free coding bootcamp have to say about it.

All of the following information that I’m going to lay out has either been confirmed by two or more news sources, or has not been directly refuted.

Backstory

Some years ago, Amanda Laucher, a native of Nemacolin, a coal mining town in Greene County Pennsylvania, was traveling in Lithuania. On her travels, she met Jonathan Graham, an Englishman. Both had studied computer science in one form or another. Graham had recently developed a platform that allowed for live-coding music. They fell in love, married, moved to London, and later relocated to Chicago, where the two took up lucrative tech consultancy jobs that, combined, grossed about $500,000 per year.

For July 4^th, 2015, the couple traveled back to Laucher’s hometown in Greene County, PA. They were surprised to learn that Amanda’s brother, Marvin Laucher, was worried about his job security. He worked at the nearby Consol Energy Enlow Fork coal mine, and it seemed like the company was going belly up. There had already been multiple rounds of layoffs, each of which he had survived. But many of his friends had lost their jobs, and he also supported a wife and three kids. He could tell which way the wind was blowing.

Amanda and Jonathan encouraged Marvin to learn to code. They were making a tidy sum, they told him, and there’s no shortage of jobs. The more they thought about it, in fact, the more they realized that the whole region could benefit from an education in computer coding.

Beginning in August, the couple began organizing their first program. They spread the word via paper leaflets and Facebook. They operated out of the town’s fire hall where the Wi-Fi was so slow, they resorted to using mobile hot spots. Among their students was Marvin, Joseph McKenzie, who I’ll speak with later in the show, and eight others.

Laucher and Graham drove the eight hours from Chicago every weekend and conducted virtual sessions on Wednesday evenings. They began by teaching their students Ruby, a language that could be applied to many different tasks. The weeks passed. The course concluded. In January of 2016, while Laucher and Graham were holding an informational session for their second run of their bootcamp, the first journalist stepped in the door.

Daniel Moore, accompanied by photographer Michael Henninger was developing a longform feature for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The product of their labors, “The boom and bust of Pennsylvania Coal Towns” is an excellent read and marks the first coverage of the Mined Minds coding bootcamp.

As Moore writes, “Where coal miners in the past would congregate,” referring to the town hall in which the coding instructors were conducting their event, “Jonathan Graham and Amanda Laucher were hoping to convince residents that computer programming — not digging more coal — can help save this town that has crumbled since the Buckeye Mine closed in the 1980s.”

Moore describes Laucher, Graham, and Mined Minds as idealistic yet slightly naïve heroes, struggling in the face of significant adversity, investing huge amounts of time into a cause that might not pay off.

The piece bears quoting at length, because it would come to inform much, if not all, of the following coverage of Mined Minds.

“She and Mr. Graham had a series of rhetorical riffs: Why is Silicon Valley the only place coders can make a living? Why do local businesses have to call developers in other time zones when they need affordable software development? Why are Greene County workers relegated to the whims of the extraction industry? And: Why can’t we teach classes here for free that cost thousands of dollars for people in cities?

At the January information gathering at the fire hall, some of the students stood up to speak about what the classes — and the prospect of more business in town — means to them.

Marvin Laucher told the gathering, “They told me there’s enough coal for 40 years, that your kids can come work. Now I’m starting to think, what am I going to do? Coal isn’t going to be around forever.”

The next speaker was Shane Baker, who put in seven years as a contractor at Enlow Fork and carpooled to work with Marvin Laucher. Days after he decided to join the spring class, GMS Mine Repair & Maintenance laid him off. “I never thought I’d do something like this,” “I thought that was my career. … But I don’t want to worry about the industry shutting down one day.”

The Ball Starts Rolling

By the spring of 2016, they began to get national coverage. CNN published a report followed by PBS and WNYC’s The Takeaway.

To be perfectly clear, I believe every word, along with the integrity of every person, quoted in Moore’s article at the time that it was published. I don’t think Laucher and Graham intended at this point to carry on practices that would one day lead to what some reports name as 60 of their former students joining together to file a class action lawsuit against them. And I’m not sure they have ever done what many of their ex-learners contend. I believe that Laucher and Graham were coming from a really good place, that they wanted to help the Laucher’s hometown, and that they made pretty significant commitments of time and money to do so.

Between their first bootcamp run and the lawsuit, something got misplaced. Something lead journalists to brand Mined Minds as ‘new collar grifters,’ or people that overpromise and underdeliver, folks that went after federal grants, educators who defrauded their students, and ultimately, hypocrites.

If I were doing something good, and people said those things about me, I’d get angry. That was also Joseph McKenzie’s reaction.

Joseph enrolled in the first Mined Minds course in Nemacolin. He had a very different experience from the former students who told KDKA Pittsburgh, a CBS affiliate that Laucher and Graham had “overpromised and underdelivered” last November.

Joseph McKenzie: Hello

Henry Kronk: Hey Joseph, can you hear me?

JM: Yes

HK: Sweet, could you begin by introducing yourself?

JM: Yeah, I’m Joseph McKenzie, I grew up in Greene County, PA. I’ve always liked computers.

HK: Could you tell me about the first time you heard about Mined Minds?

JM: It was over three years ago. I was browsing on Facebook and I saw that there was an open house that they were doing where they were going to tell people about an idea they had to bring the tech industry to the rural southwest area of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. They said they were going to teach people how to program and I wanted to check it out. I didn’t know nothing about how to program and I had no idea what I was getting myself into but I wasn’t doing much at the time and I thought why not go and see what they had to offer.

HK: And as the course went on, what was your experience with learning to code?

