Key Factors Of a Good Online IT Course

Nowadays, when the field of IT is already highly popular and attracts even more attention, many people are trying to get the hang of it and looking for the ways to learn. That’s why there are so many courses on very different relating areas depending on what you’re interested in. And, of course, what can be more convenient that learning from the comfort of your own home — online.

Due to the fact that online education has become so accessible, the number of courses are rapidly growing, which makes the decision that much harder. After all, it’s not just the question of money that must be paid for the course, but also the time, because one course can take up to 4 months.

In this article we want to focus on the things to look for when choosing a course, so you could have a clearer view of what your options are and could better navigate through the huge number of courses that the search engine throws at you.

Key Course Characteristics

• Practical experience

Whether the author has practical experience in the things he’s trying to teach is very important. You’d be surprised what people can teach even without any significant background in that field. For example, a teacher can have vast experience in C++, but he vagule knows Python and teaches it; or the course author has practical experience in web programming using Python, but teaches machine learning in Python. The reason for such thing happening is often quite trivial — the demand for knowledge to which a person has hands-on experience is either nonexistent or pretty damn small. Therefore, it became a very common phenomenon when some area that raised a lot of interest is being assigned to a teacher and the last after reading a few books immediately starts lecturing others.

To be good at what you do means actually knowing what you are talking about. Of course, a person can be whip-smart and teach programming without actual manual skills, but it’ll be more like reading a textbook out loud. At the same time, a teacher with field experience can put a positive spin on the material by sharing his personal stories on the subject. Students will be able to either get much fuller responses from such a lecturer, or they’ll be put in the direction for further research.

As you can understand, the more experience a person teaching a course has in the discipline, the better and more informative advices and explanations he can give. So, it might be relevant to find out how experienced the teacher is to get a rough estimate of how well-rounded your learning experience will be.

• Teaching experience

This is the point that you’d want to remember — the course creator has to know how to actually teach. If you think that if a person knows his stuff that means that he can teach it, you have another thing coming. A man or a woman can be “gods” in their field, they can be brilliant, cutting-edge, award-winning, but very often that has absolutely nothing to do with being able to teach. It’s an old-school mistake. Many people who have significant knowledge in some particular area think that they automatically can teach it to others. But it’s not that simple.

Teaching is a skill which requires certain learning, practice, figuring out what works for you and those who you teach and, of course, talent. As many other things, for some it comes easily, some aren’t just cut out for it. It’s just as personal, as other abilities. And if you lack passion for spreading the knowledge you have, well, that will make all the difference of how good a teacher you’ll be. Being a teacher means so much more than simply going over the content of the course. It’s also finding good examples, clear comparisons, personal rhythm of laying down the material, and entertainment. It won’t be effective just throwing information at students’ faces and expect it to sink in. Teaching is a constant journey of finding the best ways to engage students and explain the material so that they could understand and use it later on. And all of it requires experience. As much as noone can become an expert coder overnight, a person can’t become a great teacher just ’cause he possesses knowledge and decides that he’s already a teacher.

So, you might want to be a little stalkerish and check out the teacher’s background to see whether he previously had any crossings with teaching.

• The practical aspect of the course

The key of better organization of learning lies in the combination of theoretical and practical aspects. That’s why you should pay attention to this point, because it’s very important that not only the theory is being told, but also its practical value.

Don’t get me wrong, theory is good, everything great has started as a theory. But theory lessons are quite passive and mostly build on one person talking and others listening. One way communication, not much of an intellectual involvement and the words just floating around makes it so much easier to get bored and distracted. And what does theory give you in a long run if you don’t know how it can be used in practice?

When the concepts are being given and explained to a student, he has to personally figure out what’s being taught by relying on his imagination and overall understanding. But the information has a completely different impact during its practical presentation. The picture becomes much more clearer and memorable when a teacher gives students the understanding of how those concepts work in real life and where they can be actually applied. For example, a Machine Learning course can consist of 2 months of linear algebra (which for me sounds quite depressive), or a teacher can told how the machine can be practically taught to differentiate cats from dogs.

Because, what’s really a reason for people starting a programming course (or any other course for that matter)? It’s almost always the need or desire to create something, to have the skills and knowledge to do it, and quite rarely (or let me be blunt and say — never!) the solely wish to learn all possible commands by heart. This is why the practical parallels and examples are so valuable, they help you understand what you can now do with the gained knowledge and where you can use it.

