A Pedagogical Analysis of Online Coding Tutorials [pdf]

I wish the authors — or any authors — studied which courses actually deliver results as opposed to what they ought to deliver.

For instance, immediate feedback ought to deliver learning. So they looked at which courses give immediate feedback.

But it would be even better if somone looked at which learners actually learned. You took the course now build xyz. Or pass a test or something.

There might be a difference in the sorts of “immediate feedback” that are effective. It’s an indirect proxy of what you are after.

I like a great deal that one of the considerations the authors make is adapting to prior knowledge. (3.1) describes what they looked for in detail. In their summary, "None provide personalization based on prior coding experience or learner goals, other than rudimentary age-based differentiation." Its hard to overstate the importance of prior knowledge. Prior knowledge has some of the highest effect sizes in educational research. In other words, what you already know going into it is going to determine how much you learn. It's rare for other factors to have the same impact on the results as prior knowledge. And yet, even given decades of learning science research, its pretty rare to see much of any attempt in Western learning to account for prior knowledge. It would be a refreshing change of pace to see some of these coding tutorials work in preemptive assessment to figure out where to focus the learner before getting into the "how" of it.

Disclaimer: I'm working on sagefy.org

Instead of lecture based courses, I’d like to see more an adaptable textbook style, where a learner creates their own path of learning.

A simple example is a user manual online, http://support.casio.com/global/en/wat/manual/5411_en/ . The topic of each section is clearly indicated and when parts of another section are mentioned a direct link is given. In this way the information is presented as the reader wants it.

The book Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, provides a brief description at the start of book of what a chapter contains and suggests reading orders based on what the reader is looking for. These are examples of the reader choosing order.

Examples of relevant questions is in Maths textbook Mathematical Techniques: An Introduction for the Engineering, Physical, and Mathematical Sciences 4th Edition , where sections contained check your understanding boxes. In these boxes a problem relaying on the information in the section was given followed by a full worked out solution. The sections ended with more problems related to the immediate section followed by questions that involved knowledge from pervious chapters. In the way same code examples could be presented and at the end of chapters a build your own program challenge.

I've created probably over 100 video courses, hundreds of tutorials (written and video), for networks like TutsPlus (Envato), DigitalTutors, Pluralsight, LinkedIn Learning/Lynda.com, and my own site / yt channel.

I've always been a huge proponent of example-based learning, and less about theory and generalized concepts.

Still, though, I think the online tech ed space has a lot of growing up to do. In time, we'll all wise up to provide better experiences for learning. Until then, for the most part, we're stuck with:

1. Google: "How to do X in Y" 2. Watch 3 different videos or read 3 different articles 3. Apply it. 4. Run into a snag. 5. Google / Stackoverflow

That was a very interesting read. As developers, let's face it, university was a tiny fraction of our knowledge. Most of it is ad-hoc real life problem solving, followed by seeing someone else's solution and saying "wow that's neat" and getting better that way.

We're teaching recipes, when really we should be teaching self-sufficiency.

Too many new learners are stuck unable to make the leap out of the browser based IDE and into running their own code locally on a machine or on a server.

IMHO the problem with coding tutorials is they usually target people that have little to no idea about programming essentials and teach them just the very basics like key primitive concepts (what classes, variables and functions are etc), language syntax, frameworks elementary basics etc.

Is there even a single tutorial that a self-taught undergraduate coder (who has already went through a number of simple tutorials, can code a number of languages like Python and C# and use GitHub) can take to learn how are real-world apps made, what do professional (professional ≠ veteran, it just means a person who earns their living doing it, working in a team usually) coders actually do all day long at their workplaces, what are they meant to know, how to solve interview puzzles and everything enough to go and get a coding job with reasonable ease?

As far as I know many companies need coders that can join a team and start writing/maintaining plain ordinary code, not necessarily brilliant code, just code that is readable, maintainable, reasonably fast and reliable and solves simple tasks it (a particular piece of code) is meant to. As far as I know a huge portion of people can potentially learn to do this with ease (you don't need IQ>150 for this, 100 is enough, even 90 will do which means the majority of the population). But people don't know how. And knowing a programming language syntax and being capable to code a simple script for yourself isn't enough: 99% of people who speak a language and can write a simple essay have no idea about how to write a novel (not necessarily a best-seller, even a mediocre one) - they are to be taught to structure it, introduce and develop characters, describe places and situations nicely, bake an idea in, maintain suspense, organize their writing process etc - it seems arcane to them while it essentially is just a number of plain and simple principles that can be outlined in a single manual. If only somebody having both the knowledge (skill) and the talent to explain would bother to write one and wouldn't write a huge tome practically obsolete by the release date instead.

This is something we spend a lot of time thinking about at Launch School. You need the right pedagogy for the right phase of learning (https://launchschool.com/pedagogy).

Most article writers aren't differentiating their audience enough, making their articles difficult to read for most people. There is a huge variance of "beginners", for example. Further, most developers who write these articles don't have a holistic learning framework in mind. Lastly, I'm seeing far too many technical tutorials just for SEO or attracting eyeballs lately. These articles are great for attracting attention but are typically technically shallow and add to the confusion rather than help.

Very interesting read! I've not heard of "Gidget, Lightbot, Code Hunt, and tutorials provided by Code.org" before, but the paper seems quite comprehensive.

Summary: Every online coding tutorial is a lecture. They might pretend to be a little interactive, but the learning path is railroaded, and doesn't cater to individual progress.

I've been reconnecting to the academic edtech space for the past year. After spending the past 20 years in both industry and academic online learning, academic behaviour remains a bit odd:

1) Academics in education talk about the use of technology in education but often don't know how to use technology in depth.

Story: In attending the World Conference of Online Learning - held at a very capable hotel - there were no power bars for laptops, and no sessions were recorded. Less than 5% of 1500 attendees (academics) carried or used a laptop or tablet for notes. Typing fast to take notes received comments. This was one of the leading conferences (apparently) in the world. Over 100 countries, 500 speakers, and 200 sessions.

2) Some academics seem to regularly trash education that technology may be in fact delivering well for students beyond the Academic's ability to understand.

One talk I attended at this conference was a Ph.D. essentially skewering how Duolingo is not a good way to learn a language. The arguments may have had merit, I found it hard to take the talk seriously, well, because the millions of users reporting a positive learning experience with tools like Duolingo is well known. Learning to speak a language is incredibly valuable for many people.

3) If academic's don't use the right terminology...

It's a little baffling why academics use the word pedagogy when speaking about the use of technology in education.

Pedagogy is how children learn, not adults. Andragogy is how adults learn.

"Pedagogy", "improving learning experiences", "improving student outcomes"is on a long chain of lean startup type groupspeak where people continue doing what they do but sprinkle a little innovation dust on what they're doing. Want to upset an academic? Correct them in using Andragogy instead of Pedagogy as a non-academic.

4) Innovation in Education + Technology.

Technologists can learn education easier than educators will learn technology. These two groups need to come together, or as I suspect, educators competent in understanding the capabilities and possibliites of technology will need to exist in higher learning. The rate of change in society may be hard to keep up with a tenure seeking mindset.

5) K-12 educators seem a lot more tech friendly than post-secondary educators.

Post-secondary educators seem often threatened by technology replacing them, and fail to recognize that improved digital learning experiences will be like better text books.

If our educators aren't levelling up on tech use, they wont be able to help the students of the future.