Learn HTML5, JavaScript and CSS With Mozilla’s Free School of Webcraft
drumbeat.org
drumbeat.org
Like the idea, just a strange way to execute.
I'm really excited to see similar efforts, especially from folks like Mozilla who have considerable resources available to back something like this. But I sort of wonder how well the peer to peer model works, and whether it produces consistent enough results to be able to have a certification system that means anything. Personally, I don't think certification is important, but it seems to be one of the key goals of this project.
Has anyone been involved with the parent project, P2PU? I'd be very interested in hearing what sort of experiences folks have had with that. (http://p2pu.org)
It's a peer-to-peer online university, where students teach courses about the areas they're experts in, while others can gain course credit for taking and performing well on those courses. The hope is to gain some credibility with employers by the end of 2011 and to have ~250 courses offered as an alternative to currently expensive certifications and often outdated university courses on web development.
You're right that there are other sources available to learn, and those are awesome...but they are not exactly comparable to this.
For one, most of those other sources just release material, like MIT's open course ware. It's a great resource for learning, but it's not the same as actually being enrolled in a class, participating, etc etc. You also do not receive any kind of credit.
Then there are some places where it actually is a course, but most of those are probably not "peer to peer"...I find that idea pretty interesting, and I had a good experience with Reddit University.
Another thing is this has the name "Mozilla" attached, which carries some cachet with it.
So, overall most of the "pieces" of this are already done yes....but I think this is an interesting combination and am pretty excited at the potential of it.