croyd

There's no dependency between learning functional programming, including Haskell, and category theory. I say this as someone who is reading a CT book (Conceptual Mathematics) after being first exposed to the topic by learning Haskell.

FP Complete has a web IDE: https://www.fpcomplete.com/business/fp-haskell-center/

I'm currently trying to learn functional programming through Haskell. Glad to have found another resource, plus this cheat sheet linked from the page looks handy: http://cheatsheet.codeslower.com/

"What would help, in my mind, is for kids to be able to learn each subject at their own, separate pace--one "micro-skill" at a time, advancing to the next only when all the micro-skills relied upon as a base for the next micro-skill have been mastered (100%ed). [Think of it sort of like an unlockable "tech tree" of education.]"

This is exactly what the Khan Academy is doing. I believe there's at least one school (not sure if public or private) where they're experimenting with that model. See:

http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_rein...

IIRC, the students in the class take most of the lessons via computer/tablet and move forward once they've answered a certain number of quiz problems correctly. The teacher can monitor the progress of each student, and if one is having difficulty than he/she can get some individual help from the teacher or another student.

I took Udacity's cs101 class as a (lazy) way to get introduced to python. While I felt like it was a very well done introduction to computer science, it wasn't a very effective way to learn a language as it made a deliberate effort to decouple python and cs (and rightfully so). I would suspect that this is also true of the other MOOCs listed here.