With our next Collective Academy: Founders & Coder III just around the corner, we catch up with Programme Director Dan Sofer to answer some of those FAQs.
What is Collective Academy?
It is an intensive full-time web development course for absolute beginners.
How did the idea for Collective Academy first come about?
A couple of years ago I discovered Coursera, the website that offers academic courses online, and shortly afterwards I began organising Coursera study groups. I organised dozens of them. It sort of took over my life and I realised that I probably needed to find a way to turn what I was doing into some sort of a living.
As it happened, Collective had kindly offered some space for one of my weekly study groups and I told them about my conundrum. Their response was immediate: If I could come up with a syllabus, Collective would offer a room at their new site at 161 Camden High Street.
So, in January 2013, we took our first cohort of students on a six-week pilot course, “Coding the web”, and Collective Academy was born.
What’s your background?
I have been building software since the 1980s and was involved in my first tech startup in 1995. Since then, I have worked as a developer and project manager on a number of large-scale web publishing projects, most recently on the websites of the London 2012 games. Since discovering Coursera, I have been studying, and now teaching, more-or-less full-time.
What are the backgrounds of your students?
They come from all sorts of backgrounds. Some have recently graduated from university, some graduated several years ago, and others have no formal post-school qualifications. Many are based in Camden and almost all live in London, although we have a significant number of applications from outside the capital and we have even had a couple of students join us remotely from Belgium.
Do you get many students dropping out?
When we started the course earlier this year, quite a few people warned me that we should not expect a high level of commitment for a free course, but the opposite has turned out to be the case. Applicants seem to realise this is a learning experience that they are not going to find elsewhere and tend to grab the opportunity with both hands.
What do they end up doing after they graduate?
Our students end up doing many different things. Some of them return to previous occupations; some are Collective members, who after graduation return to their own businesses; some get jobs in related fields; increasingly, we are attracting students who are serious about becoming software developers or building their own software-based startups.
Can students expect to walk into developer roles when they graduate?
Yes and no. Some of our graduates have found work as developers, but it is no means guaranteed. Those who have done so have been, without exception, those who have been the most single-minded, have worked the hardest and put in the longest hours.
In one case, one of our students decided to volunteer as a teaching assistant with us after he graduated before subsequently being hired as a developer.
Three of our most recent graduates have secured work with a client to build a web publishing platform on which they are now all working full-time, mentored by a Collective member who is an experienced software developer.
What do you think sets the Collective model apart from other schools?
Well, apart from the fees (or, rather the lack of them), our defining characteristic is probably the peer-based learning experience. Students learn to rely on each other to a greater degree than in most classroom environments. They are expected to communicate their work and ideas to each other both within groups and to the rest of the class throughout each day.
By contrast, when a student has paid for a course they might expect a well-structured syllabus and a lot of teaching support. We offer something rather different. The syllabus is loosely-structured, experimental and in development. Teacher time is thinly-spread and probably more focussed on managing the groups than on explaining the material. Out of necessity, students have to turn to each other for support.
Another differentiating factor is that our students and alumni are encouraged to help us determine the future direction of the course and to develop our business model. We don’t have any full-time permanent staff and we don’t have the funds to support them, so the development of the programme depends to an unusual degree on the energy and creativity of our students.
How has the course changed since you started?
The course has changed radically. When we started, our syllabus was based around a couple of very good courses on the Udacity online learning platform that use the Python programming language, but frontend development requires a knowledge of JavaScript. Learning two languages ended up not being the most sensible use of our time, so we have now switched almost exclusively to JavaScript.
Also, over time the course has become more social. We started with a suggestion that students programme in pairs, but it turned out that this didn’t happen naturally, so for the second cohort we started picking people to work with each other at random. This was an improvement, but it was not ideal. For the third cohort, we organised students into teams for the first time, which has led to a much more collaborative and productive learning experience.
What is the most important thing you have learnt in the last few months?
Probably the biggest lesson was about the power of peer-led learning. When we started on this path, I really thought the magic ingredient was going to be bringing these marvellous new online learning materials into the classroom. It took me until about halfway through our second course to begin to have doubts about this.
For our third and most recent course, I threw away the entire off-the-shelf online syllabus that we had started with and started more-or-less from scratch with nothing but the most basic outline of a course and some very open-ended and ill-defined problems for the students to work on. It was a shot in the dark for all of us, but after a very shaky first couple of days, the students adjusted their expectations and just started pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. It was pretty breathtaking.
What plans have you got for the future?
Above all, we want to keep improving the learning experience, while keeping the courses free to students. We definitely see the model of peer-led and free education that we are developing at Collective as a viable model for the future.
We want to find ways to extend our eight-week programme into something that is more like an apprenticeship, offering students a more comprehensive training and some sort of remuneration while they learn. We have already made a first step in that direction and we are looking for more projects for our students to work on. We are also extremely lucky to have within the Collective community a number of really first-rate developers willing and able to act as mentors.
Given the acute tech skills shortage we face in London, I am optimistic that we will be able to find a mixture of funding from employers, paying clients, and public and charitable sources for the programme we are developing at Collective.
We are particularly keen on finding ways to employ our alumni to work with subsequent student cohorts, so that they can give something back to the Collective community, while continuing to sharpen their skills and earning a living.
And we really want our alumni to think seriously about setting up their own versions of the course–as long as they stick to the Collective model of education that is peer-led and free.
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