Last year I quit my tenured position at the University of Amsterdam. I did so because I believe that our education system is broken. It’s too slow. It’s too expensive. It doesn’t meet any real-world requirements. But most importantly, students don’t learn enough.
I know this, because I spent most of my life trying to fix it. As a student, a professor, and even as HR manager. After two decades, however, I reached the conclusion that we need a radically new approach.
What we need is a form of education that follows the students development rather than the other way around. A space where learning can happen everywhere, all the time, rather than in short, intense bursts. We built a platform that facilitates this: the platform is called 'Offcourse'.
Offcourse gives you the tools to take ownership over your professional growth by helping you find just the right content and tracking everything you learn. It’s free. It’s open source. It’s easy to use. Join us, if you are ready, in a future of learning based on finding and sharing content worth knowing.
At launch, Offcourse will focus on beginning to intermediate developers. Why? Two reasons:
-
CS programs around the world have proven to be incapable of educating enough high quality developers to fulfill the market’s demand: both in terms of quantity and quality.
-
Developers have already proved to be open to new, non-traditional forms of education. Recent research shows that 63% of all professional developers is self-taught. In the last four years, coding bootcamps have managed to grow exponentially. And the valuation of learning sites in this sector, like 'Lynda' and 'Pluralsight' is steadily growing.