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Yan Kozlovskiy
Courses Plus Student 13,773 PointsMy thoughts and rants on Treehouse content... Let's have a discussion!
I've been learning a lot of stuff here, on Treehouse. So far, I am unable to retain most of the information from most courses on here. However, I would like to say that I found only one approach that is truly effective. I haven't seen every video on this site, but bare with me . Dave McFarland's courses, on JavaScript, have been excellent. They're long, concise, and very engaging. Dave makes you type a lot and it works! My favorite part of his videos are the challenges that are at the end of each badge. It's not a code challenge, but a programming challenge. You're told to create a program using the stuff you just learned. If you're stuck, you can watch the next video that gives you a solution. This has helped me out tremendously with retaining the information. It's something I wish I could say about other courses I took. For me, the hardest subject to retain is HTML. I'm not giving up on learning, but I just wanted to share my thoughts.
I think it'd be a great idea to follow Dave's model on teaching. In months of learning HTML, I'm still not confident in my ability. After the JavaScript course, however, I was feeling confident during the course. I also didn't like the Ruby course because of the same reason. I felt like it was fast-paced and the code "challenges" were too easy. The answers are practically in the question. This does not help me with retaining the information.
How do you feel about the content?
2 Answers
Laura Kyle
19,794 PointsHave you ever noticed that attempts to have discussions on here so often don't take off? It's a shame that the treehouse community isn't more active.
I find it interesting you say that you don't like the Ruby course. I decided to head over to the forums just to make a post about how amazing I thought the Ruby courses and Jason Seifer are! I love how he doesn't hesitate to repeat things, and explains things that many people would feel unnecessary. For example, in one of the first videos he simply explained that the "1." in the document was the first line of code. I'm sure the large majority of people don't need this explained, but it also doesn't hurt by taking 3 seconds to mention it. I think that's great!
I've been programming for awhile, and feel like my grasp of all languages is improving significantly because of how Jason teaches Ruby.
I started the Ruby courses right after trying to figure out the Angular course. That is by far (well, IMO of course), the worst course on here. I found myself lost the whole time, not knowing what was going on. Decided to check out the free Angular course on CodeSchool...Turns out the basics of Angular are really quite straight forward.
Because everyone has their own style of learning, if all the courses were built with the same teaching style as Dave for example, though that would work in the favour of some it would result in a bigger struggle for others. So there isn't really a way to win I don't think (...except by rewriting that angular course perhaps. Just sayin').
Yan Kozlovskiy
Courses Plus Student 13,773 PointsThe courses on Ruby have a lot of valuable information. However, I wasn't able to retain as much information as when I took the JavaScript course. I'm guessing it could also be part of me already knowing a little bit of Ruby and making connections to JavaScript. I did feel like the "big" code challenges also did a lot to help me retain the information. In the. The problem is that I was unable to solve a few code challenges and I had to google the answer. I'm not alone here as someone already posted the same question I had. I understood the question and the answer after that. This is a good approach to learning, but it's not the optimal for me. I wish they'd have Dave's challenges in every segment/badge. I was really pushing myself there.
Caleb Kleveter
Treehouse Moderator 37,862 PointsI agree the ruby courses in general are great, but one of biggest issues I see (especially in the ruby foundations course) is he sometimes uses code that you never learned about which causes a lot of confusion.
Yan Kozlovskiy
Courses Plus Student 13,773 PointsOh, so that's why I was really confused! I thought it was my brain not being able to understand the material.
Laura Kyle
19,794 PointsI haven't encountered that yet, though I will admit with the Ruby courses that I do wish the challenges were more difficult. However I'm finding the opposite than Yan, I'm retaining far more with the Ruby courses than I did with Javascript (though I agree that Dave is a fantastic teacher too!).
Caleb Kleveter
Treehouse Moderator 37,862 PointsYep, some courses are better then others in that matter. One of the other things that drives me crazy is when the teacher uses a keyboard shortcut without telling you.
Laura Kyle
19,794 PointsThe shortcuts...Absolutely! I'm still of the belief that keyboard shortcuts are magical (it never occurred to me to use them until a year ago). Just a quick "key + key to do this" would make a big difference. Yes, it's definitely easy enough for us students to google and find the shortcuts, but repetition is so helpful!
Tommy Gebru
30,164 PointsTommy Gebru
30,164 PointsI think the recent Workshop Launcher in the video window helps tremendously. I mean it really encourages students who have not used or avoids Workspaces and I strongly believe that the launcher should be embedded in every single Treehouse Video Lesson.
Also it helps after completing an Objective exercise, to quickly dart over to the Forum and search for keywords in your lesson and see what other students have struggled with. This encourages students to help each other, and review what they just learned, better overall understanding!