So, when choosing a course to take, estimate how much time is devoted to the practical aspects of the knowledge.

• Homework

It’s a know fact that we remember things better when we learn how to apply them in certain situations. It’s unbelievably hard or even borderline impossible to hold a huge amount of information. Our brains tend to shut the hell down when an avalanche of raw data comes its way. But this is where the practical application come to the rescue. When after receiving the information our brain finds a way to analyze it and systemize, the odds of remembering it are much higher. So, it’s essential for the course to contain relevant personal assignments after each lecture or introduced and examined topic. For example, even the simple questionnaire, test or a few relevant tasks after the lecture or a viewed video can significantly increase the amount of remembered material. All of this is due to the homework being highly helpful for a person to systematize obtained information and use new knowledge. Because “doing” has always had better effect than just trying to learn everything by heart and pray to god it won’t be erased when some other information hits you. By solving particular tasks based on the previously given material, you learn to think in a certain way, analyze the situation and look for the appropriate approach to use. If you really want to learn something and make it stick for a long time, you have to find a way to see for yourself how everything theoretical works, so you could develop practical skills.

So, make sure that the chosen course has an appropriate amount of assignments or you know where to find the relevant tasks, if there aren’t enough of those.

If you’d like to read more about the importance of homework, we’ve extensively covered this point in one of our previous articles.

• Online Community

You think that to get the most out of the course you need to just follow the lectures, listen to the teacher and do your tasks? But what if I tell you that there is another significant aspect that can also be a great source of knowledge.

Each course forms a community around it, people who have taken that course or are in the process of going through it, or are just interested whether it’s worth wasting their time on. Everyone is free to ask questions, get answers, share insights and ideas in a safe trusting environment of peers (ideally). And it’s much less pressure because you can edit your posts, don’t answer right away, reflect on the material before you construct your reply and critically analyze the received answers.

Don’t ever underestimate the power online community has, because that’s where the real engagement begins. Being a member of a learning community means being an active learner who can participate in discussions, share thoughts and experiences, collaborate and make meaning of the information, among many other things. The dialogues that appear between the community members are very beneficial to those involved in them and even to those who are simply observing. Students learn by explaining their ideas, getting feedbacks, evaluating their progress and successes, receiving advices and building meaningful relationships with fellow learners, which will help them and be a great supporting system when they are struggling in a course. All of this gives you a fuller experience during the studying, so you don’t miss out on something that others could share with you, and it comforts knowing that other students also have their difficulties and life circumstances that they have to deal with.

So, it might be a good idea to check out how active the course community is, how friendly, and how much the course authors are involved in this community, because online learning communities can have a colossal impact, but they should be intentionally created and sustained.

• Actuality

If you have been interested in technologies, you’ve noticed that they aren’t developing slowly, but rather making leaps, and suddenly everything you’ve learned just a few years ago now became obsolete. That’s why it’s so important to look for the latest updated information.

It happens that the course was recorded several years ago and some of the stuff it teaches went out of date or there are a lot of new data it should contain. But the course creator could be engaged in some other things and isn’t able or doesn’t bother to make adjustments, re-record lectures and overall update the course. And any conscientious teacher looking on a course he himself created five (more or less) years ago will tell that it needs reinvention. Of course, this can’t be applied to all of the courses. For example, the course “Python Basics” will still be relevant even 5 years from now, but when we go into the details of the frameworks — Django or PyTorch — you should consider the fact that 2 years later the material may lose relevance.

So, you have to pay particular attention to the latest trends and successes in the development of programming, and whether the course covers the most recent developments, so you could be sure that you’ll receive the most relevant knowledge. But also remember that especially for the IT sphere learning never stops, you always need to look for the ways to self-improve, monitor changes and stay tuned.

Conclusion

We went through the key characteristics that we believe should be considered when choosing the best course for you. But the key factor that will overshadow all of them is YOU and your desire to learn. Even if a course you’re interested in is missing something, you can think of some ways to make up for it. For example, if a course is strictly theoretical and doesn’t have any practical assignments, you can think of or find the matching tasks yourself. If the course is great, but simply not actualized enough, you can check and update data yourself. If the course is missing a forum or it lacks a community, you can create it yourself on the Internet, there’re a lot of people willing to share their experiences and discuss common interests.

So, go and find the best course to reach your learning goals! We hope that this article was informative enough to help you with that. And if any of you have some other parameters that should be considered when looking into the course effectiveness, please, do let us know by writing below in the comments. Learn on, guys! :)