JM: Wonderful. They started out teaching us Ruby, which is a really fantastic language to learn to code with. Then [we] learned HTML, CSS—which is the backbone for websites—JavaScript, and moved on from there to what I really love which is online cloud functions and server-less architecture dealing with Lamda and RDX databases, stuff like that.

HK: How long did the initial program run?

JM: Probably about 6 months.

HK: And what happened when it finished?

JM: They offered me a fulltime job and I took it.

HK: What kind of work were you doing early on?

JM: We were building websites for clients around here and in West Virginia, we built a web program for a chain of grocery stores to help out with some security stuff, and some other stuff like that.

HK: Were you working full time for them at this point? Did they have clients to keep you busy?

JM: We really didn’t have too many clients at the start but I was working full time. We had enough work to keep us busy.

HK: And what about your classmates? Were they hired on and working as well?

JM: Yeah, it was me and one other lady that got hired on and were working at first. A month later, a couple more got hired. Everyone who completed the course at that point got hired.

HK: And since, you’ve gone freelance, is that right?

JM: Yeah.

HK: And how is that work treating you?

JM: Wonderful. I mean sometimes it’s slow and stuff, but I love it. I get to work on my own schedule, my own hours, whenever I want to. The pay all depends on what clients you’re currently working for and stuff like that. I feel bad sometimes for people and give them discounts but maybe I shouldn’t but whatever, they have to work with me and I’m still learning. They’re helping me, I’m helping them, everyone’s happy.

HK: From a lot of people I’ve spoken to, I’ve heard nothing but good things about Mined Minds and about Amanda and Jonathan. But there’s also a lot of negative press out about them as well. Are you aware of the various investigative reports and the lawsuit filed against them?

JM: I am aware of it, yes. I like to keep up with everything.

HK: Does it seem strange and totally out of the blue for you like it does for me?

JM: Well, I don’t understand it. I’ve worked with a lot of these people that make these claims. I can’t say how they feel, but they’re really smart people and, if they just put the footwork into it … I know with me, it took a lot of resumes in and a lot people saying no, and constantly learning, and doing more work, and not make any money. I mean, it’s not easy. You can’t just put one resume in and get hired right away.

HK: What about the people who said they were offered a work apprenticeship, got hired after completing the course, and then were fired a few days later?

JM: I’m not really sure about that. It seems crazy to me.

HK: Nothing like that happened with you guys?

JM: No, hell no. I’ve loved Mined Minds since day one and it’s been three and a half years. I’ve been with them in and out, in and out. They’ve always been really good to me and everyone I’ve known. I just don’t understand some of what’s going on right now. It gets me angry when I hear people talking bad about them. They’ve done so much for me personally and in a business sense along with everyone I know. They paid so much money out of their own pocket when the first class started. They were coming in from Chicago every weekend and no one was paying their gas. They bought me a brand new computer because I didn’t have a good one, every time it would come unplugged, it would shut off. They are some of the nicest people I have met in my long life and I’ve only known them for three years.

Branching Out

This can get confusing, but Mined Minds began their operations in Waynesburgh, Pennsylvania, which is in Greene County, near where Amanda grew up. After their success in Waynesburgh, they began to partner with the Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC), which is based also in Pennsylvania. While they were still partnering with CCAC, they expanded into West Virginia and went on from there. The students who first voiced their discontent regarding Mined Minds to investigative reporter Andy Sheehan, they were from a run at CCAC. The students who filed a class-action lawsuit, they’re from West Virginia.

The two students, Max Pokropowicz and Brian Lewis who spoke to KDKA’s investigative reporter Andy Sheehan leveled the following claims:

They said they were promised a four to six month apprenticeship.

So was Joseph, but he wasn’t fired.

Pokropowicz said “Without that six months experience, it’s pretty hard to find a solid employer who’s willing to take a chance on you, and say okay we’ll hire you.”

Joseph had that benefit.

But Joseph also reiterated how hard he worked to get where he did. None of this was easy. By Andy Sheehan’s own reporting, only 7 of the 20 students at the Community College of Allegheny County who took the program graduated. Of those 7, six were soon let go.

As KDKA reported, the Community College of Allegheny County has since dissolved their relationship with Mined Minds. They began their partnership back in August of 2016.

CCAC released a statement in July 2016 saying the following:

“This is the first time CCAC has partnered with Mined Minds, which is based on the premise that anyone can have a successful career in the technology industry. The organization has successfully taken residents of Southwestern Pennsylvania through its training program into full-time positions as software development consultants.

“Partnering with CCAC brings great advantages to the students,” explained Amanda Laucher, who co-founded Mined Minds with Dr. Jonathan Graham. “In addition to gaining the skills required to start a new career within the technology industry, participants will be able to access student support from the college and receive a co-branded certificate of completion as well as continuing education credits upon successful completion.”

Most computer-coding boot camps are based in major cities and have significant tuition costs, according to Brian Hannon, director of the Center for Professional Development at CCAC. What sets this course apart, Hannon said, is that participants can fully fund the tuition through opportunities that are available through PA Career Link, or they can self-fund at a very reasonable cost.

Laucher and Graham use their wealth of industry experience to assist successful students with job placement. They also provide the opportunity for potential employment with Mined Minds Consulting, which offers software development consultancy services for local, national and international firms.”

For their fall 2017 report, CCAC wrote the following: Our Coding Boot Camp, in partnership with Mined Minds, has been selected as a top 25 university affiliated coding boot camp. Join our Pittsburgh coding cohort this fall.

There were two important points there. First, the coding bootcamp offered the potentialll for employment with the Mined Minds consultancy firm. I’m not saying that hiring someone on for a couple days and then firing them is a great thing to do, but it kind of seems like Pokropowicz and Lewis didn’t read the fine print.

