A college free of charge with no teachers, no classes and no diploma in the end. This is Codam, a futuristic educational programming system which opened its doors for students on the 24th of September 2018 in Amsterdam. The average duration of such a programme is three years long, depending on the pace of the student.
Students are welcome any day at any time since the college is open 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. Their innovative teaching method is to guide students into developing highly-demanded programming skills by having them work together on projects, which get checked and graded by their own peers. Working without any teachers, students can manage their own learning process by participating in gamified challenges. According to Codam, students learn the most by doing and they are able to work on their own projects and make mistakes without being pressured.
There is a high demand for good programmers and this demand will keep expanding exponentially, considering the digital world we live in. According to current market data, jobs in the technology sector are expected to grow 11% faster than any other job sector in The Netherlands. What is interesting from this educational system is that this teaching method is actually succeeding, even in other countries as well. Codam is following the same principles as the French Ecole 42, which has been awarded as the best coding school worldwide in 2017.
So what is this unique learning method telling us? Are we slowly but surely entering a phase where traditional educational systems will be replaced by self-teaching futuristic systems?
If these self-teaching programming colleges managed to be the best worldwide and thereby outperforming the same study programmes which are offered in the traditional educational systems, I believe the answer is yes. What do you think of this disruption? Will this be seen as valuable for future employers?
https://www.codam.nl/
Hi Justina,
Thank you for this post!
I just have a few concerns regarding the Codam programme. What do these (future) students gain when finishing their programme? Is it an accredited degree? If so, it would still have to meet certain requirements the university like ours does. Are there any requirements or standardisation methods in play in order to ensure that the programme graduates are of a (relatively equal) caliber?
I do like the idea of a practical application and being graded by your peers, I would need some more answers however, before I would enrol myself.
Hi Justina, thank you for your post.
To be honest I have never heard about learning systems as Codam or Ecole 42. I find it very interesting how they change the concept of education and self-learning. The aspect that for example the Ecole 42 is a non-profit and tuition free institution makes it really attractive for people that normally could not afford paying expensive study and living fees. Furthermore, in respect to the IT and coding industry the concept seems to be suitable. However, I was wondering how it works if the students do not get a diploma at the end. How can they prove that they really attended and participated in the courses, because a normal certificate could be easily manipulated or just copied?
Furthermore, I don’t think that the education industry as a whole could be disrupted by this concept as even for higher education teachers are really important to explain study materials and help solving problems that appear during the self-study. Moreover, in my opinion a teacher in higher education also offers some kind of social interaction that is important for studying. In my opinion some concepts like online-courses, connected classrooms or robots as teaching assistants are more likely to disrupt the classical education system.
I somewhat agree with the thought processes in this upcoming educational system. On the one hand I like the hands-on approach, empowering students to let them decide where to participate and checking each others work without the supervision of a teacher. This sets students up to be more responsible for their own work and also feeling more involved in the whole learning process. On the other hand, I think that there is some guidance needed to give the courses a more structured feeling. For students who have a hard time getting everything done on time, will feel a bit lost in this unorganized system. Overall, it is a interesting and unusual experiment which will hopefully succeed in the future.