I am the founder of Profound Academy, an educational platform that aims to provide a hands-on learning experience on computer science topics. We have released a Python course for free that is designed for complete beginners. Ask me anything.

What's the difference between your platform and the hundreds of other ones that have free coding courses?

All the concepts are explained with many supplementary exercises to make sure you fully master the material. So, the content is pretty in-depth. Besides having free courses, the platform also provides a way of signing up for group tutoring sessions to make sure the students make consistent progress and not get stuck halfway. Most of the online platforms have ~5% completion rate, so 95% of people don't even get to the end. Group tutoring sessions are really helpful to make sure the students get from 0 to hero.

I'm an experienced, mid-career dev looking to make more of a difference in the world. I think educating the next generation would be a great way.

How would you suggest I start participating in a platform like this, or perhaps more locally, to work toward that goal?

That's great to hear!

We are constantly looking to improve our courses and add new ones. So, we can collaborate on those.

What kind of experience do you have? I would love to discuss in more detail and understand what we can do to improve educational content worldwide.

are the courses free on the platform?

We believe that educational materials should be accessible to everyone! All people should have the access to the best resources online to learn and accomplish their goals. Following that ideology, our courses will always be FREE for everyone.

Thats amazing! But how do you make money? Is this a non profit?

We offer group tutoring in our Pro plan to help with regular practice. Did you know that the completion rate of an online computer science course is ~5%? So, ~95% of people don’t get to the end of the course and drop it as soon as they reach a challenging topic.

With regular group tutoring sessions, learners get unstuck and progress faster. The sessions are also a great way to make friends in the community of learners. This really helps with keeping the motivation high.

What's the price of the Pro plan?

It's $199/month. You can get more details on the platform: https://profound.academy/

Who is your target population? What research have you used to guide your course creation? Do you have any experience in CS education? What pedagogical choices have you made and why?

That's a really great question! The Python course specifically targets people with no background. It's made for complete beginners. The other courses that are coming soon like Django, or React.js target more advanced programmers who have a solid background in languages like Python or JavaScript/Typescript.

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I have been teaching at several high schools and taught students different topics (C++, competitive programming, Python, introduction to machine learning).

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Regarding the philosophy of the platform, we believe that the only way of learning to code is by actually writing code and having a lot of practice. The main idea behind the practical exercises is to have instant feedback to facilitate quick iteration for students.

Yet, having an online platform only might not be enough. The best learning experience is obtained when you are surrounded by other people interested in the same thing. So, creating an environment is one of the most crucial parts.

We try to accomplish that by providing group tutoring sessions so that the learners also have a social experience and guidance from industry professionals to not get stuck and have better career choices later on.

the only way of learning to code is by actually writing code

This is bedrock truth.

You can sit through all of the lectures in the world, but if you're not hacking code on a regular basis then you're still just a person with a bunch of notebooks and a piece of paper.

Back in the 80's/90's I had my own software company. We were small, but we were apparently doing stuff that was Over The Horizon for most people with a freshly minted CS degree. I hadn't thought that was the case until I began trying to find a programmer who could deal with the fact that there wasn't any book about what we were doing.

The biggest shock was how little code some of these people had written, even though they had Masters and PhDs from places like CMU, MIT, UC Berkeley, and Stanford. They did not have clue 1 about how to crank code in a production (or pre-production) environment. Hell, many of them hadn't cracked the lifetime 10,000 LOC barrier. Really? I wish we had FizzBuzz back then, it would have made interviewing far less painful.

It slowly dawned on me that I didn't want a a "computer scientist", I wanted a "software engineer". I eventually decided that if they hadn't personally generated a minimum of 20,000+ LOC, and/or been a significant collaborator on a 50,000+ LOC project, then they were going to be a net drag on our overall productivity. We didn't have the time, resources, or (quite frankly) the interest in helping them learn something they should already know.

The Good News is that it's now 30+ years later and there are tons of good resources and good languages to help you learn to code. But they only work if ... you do the work.

/rant

Sorry about that. This has been a pet peeve of mine for 40+ years.

This comes up in our discussions very frequently. You said it really well. Thanks for writing this in detail!

How is this different from more popular free platforms like freecodecamp? And how do you intend to pay for things like server costs?

Freecodecamp is awesome! We try to focus on more hands-on practice and mastery of materials. So, each concept is explained along with many exercises to make sure the learner actually masters the topic.

Besides the content part, we also provide group tutoring sessions to help people have a more regular practice schedule and get unstuck faster. Group tutoring is a paid service that is the main source of income for Profound Academy as everything else is completely free.

With regular group tutoring sessions, learners get unstuck and progress faster. The sessions are also a great way to make friends in the community of learners. This really helps with keeping the motivation high.

These sessions happen 3 times a week for each user and the next "batch" of group tutoring starts this August.

Hey Martin thanks for your contribution to education. What do you plan to achieve in 2 years time given the platform gets more popular? Are you planning to add only programming courses or other professions too?