The second point: when Mined Minds partnered with CCAC, the bootcamp wasn’t free. They could get funding from something called PA Career Link or self-fund at a very reasonable cost.

I got in touch with Elizabeth Johnston who is the executive director of PR and marketing at CCAC. I wanted to get three pieces of information from her: what was the nature of the partnership with Mined Minds? Was it free, or did students need to pay for it, and why did the partnership end?

Johnston told me the following “the class was tuition-based; although those enrolled happened to qualify for training under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act). As the college is always interested in training/re-training un/underemployed individuals in new and innovative ways and coding jobs are growing, CCAC hired a noncredit instructor with expertise in coding and teaching. After the initial semester, which only enrolled five to six students, the college made the decision to move in a different direction.”

Unfortunately, I’m not sure how much I can trust Johnston because some of this information is incorrect. Mined Minds did run for more than one semester. I know this because I checked the course offerings for 2016 and 2017. Also, the press release I just read had nothing to say about the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. But it did mention funding via the PA Careerlink. When I pressed her on this, she responded saying

“I misunderstood; we actually ran the program twice; once in the fall of 2016 and again in the spring of 2017. Five CCAC students were enrolled in the fall of 16, one in the spring of 17; apparently, these students were mixed in with Mined Mines’ other clients.

And too, funding was available via Career Link. We placed the program on the ETPL (education and training providers’ list) through the CWDS (Commonwealth Workforce Development System) Career Link.”

I don’t know how true this info is, but a few things seem to be pretty plausible. First, it seems like the partnership with CCAC ended simply because there wasn’t enough interest. Second, it seems that most, if not all students were allowed to attend the bootcamp for free, but that doesn’t mean that Mined Minds wasn’t making any money. I have a hard time believing that CCAC is getting all of the CareerLink and/or workforce innovation and opportunity act funds when they’re not pulling any water in the effort.

So then – what happened with Brian Lewis and Max Pokropowicz. I’m going to take an educated guess.

The folks at Mined Minds had a good chunk of change saved up when they started this venture, but by the summer of 2017, after operating for over a year, the well had begun to run dry. These guys weren’t just renting space, they were buying their learners new laptops. They came to rely more and more on their consultancy work. They hadn’t necessarily lost any of their passion, but they still needed to be able to keep the lights on.

Along with that, I don’t think that they had as much success with their consultancy work in the local or even national market as they had initially hoped. Joseph McKenzie attests to this as well.

After a few runs of the bootcamp at CCAC, they couldn’t afford to employ someone who wouldn’t be able to deliver solid results. Out of necessity, they raised their standards for their apprenticeship program, which, after all, totally depended on the business they could bring in.

It’s entirely possible that Max Pokropowicz and Brian Lewis simply couldn’t meet flush with Mined Minds bottom line. In other words, it may not have been any fault of theirs that they were let go. Maybe Mined Minds just wasn’t bringing in the business to employ them.

You have been listening to Code Burst. This episode was produced as a collaboration between ckut 90.3 fm and elearning Inside news. Check out elearninginside.com for a story accompanying this episode which includes transcripts of the interviews and links to the resources I used to compile this information. I would like to say thanks to Evan Dent and Tamara Filyavich for helping me put this episode together. All of the music you heard throughout is from Daniel Monkman who is currently playing under the name Bloom. His LP containing these tracks is forthcoming. And thanks Joseph McKenzie for offering to help me out with the web development course I’m taking.  My name is Henry Kronk, thanks for listening.

The post Code Burst Episode 2: From the Beginning appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Code Burst, a podcast produced in collaboration with CKUT 90.3 FM and eLearning Inside News, will premier on Monday, March 5^th. Over several episodes, it will investigate the free coding bootcamp Mined Minds, which seeks to retrain out-of-work coal miners for a job in the tech industry. Tune in to/stream CKUT 90.3 FM on Mondays at 11:30 or subscribe on Apple Podcasts.

I first came across the coding bootcamp called Mined Minds in a story a colleague shared with me. The title reads “In Appalachia, Coding Bootcamps that Aim to Retrain Coal Miners Increasingly Show Themselves to Be ‘New Collar’ Grifters.” It was written by Elizabeth Catte and put out by Belt Magazine in mid January.

“A recent class action lawsuit filed in West Virginia against a retraining program that promised unemployed coal miners a foothold in the tech industry offers a cautionary tale to those banking on the rise of a Silicon Holler,” Catte writes. “At least 60 plaintiffs in the suit allege that coding bootcamp operators Mined Minds, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit organization, provided inadequate training and failed to place trainees in paid apprenticeship programs, which many believed would be a cornerstone of the experience.”

It seemed like a confluence of clichés to me. An overpromising, under-delivering tech training start up meets the Appalachian carpetbagger rolling through town in the wake of bankrupt mining companies, looking to prey on the disenfranchised.

But it also sparked a distant memory. After a quick search, I realized that I’d heard about these guys before. In their early days,  PBS, a local Pittsburgh station KDKA, and CNN Money covered Mined Minds with a strikingly different angle. These guys have an incredible story. They operate as a non-profit. They offer their courses for free. These guys sound good.

Code Burst

In the practice of coal mining, there’s something known as rock burst. It happens in deep mines and tunnels around the world. Deep drilling causes the rock to shift and buckle. Shards can unexpectedly burst from the tunnel walls, injuring or killing miners.

Code Burst is a story about a violent, unexpected shift in the structure of the global economy. It involves the growing skills gap, the growing tech industry, the growing obsolescence of higher education, and one married couple who either tried to make a difference, or tried to make a buck. This is a story about trust.

I started reading other articles and interviews. It wasn’t just Catte’s story that didn’t completely add up. There were glaring inconsistencies across the board.

