Three Cheers for Codecademy from KO

The letters MOOC stand for Massive Open Online Course. The diagram above from Mathieu Plourde explains each word in the term. The simplest part to comprehend is that these are online courses. Considering the unlimited potential for building an audience on the internet, massive is the word chosen as the most profound description of these courses. Open is the word used to detail the availability of these online courses to a large audience. They are open source, meaning available to all. They are open enrollment, meaning available registration to all (more or less). Originally, the Massive Open Online Courses were developed to provide free and affordable education and learning opportunities to the general public and those in remote areas in the world. Many of these courses are still widely affordable to anyone with an internet connection. The noble intent in their creation is what drew my attention to the MOOCs. I started testing them out on different sites several years ago due to the wide variety of subjects presented. Within the past year I have discovered a new site, Codecademy.com.

Three Cheers for Codecademy

By Katherine Orho

Codecademy is an educational company whose motto is “Teach the world to code”. In a CNN Money Tech report, (http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/29/smallbusiness/codecademy/index.htm) Laurie Segall reveals that codecademy claims it can turn anyone into a Web programmer. The company claims to take more cues from Facebook and Zynga in creating an engaging educational experience than they do from the classroom. They have delivered engaging educational experiences as promised.
Zachery Sims and Ryan Bubinski founded the company in 2011. By October 2011 the company had raised $2.5 million in stock during the company's first significant and early stage round of venture funding, which was announced in the company's November 2nd blog by Zach Sims --see (http://www.codecademy.com/blog?page=8). Success came quickly and the company has continued to grow. Wikipedia reports (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codecademy) that over 24 million users have completed more than 100 million codecademy exercises as of January of 2014.

For the sake of learning HTML/CSS the codecademy dashboard has three major sections that can help: Web Developer Skills, Language Skills and Projects. Web Developer Skills gives the user the option of making a website or making an interactive web site. To learn the structuring and styling of HTML and CSS, the Language Skills section has just the right icon to click on. The projects section is quite helpful practice for the skills learned in Language Skills section. There are badges to be earned at the completion of exercises. There are discussion groups to get questions answered and network with co-learners.