Best Practices for Educational Sites That Teach Computer Programming

Here's an excellent article, Learnable Programming, on the important qualities of websites for learning programming, and programming's greatest flaw: how difficult it is (which is often deliberate over-complication by programmers who are protecting their field of endeavor from everyone else who might otherwise be able to help).

It's not for everyone, but programmers and those who write about programming, teach it, or run sites that teach it must read!

This article is not all-encompassing but it contains enough information in it to help the development team of such a website to create a much better experience.

Here are a few of my own suggestions, for both websites and courses.

1. Multi-sensory approach
Not everyone learns the same way, so it's important to have an approach that works for the widest range of learners possible. Some people need videos, while others need text, and most need kinesthetic stimulation (challenges, activities, exercises, projects, etc.), yet this is the most overlooked issue I've seen on all the sites I've visited. PluralSight relies entirely on videos and provides no direct challenges. Code School provides videos, slides and snippet challenges, but does a poor job of fixing problems and considers the slides to be supplemental despite being taken directly from the videos. Codecademy and Solo Learn rely on text and challenges, and the latter has no customer support to speak of, doesn't monitor its forums, and sometimes crashes. And so on...
2. Supplemental Materials
A range of extra materials, including glossary, web/podcasts, articles, projects, videos, etc. make for a robust system.
3. Both breadth and depth of subjects
4. Free and Paid offerings
Basic courses, at the very least, should be offered for free.
5. Certificates, Nano-degrees
6. Open Badges
7. Ability to share their progress on LinkedIn and other sites, and via email
8. Routine updating of information provided
9. Rigorous standards and a consistent framework for all courses
10. Recognized as an institute of learning by (at least) LinkedIn
11. Videos should be engaging, well-made, error-free, and contain non-compugeek humor
12. Interactive subtitles that allow a person to navigate directly to that part of the video
13. Transcripts and slides
14. Excellent customer support
    • Feedback/Complaint system (form/email)
    • FAQs
    • Forums that can be linked to the:
      • Main page
      • sub-forum that corresponds to the course or major topic the user is coming from
      • specific thread or sub-topic of the sub-forum for that particular challenge
    (Solo Learn offers this multi-tiered approach to forums, but doesn't moderate.)
    • Help-oriented chat rooms
    Chat rooms should be available for confused learners, and must be moderated. Some people are under time constraints and cannot wait for responses via forums or static answers in FAQs.

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