CBS reported that the two founders funded the coding bootcamp with their own money, while two local sources said that the cost of enrollment was supplemented or provided entirely by the Pennsylvania Department of Labor. PBS quotes the co-founders saying they don’t use any federal or state grants in 2016, but the Appalachian Regional Commission—a federal body—provided a grant of $1.5 million that was to be split with another software development training organization CentralApp less than a year later. The grant stipulated that the two educators “work together to provide courses and certifications needed to qualify for high-demand technology jobs, enabling participants to work locally for companies that can be located anywhere in the world.”

On November 17^th of last year, the CBS Pittsburgh affiliate KDKA released an investigative report. It took a different tone from the previous stories:

“[Max] Pokropowicz and Brian Lewis went through a Mined Minds coding camp at the Tech Shop in Bakery Square, and say they were promised a four to six month apprenticeship to give them the practical experience necessary to land a job.

But after 13 days, Mined Minds laid Pokropowicz off, and terminated Lewis’s apprenticeship after just three days.

“All they said was it was circumstances beyond our control, and there’s nothing we could do to avoid it. Anytime I would ask for more information, they wouldn’t give any,” Pokropowicz said.

They weren’t the only ones left high and dry.

According to other former students KDKA’s Andy Sheehan has spoken with, “of the 20 who started the boot camp, only seven graduated. Of those seven, six were quickly let go. The boot camp, funded with a $71,000 grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry appears to be a bust.”

On November 18^th, a day after the KDKA report, the nationally broadcast CBS Evening News published their own investigation, but this time, it resorted to the usual, ‘uplifting news style’ positive coverage.

Did these two investigative reporters who work for the same company even know they were both in the same town, maybe on the same day? They should have gotten lunch.

Enter the Lawsuit

Later in December, WVVA, an NBC affiliate based in West Virginia reported the class action lawsuit that Elizabeth Catte wrote about for Belt. Their report wasn’t positive.

Speaking to WVVA reporter Annie Moore, one of the two defendants in the suit who have gone public, Ty Cook, said the following:

“We became suspicious on day one when we learned there was no pay. We were told to quit our jobs but come everyday to still study. Later on, we did research in the tech world and realized we don’t have the skills people are asking for with these tech jobs.”

As Moore reports, “Cook quit the program in November and Victoria Frame followed suit. As Cook said, “We got more suspicious when we saw articles where there were issues in Pennsylvania and the company’s problems there. That’s when I became very concerned about my future with Minded Minds.”

Amanda Laucher, one of the co-founders, told Moore a different version of the story.

“Tori and Ty were both within days of completing the initial training and were to be offered a paid apprenticeship position upon completion. The dating couple both dropped out of class in support of Tori’s mother, who was asked to leave the class because of unprofessional behavior, sexual harassment and sexual assault complaints from four different team members while traveling to a tech conference in Europe. We have written complains on file as well as the record of a detailed letter asking Stephanie not to return to class.”

But when pressed on whether any of the team members filed police reports, Laucher said the matter was handled internally.

New responded to those allegations saying one of the team members Laucher is referring to denies he was sexually harassed or assaulted. In fact, he said he too has joined the class action suit seeking damages from Mined Minds.”

The story was getting way too weird. It didn’t make any sense.

What the Mined Minds Story Means for Other Communities

The cost of attending college around the world is going up. Last May, a Yale website published a report by demographer Joseph Chamie detailing how student debt, even in countries where university is free of cost, can make a university education prohibitively expensive.

“In tuition-free Sweden, for example, students borrow money as frequently as American students do – about 70 percent have student loans – and Swedish students graduate with about $20,000 in debt.”

In the U.S., the cost of private university tuition has doubled in the past thirty years. At public universities, it’s tripled.

And there’s this other thing going on. It’s called the skills gap.

On top of this, universities aren’t doing a great job of preparing students for the workforce. A 2014 study found that half of all graduates say their university degrees did not prepare them for the working world. A more recent survey is even less optimistic.

Facing record tuition at universities that may not prepare them for the job market that is, as some say, ravenous for talent, who wouldn’t want to seek out alternatives to higher education?

Coding Bootcamps

That’s where coding bootcamps come in. The gist of coding bootcamps is that students take an intensive bootcamp-like course on computer programming. When they graduate, they’ll be able to work as web developers, software developers, or in some other role in the tech industry. Institutions like The Flatiron School or Hack Reactor charge around the ticket price of a 2018 Toyota Corolla and bring learners from zero to employable full stack software engineer in a matter of weeks.

Most coding bootcamps are for-profit businesses and, like many past and future for-profit educators, a good many have defrauded their students.

In fact, Flatiron School is considered by some to have the best integrity and reputation among bootcamps. They pioneered graduate success self-reporting (in their words at least) and they were a partner on the Obama Administration’s TechHire Initiative. The effort provided $100 million in grants to help Americans pursue a job in tech.

But last Fall, they paid a $375,000 settlement to the state of New York for operating without a license and misrepresenting their students’ success rate. In other words, they were really proud about how honest they were, and then they had to pay a hefty fee for lying.

I could talk at great length about for-profit educators who can’t help but defraud their customers. Trump University be a good example. The scrutiny the Obama Administration turned on for-profit educators resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements, and the outright closure of two major players: Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute. Other notable perps were the University of Phoenix and DeVry University.

One factor that continues to drive students to non-profit universities despite the high costs and the poor payoff is trust. Students (and parents who are willing and able to pay for tuition) trust public universities to provide them with a good education. Non-profit educators simply don’t defraud their students to anywhere near the same degree as for-profits.

So when a bootcamp comes along that is offered for free, potentially includes an agreement for employment upon graduation, and is located in an economically distressed region, you really would hope you can trust them.

