Experienced developers teaching local wanna-be developers in their house/local caffee

[triumphant8891]

Hello folks,

What do you think about the idea of experienced developers having micro-courses for other local students who want to learn programming?

Here's how it would work:

1) There are many people who want to learn programming but are missing one-to-one mentorship

2) 3-5 of such wanna-be developers would group together

3) Experienced developer would meet with them for a 1-3h lesson each week and teach them how to code in specific language.

By having a group of 3 people who pay $30 each, a teacher would get $90/h which I think is ok for both sides.

Some of my friends who are trying to learn programming are using online courses (Coursera etc) but they often miss having a real teacher who they can talk to about a specific problem.

What are your thoughts? Would you use it as a teacher / student?

 

[sylviagab]

@triumphant8891 Sounds like an easy thing to try. Try to put together a group and report back. Maybe structure around an existing open source class, like MIT opencourseware, or freecodecamp as the two possible extremes so that the dev doesn't have to plan an entire curriculum.

 

[pollostyle]

@triumphant8891 This seems like a good idea. Using mentorships to build skills would give you a lot of room to help guide the growth of the learners, tailor the training to their needs, and even impart things like "best practices" and current trends that can be timely and much more difficult to pass along thorough online classes alone. It might be helpful to include someone with experience in instructional design in your planning and also to "train the trainers" so your developers learn how to design effective classes or coaching sessions, give good feedback, and know how to assess students' progress. There's a real skill to teaching others that goes beyond just knowing the subject well. Anyway, cool stuff. Good luck with it.

 

[emotionalrollercoaster]

@triumphant8891 I think your math is wrong. 3 people x 30 = 90 total 90 / 3 hours = $30/h. Unless you meant that each person would pay $30 an hour which would be $90 a week for each person. Also, if this is a startup, how would you monetize yourself, not just the developers?