The learning journey
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What is this? You are viewing one of our supplemental "Stories." In addition to our core design curriculum, we are constantly building out additional resources. Stories are a collection of real work tasks, design history, UX explorations, and work-throughs. Stories are often off-the-cuff and less concerned with production value.
Introduction
What’s your ideal learning journey?
Do you want to learn it fast? Slow? Surface-level? Deeply? Just enough? Too much? Let’s talk about it, Goldilocks.
There are so many ways to go about this.
We know. We tried most of them.
But let’s start out with the one we see the most.
Does your Udemy learning page look like this?
This is a pretty common situation. Each course may have cost $199, or if you waited around long enough on the page, maybe $12.99.
And we’re going to be upfront and honest here: All of these courses – are really great. And for the price, it’s truly amazing that you can get this much value for so very little. It’s like / just have 2 fewer beers (one night a the bar) – and you’ve got a whole class of tons of hours of video classes. Each of these people are smart and kind and great people. These are the facts.
Each of these people painstakingly outlined how to best organize the material. Each person really put a lot of care into how they presented the concepts. Each person (and possibly their team of helpers) carefully chose the projects to cover – that they felt would best cover the concepts and give you a chance to see them in action. All of these people are wonderful. And we’re being 100% serious here. And they also put a TON of time into answering questions on forums and in their Discord and Slack servers.
Do they work?
This is a pretty common outcome. These courses are so dirt-cheap that it’s really not of any importance to talk about their price. One tiny piece of new knowledge would make them worth the money. They’re basically free.
Note: Many of these courses say 2023, but they’re 2021 courses with a few added lectures, so they can be considered up-to-date. This person has been buying courses on web design for 5 years and this is very common in our experience. Most of the people we’ve met have been trying to learn to code for many years already.
Very few people complete these courses. But why not?
As of July 2023, it says that Angela’s course has 1,009,527 enrolled students. Almost 1,000,000 in her Python course.
Colt has many courses: 680k, 870k, Jonas has 800k in one of his courses, and there are a bunch of teachers that have over a million students. We don’t know how to do the math but millions of people enroll to learn web development from online courses – every year.
You can go look it up – but when we looked, it seemed like there were less than 1 million programmers in the US in total. And there are only around 60,000 Computer Science graduates per year. We’re not sure what that all means. You can think about that if you want.
But what we do know – is that very few people are able to make it through these courses — and of the people that do, very few of them gain the skills to be hirable web developers. If you think we’re wrong, please let us know and we’d love to talk about your experience.