You’d really hope that they mean what they say, and nothing shady is going on. Because if it works for them, maybe it could work elsewhere. Maybe students would be better equipped to pursue their education without worrying whether or not they’ve already been defrauded.

Right now, I hope I can trust Mined Minds. I would hope that any willing learners who want to improve their socioeconomic situation would be able to meet with the companies that are hungry for jobs so they could scratch each others’ backs.

But the story of Mined Minds fits a pattern. They potentially share a striking amount of details with other confirmed for-profit frauds, like operating without a license, benefitting from federal funds, claiming they have hearts of gold, clearly miscommunicating with at least some of their students, and generating a good deal of negative press. Multiple parties from different locations have levied the same claims against them. A reasonable person might conclude they’re too good to be true.

I think that there’s a chance that these guys aren’t who they say. I also think there’s a chance that they got gamed by the system. I think that, through a long equation comprised of disenchanted ex-learners meeting with underpaid and overworked journalists in an economically depressed region of the country, it’s possible that a seriously negative and untrue narrative of these guys got out. And a lot of people liked it better than the good narrative.

The post Code Burst, Episode 1: The Conflicting Coverage of Mined Minds, a Free Coding Bootcamp that Retrains ex-Coal Miners appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Code Burst, a podcast produced in collaboration with CKUT 90.3 FM and eLearning Inside News, will premier on Monday, March 5^th. Over several episodes, it will investigate the free coding bootcamp Mined Minds, which seeks to retrain out-of-work coal miners for a job in the tech industry.

In June of last year, Donald Trump convened a technology summit at the White House. Leaders from some of the biggest companies of the world gathered to advise on policy, identify areas for growth, and, unwittingly, provide some serious meme fodder. CEOs Tim Cook (Apple) Satya Nadella (Microsoft) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) each reiterated what industry leaders have been saying for years: there’s a skills gap, we need to teach younger generations to code, and we’ll even need to retrain a significant slice of the current American workforce for jobs in tech to allow American companies to continue to grow.

While the tech industry skills gap has long been identified, the American education system hasn’t responded effectively. In fact, it’s not just the tech industry. A recent survey conducted by Strada and Gallup found that, “While 96% of chief academic officers of colleges and universities believe that their institutions are very or somewhat effective at preparing students for the workforce, only 11% of business leaders strongly agree.”

In other words, there’s not just a skills gap, there’s an education gap as well.

For workers around the world, the promise of the tech industry is kind of like the new American dream. If you train diligently—even for a period as short as a few months—you can gain the skills that will lead to a six-figure salary and a job that won’t be replaced by automation.

But where can people go to get this training? Computer science degrees still take four years and are part of an ailing education system. As an alternative, many have begun to turn to coding bootcamps.

The gist of a coding bootcamp is that students take an intensive bootcamp-like course on computer programming. When they graduate, they’ll be able to work as web developers, software developers, or in some other role in the tech industry. Institutions like The Flatiron School or Hack Reactor charge around the ticket price of a 2018 Toyota Corolla and bring learners from zero to employable full stack software engineer in a matter of weeks.

Most coding bootcamps are for-profit businesses and, like many past and future for-profit educators, a good many have defrauded their students. Most will claim that a certain strikingly high percentage of their graduates obtain high-paying jobs within months of completing the course. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on this subject at length in 2016 how these figures are often manipulated or downright cherry-picked.

Enter Free Coding Bootcamps

More recently, certain groups have begun to offer their coding bootcamp without a for-profit model. They keep the lights on with donations, federal and state grants, by performing contract consultancy work, by charging referral fees to their employers, and through many other strategies.

Code Burst will focus on one of these coding bootcamps.

Mined Minds has made a considerable splash in seeking to retrain ex-coal miners and other underemployed workers in the Appalachian region of the U.S. They offer their coding bootcamp for free and include the potential to hire their graduates on for a paid internship in which they conduct consulting work. Their model seems like it could have an incredible effect on any community.

But that’s not the whole story. Many ex-learners who took the Mined Minds program have expressed discontent with the organization, saying that they made big promises and then failed to deliver. Others have even filed a class-action lawsuit against them on charges of fraud, breach of contract, and breach of fiduciary duty.

Besides their consultancy contracts, Mined Minds has received significant financial support from federal and state agencies.

The case of Mined Minds is, in one sense, very specific. But it can also act as an example for any community in the world. Because if the federal government, the state governments, and the education system of one of the most developed countries in the world can’t figure out how to retrain a workforce, then that job will go to businesses and communities. And if they can’t do it, who will?

Tune in to CKUT 90.3 FM on Mondays at 11:30, stream it live from their site, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts.

CKUT 90.3 FM

CKUT is a non-profit, campus-community radio station based at McGill University. CKUT provides alternative music, news and spoken word programming to the city of Montreal and surrounding areas, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

As a campus/community radio station, CKUT’s mandate is to provide an essential service to those in the Montreal community whose needs are not met by mainstream commercial radio. CKUT functions not only as an alternative to the status quo, but also as a viable community resource.

The post Coming Soon: Code Burst, an Investigative Report on a Free Coding Bootcamp that Seeks to Retrain Ex-Coal Miners appeared first on eLearningInside News.

In my Codeacademy course on How to Build Websites From Scratch, our positioning unit has concluded and we’re now on to browser compatibility. Basically, we’re going from using fixed dimensions of objects in websites to proportional and relative measures. This allows them to appear the same on different devices and browsers. In all honesty, it’s one of those subjects that’s boring but important.

I am nearly caught up at this point, which to me is miraculous because we had another project to turn in for evaluation at the end of the last unit. I found the material to be challenging, and I encountered a real sinking feeling when I learned that I would have to build a static website using the unit’s material and submit it for assessment.

