Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on the CS 101 course through Udacity. Like Khan Academy, Udacity seeks to provide education for free to anyone who wants to learn. I’m excited to see where this new educational model goes, and what kind of students will take advantage of it. Although Udacity assumes that you have access to a computer and the internet as well as time to work through the courses, this can provide an amazing educational opportunity for nontraditional students. I looked through the forums yesterday, and it was wonderful to see the students who are taking the course–there are a lot of older, younger, and international students all learning together.
This particular course focuses on learning Python to build a tiny functional search engine in seven weeks. We are nearly halfway through, and I’m enjoying the course tremendously. I haven’t really done any programming since a C++ course I took in college more than a decade ago, but Python is not as hard as I thought it would be.