But I had also been equipped with tools to overcome this challenge. One set of tools, specifically, saved me from a night filled with hopeless frustration and instead allowed me to complete the project in just a couple hours without much confusion.

The Miracle of DevTools

That toolbox is brought to the world by Google Chrome and known as Developer Tools (or DevTools for short).

In Chrome, if you’re curious about any funky aspect of any website, you can right click on it and select ‘inspect.’ That will bring up a bar on the right side of the window displaying the various segments of code that your browser has translated into a sleek visual experience.

For our assignment, we had been shown a version of what our site should look like, and we had also received a sheet with all the specs we would need to know. One could certainly recreate the existing website simply by looking at the end product and the spec sheet. But that’s not what I did. Instead, I used DevTools to go in and check on all the fancy footwork the Codeacademy people used to create the site in the first place.

DevTools allowed me to complete the project quickly and easily get unstuck whenever that occurred. Was I, at times, simply copying and pasting the code from the model to my own text editor? Absolutely. Did it matter? No.

Sure, I wouldn’t exactly be able to do this in a real world situation, but at the same time, I could certainly borrow fragments from websites that I particularly like and apply them to my own projects. This realization got me excited. Like, really excited. And the reason wasn’t just that web development would be easier for me in the future.

Coding and Copyright

The excitement stemmed from the fact that, in the creative world, coding stands in its own field regarding how people reconcile it with intellectual property. If I were to copy and paste a company’s logo, I should expect a cease and desist letter to land in my mailbox. If I were to copy sections of a George Sanders short story word for word, stick it in my own selection, publish it, and profit from it, I wouldn’t just get a cease and desist letter. I’d need to hire a lawyer.

It’s true, copyright law still certainly applies to anything created by computer programming, be it a software application, a website, or anything else. You don’t need to apply for it. If you have created something, it’s your intellectual property (unless you created it as part of your employment contract). I would not be able to copy the code of an entire website and push it as my own. But I can see how a programmer designed certain aspects or created various features.

In one sense, this is no different from, say, creating a piece of visual art or choreographing a dance. Once your creation is displayed, people will be able, to a certain extent, see what you have done and how. But the presence of DevTools, along with the popularity of open-source sites and apps shared in places like Github, allows for an incredibly greater degree of collaboration.

The post I Am Learning to Code: Week 6, DevTools and Copyrights appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Many sources spend a lot of time trying to determine which programming languages are best to learn. They focus on employability, how widespread a given language is, it’s trajectory over time, and any number of other factors. A recent report by Codementor, however, takes a different tack. The Silicon Valley-based career marketplace has compiled “The Worst Coding Languages to Learn in 2018.”

An enterprising coder, especially someone working freelance, is both determined and sought out based on the languages in which they are proficient. In today’s workforce, learning a new programming language can level you up and make you stand out in the pack.

But it can also be a big waste of time. As Codementor reiterates, “we are in no way disparaging the usefulness of these languages or questioning their worth. This post merely assesses the performance of these languages based on three criteria: community engagement, the job market, and growth (level of developer interest in working with the language).”

The five worst languages to learn go as follows: Dart, Objective-C, CoffeeScript, Erlang, and Lua.

That’s a fairly interesting mix. Some languages, like Objective-C, have had their day in the sun. Others, like Dart, are relatively new. And CoffeeScript? What does that even do?

Stop Learning Dart

This one is kind of a surprise. It was developed as a general purpose language by Google in 2011. The company still uses it to develop apps on various different devices as well as Internet of Things gadgets. But despite its use by one of the biggest tech developers in the world, it appears to be on the way out.

As Codementor notes, “Dart came in dead last in terms of the number of companies using it in their stacks. While Google, Wrike, Workiva, and Blossom use Dart, there doesn’t seem to be a large number of jobs for Dart developers.”

But there’s also a silver lining. “The good news is that Dart developers have less competition compared to developers who work with other languages. Of the languages we surveyed, Dart developers are relatively rare. This means when they’re needed, they might be able to command a higher rate. The flip side, is, however, they’re also competing for very few jobs.”

Objective-C presents a different story altogether

It was developed in 1984 and widely used until just a few years ago. Apple developed both the OS X and iOS operating systems with it. When Swift was created in 2014, many Objective-C developers made the transition and never looked back.

Like with Dart, just because of the low score, it doesn’t mean that the things are all bad for Objective-C developers. “Despite its age, and the rise of Swift, Objective-C is faring quite well when it comes to the job market. Objective-C ranked 4th for the number of businesses using it, 5th for developer supply, and 6th place overall for its job market ranking.”

“For current Objective-C developers, there should be plenty of jobs available with companies that need to maintain their legacy code. However, there are also many Objective-C developers for companies to choose from, which makes it essentially a buyer’s market.”

The rest of the programming languages in the bottom 5 have, by and large, led more obscure lives. As you might guess from its name, Coffeescript transcompiles into JavaScript. Any JavaScript library can integrate seamlessly with the language, and there’s no live interpretation work to be done. While pockets of developers around the internet still use and discuss the language, it has largely faded from popularity.

Lua, an embeddable scripting language, is still often used in gaming and web servers. It’s one of the older programming languages. Developed in 1993, it saw popularity at one time, but those days are gone.

Erlang, finally, is primarily used in banking, e-commerce, instant message, and telecommunications. Looking just at the number of Github repositories (a factor in the survey), it ranked 17^th. Many developers simply aren’t working with it much anymore.

Codementor concludes by saying that you should take their report with a grain of salt for two reasons:

“First, these rankings were derived from how well a language performed on the three particular metrics we listed above. The 20 languages we chose might perform well and even be listed as “languages to learn” based on other metrics. Therefore, while we don’t recommend learning them as beginners or as a primary language, they are useful in their respective domains.”

“Second, we also acknowledge that there may be inherent biases in the sources that we used. For example, Stack Overflow surveys are biased towards English-speaking developers and stackshare.io is biased towards companies with employees or founders who fill out information on the website.”

“Before we conclude, we want to reiterate that the five languages we chose may be less competitive on our metrics but are still useful in their respective domains. If you’re inspired by this list to learn them for fun or as a side project — and not as a primary language that will help you make a living or a career — by all means, go for it!”

The post These Are the Worst Programming Languages to Learn in 2018 appeared first on eLearningInside News.

After making up some ground last week in my Codeacademy course on website design, I’ve again fallen slightly behind. At this point, I’m somewhere between three and six days back. I’m still struggling to keep my divs in line, and I certainly do not feel comfortable with the formatting methods of the box model and flexbox. But I also haven’t gotten stuck or cried any tears of frustration. At this point, it’s less stabbing in the dark and more stabbing in the dusk.

An instructor described it like this:

On the course schedule, each day is allotted its own lesson, article, quiz, and/or project. When I began, I would generally do one to three days at a time, and come back a few days later. With my current schedule, however, I’m only able to continue to study on given days (usually weekends or Friday afternoons). As a result, I’ve started doing entire weeks at a time in periods that can last 8+ hours.

Binge Learning In Action

This is a phenomenon known in the world of online education as binge learning. Binging educational content and coursework, like TV shows on Netflix, involves consuming module after module without diverting one’s attention for any given period of time.

A lot of research and conventional wisdom states that this is probably not a good idea. Many educators believe that effective study habits include only focusing on a given subject for, say, an hour or two at a time. After that, take a break, move to a different subject, go for a walk, cook a meal and then resume.

But last fall, a study came to a different conclusion. Professors at the Wharton School of Business Eric Bradlow and Wesley Hutchinson, along with doctoral candidate Tong Lu, produced evidence that students who binged parts of their courses actually did better than their peers.

For the study, the researchers looked at a marketing class offered by Coursera. They analyzed the study habits of its learners, how long they took to complete the course, and then compared their grades.

One big distinction with their findings was discerning between types of binge learning and binging in general. The authors distinguish between temporal binging—consuming content repeatedly over an extended period of time—and content binge learning. The latter refers to the habit of focusing entirely on one thing until it is done before moving on to the next task at hand.

Benefiting from a Solid Binge

While the authors found that learners who binged more performed better, content binging was found to have positive secondary effects. The more a learner content binged, the more likely they were to complete and excel in other classes.

True, the study imagines more of a full-time student enrolled in several courses as its subject. But it does seem that I’m currently performing both types of binge learning.

I can’t say that this is my typical go-to strategy. I personally like to break things up. But that also takes more time, and when push comes to shove, I’m willing to string up a bulging feedbag of education and get to work.

A few aspects of my course really facilitates this. For one, all of the course material has been released in advance. We can get as far forward or behind as we wish.

Second, each unit is comprised of various different aspects. There are several simple readings and quizzes. But from there, we are brought through the material again, but asked to implement it ourselves in text editor that sits on the page to the right of the instruction. Next, we are often asked to do more project-ish work with less instruction. Finally, in each unit we are given a project to care of with very little to no instruction at all. There are also some complementary videos every now and then.

In other words, even though spending many hours learning one subject in one course, I’m actually doing a lot of different things. And I consider that a really great aspect of this program.

The post I Am Learning to Code: Week 5, Binge Learning appeared first on eLearningInside News.

At the beginning of this project, I said that I would report weekly on the process of learning to code. I am currently enrolled in an online-only course offered by Codeacademy titled “How to Build Websites from Scratch.” Last week, I did not write a post. The reason? There was nothing to report. I had become unexpectedly busy with a few other projects and I only made it through a handful of lessons during the week.

The way my Codeacademy course is structure, you can take it more or less at your own pace. There is, however, a dedicated schedule, and students who finish more than two weeks after the final date won’t get feedback on their final project or receive a certificate of completion. This is one thing that really endeared me to the program. When I was in university, I was able to follow a course’s schedule for the most part. But I also wasn’t working full time. I’m currently logging over 40 hours per week, and Codeacademy estimates that an additional 10 hours are required to keep abreast in the course. I really appreciate the flexibility.

The Case for Synchronous Schedules

But I’m also a big believer in synchronous courses. One of the biggest struggles for online educators is promoting student engagement. I’m not aware of any study supporting this, but via my own experience and the anecdotes of my peers, synchronous courses—or those that follow a dedicated schedule—greatly enhance student engagement. Every learner moves through the information at more or less the same pace. Students generally struggle with similar tasks, and they can rely on one another to help each other out. Learners in a non-synchronous course do not have this benefit.

Dhawal Shah, founder of Class Central, made a similar argument last fall. As Shah writes, “[Asynchronous courses] means that instead of tens of thousands of people learning together as part of a shared experience, everybody is learning at their own pace in significantly smaller cohorts. The always on-demand MOOC trend has led to a drastic reduction in forum activity within MOOC cohorts. At one point Coursera boasted about an average forum response time of 22 minutes; that’s no longer the case.”

Fewer than 500 learners participate in my class’s forum, but it’s still an incredibly lively and productive space. I don’t think it would have the same spirit without a semi-set schedule.

Failure and Success with Github

I’ve made up some ground from last week, but for the most part, the class is in the middle of learning some more advanced CSS at the moment. I’m talking margins, padding, borders, flexbox syntax, positioning—all the things that go into how and where something appears on a web page. So far, I’m fine with Cascading Style Sheets. I’m fine with HTML, and I’ve really been enjoying seeing how websites come together. Learning these languages in an online context has been a great experience.

But I’ve also recently run into some moments of pure frustration. These moments came at the hands of deploying a site via Github Pages. Github for coders is like Flickr for photographers, or Etsy for Artists. It’s a platform where you can upload any kind of code you’ve been working on to show your pals, your potential employers, or just save it for you. With Github Pages, you can also set up a link between your own computer and your Github account, allowing you to deploy your code as its own website without doing any fancy footwork when it comes to hosting, setting up a domain, etc. When sending or ‘pushing’ code from your computer to Github, you need to follow some pretty simple but very specific steps, especially regarding the file path (where your code is saved) both on your computer and on Github.

On Sunday, I thought I would throw together a quick, easy site about Devin Nunes’ continuously pursed lips to make my friends laugh. After I finished, I could not for the life of me figure out how to correctly deploy it with Github Pages. I went through the same steps over and over again and it never worked. I began to really regret the online format and wished I had a human with expertise in the room who could show me how it’s done. We certainly have access to experienced coders via a Slack, but this portion of the class had already received a fair amount of attention. Moderators had already created a 30 minute how-to video. I read their messages over and over, and still it wasn’t working.

On Monday afternoon, I tried again, and it worked instantly. It might have had something to do with trying to figure it out after 8+ hours of coding. I’m not sure if I could have benefited from a human instructor or a few hours of sleep.

MRW my code doesn’t work, then it does, but idk why from r/reactiongifs

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The online course I’m currently enrolled in, Codecademy’s “Build Websites from Scratch,” promises the following: “No prior coding experience is needed to enroll.” Codecademy isn’t unique in this regard. Many online courses offer to train total coding noobs. This post is dedicated to that idea, whether I perceive it to be true, lingering concerns I have, and whether you can, in fact, enter into a coding program without any prior knowledge and successfully complete it.

To be clear, the kind of coding discussed here is web development. It accomplishes a different goal from software programming, it’s easier, and it doesn’t really get into more advanced math and logic.

I was pretty new to coding before the first lesson, but did have some knowledge. Like many people my age, I spent most of middle school and on into high school posting actively on my Myspace account. One of my favorite features that Facebook did not preserve was that Myspace allowed you to completely change your profile design. To do this, you’d find a sweet skin on some online forum, copy some code comprised, I believe, entirely of HTML and CSS, and paste it into a section of your profile settings. That was the first moment when I realized that combinations of basic text could translate into something completely different.

Before I began the Codecademy course, I also checked out some of the resources on w3schools.com, which compiles standards of coding established by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3. W3 broadly acts as an international body that writes standards of practice for the internet. Besides a good deal of reading material, W3 Schools offers free coding exercises in many of the most popular languages. They’re a really good place to start.

Other than that, I had nothing

I think that most people are wary of coding because of how mysterious it can be to certain members of the public. We fear the unknown. Many of us, myself included, struggle to remember our passwords to various online accounts. Computer programming is surely more difficult than navigating our online professions and personas.

So does Codecademy’s promise to teach even those with no prior experience hold up? My belief is, for the most part, yes.

After a short series of introductory methods, the lessons began with HTML—arguably the most basic coding language. Lesson 1, Unit 1 begins by asking “What is HTML?” The answer: “HTML is the language used to create the websites you visit everyday. It provides a logical way to structure content for websites.”

They go through what HTML stands for, what it does in great detail, and then shows you how to write it. From there (so far), all lessons build off of skills previously learned and reference past units. No lesson so far has thrown me. I’ve grown frustrated at times, but I’ve always managed to find the solution on my own.

Had I not been able to do so, there’s also a healthy Slack account dedicated to our class where people post constantly about the issues they’ve had, solutions, and everything else.

I generally enjoy Codecademy’s pedagogy. It doesn’t quite follow a flipped learning model, but it often comes very close. By the end of the first unit, learners are asked to simply recreate a website just by looking at it. This more hands off, let learners make their own mistakes approach suits me well. I also really enjoy the tone of Codecademy lessons. They manage to be inclusive, supportive, and above all else, not boring.

Lingering Concerns About Codecademy’s Approach

One of the main criticisms of Codecademy I have read is explained succinctly by Matthew Hughes of MakeUseOf: they offer too much cake, not enough vegetables. “The reason why Codecademy is successful is because it takes coding, and transforms it into addictive bite-sized pieces that are easy to accomplish, and offer instantaneous feedback,” Hughes writes. “It’s the candy of coding.”

Hughes’ piece was written in 2015, before the advent of their intensive synchronous courses. But I must admit, I worry that his conclusion is true. Maybe the reason why anyone can pick this info up is that it doesn’t take much energy to digest.

That said, one of his other claims, that if you blink while studying on Codecademy, “you’ll miss it,” does not hold up with their newer courses. If it were true, it would cast more worry for me on how a layperson could begin learning without previous experience. Each successive project and lesson has been built on skills learned before. True, I’ve only gotten into Unit 3, but it still feels like I practice information from previous units on current ones.

Another larger issue I worry about was voiced by Basel Farag of TechCrunch in 2016:  “The line between learning to code and getting paid to program as a profession is not an easy line to cross.” True, Farag is taking up programming, not web design, but I believe the logic holds.

With a background in freelance writing, I feel like I’m somewhat prepared to cross this line. But others enrolled in the course will need to also have those skills or live in a community hungry for web developers. If you’re coming from anywhere outside the tech industry, knowledge of a set of coding languages alone won’t necessarily translate into a career change. And Codecademy doesn’t promise to teach us that.

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