Our mid to long-term goal is to cover the most fundamental topics in computer science so that we can guide the newcomers and make them great professionals. We plan to have career paths in Data Science, Machine Learning, DevOps, Mobile development, etc.

In the very long term, we would love to have the STEM fundamentals covered.

Why not partner with an already established online education platform (eg. Khan Academy)?

It's pretty hard to test new ideas with established products. We really want to provide a unique experience for the learners on our platform and focus on hands-on experience.

For instance, we can currently have multi-language content for the same concept and the same exercise, while most other platforms handle the localization differently.

This way we have full control of the content, the checking system, and the platform itself. This gives a lot of flexibility during experimentation and trying out new concepts.

You could drive more traffic by partnering with Khan for key concepts. Struggling with a math process on Profound? Here is a link to a free Khan training. Khan can then link your free material in their computer science section.

The problem that I have always found with free learning content is trying to find them. The ones that are "free" (aka free trials) always find themselves at the top of Google searches because they can afford to optimize and market. Finding the true free content is difficult.

That's a really great idea! Do you know what would be the best way to reach out to them for collaboration?

Yeah I think now finding Profound is almost impossible :)) but we'll try to optimize for the search engines a bit.

Our courses will always stay entirely free as we have pretty strong beliefs about the educational materials being accessible to everyone.

What made you want to start this free online school?

I come from a competitive programming background and I used to participate in programming olympiads when I was in high school.

Back then we used to solve a lot of problems to actually master a concept along with meeting weekly with other folks interested in the same field. That was really helpful to keep the motivation high.

So, these two things were the main motivations to create a platform that would have enough practice material to cover the programming concepts in-depth, while also providing the possibility of regularly meeting several times a week.

Hi there. I've been reading through a few of your responses and am impressed by your philosophy on learning, inclusion, and accessibility. As an instructional designer myself, it's always refreshing meeting people who want to tackle topics virtually, asynchronously, and socially. Are you looking to add any more IDs to the team?

Thanks for the kind words! Would be great to hear some ideas on the topics we try to tackle. I would be happy to collaborate on some tasks that we work on right now.

What are you doing to bridge the gap between a learner establishing the basic skills and that learner getting hired as a developer?

The best way to practice coding is to actually code. Similarly, the best way to practice to get a job is to emulate an environment where similar mini-tasks can be completed.

We focus on giving many small practical tasks and projects to help learners gain that hands-on experience and show their skills during the actual job.

All the concepts have many hands-on exercises to help people practice and actually master the topic. We also provide mini-projects that are more advanced and emulate a more similar work task.

What do you consider to be the most relevant and useful coding language to learn for a beginner?

It really depends on the long-term goals. Each language is good for its field.

• JavaScript is great for web development (both front-end and back-end).
• C++ is great for embedded systems, databases, and compute-intensive libraries.
• Python is great for scripting, Data Science, ML, and backend development.
• Java and Kotlin are great for android development.
• Swift and Objective C is used for iOS development.

Yet, in general, I usually suggest starting with Python as it has the most useful concepts that are used in almost all the other programming languages.

When learning Python you get to know the conditional statements, loops, functions, and classes (along with inheritance and typing). This is usually enough to start learning another language as it includes most of the basics that form the core of other languages as well.

If I wanted to build a web application similar to ebay which languages would you recommend?

I think this is more of an architecture design question. So, the choice of the language is secondary. It's more important to discuss the structure of the application, the databases used, what kind of processing jobs (maybe recommendation systems) are going to be used, etc.

What's your opinion on php?

I've only worked with PHP at Facebook which wasn't enough to form an opinion to be honest. There is a lot of love and hate around the language but I haven't used it enough to have a well thought opinion.

As someone without any real programming experience, if I wanted to use your courses to get a job in IT, realistically, how long would you say it would take to learn enough to be employable?

The Introduction to Python course is expected to take 2-3 months to fully finish the course. Then we suggest doing several hobby projects to gain close to real-world experience. For some places this might be enough, other places require the knowledge of algorithms and data structures. Learning the latter might take several months of hard work as well.

I would suggest focusing on the process and trying to get as much knowledge as possible.

What does group tutoring include?

What is the limit?

The group tutoring includes meeting 3 times a week with 4-10 people. We keep the group sizes small to make sure everyone gets enough attention and really benefits from the sessions.

On the other hand, we think that group tutoring sessions are better compared to individual meetings as the best educational experience should be social. As a learner, you get really motivated when you are in an environment that has the same interests as you.

With regular group tutoring sessions, learners get unstuck and progress faster. The sessions are also a great way to make friends in the community of learners. This really helps with keeping the motivation high.

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The great thing about our sessions is that no student is dependent on another one. When organizing group tutoring sessions, we group people who have made the same progress together. So, during a group meeting, everyone has the same context and approximately the same knowledge (Students who have reached the level where they cover for loops are in one group, while those who reached the level of if/else statements are in another. And these groups can change from meeting to meeting).
We believe this kind of division by the made progress is beneficiary for both students and tutors. Students who learn fast don’t get bored in the classes as they usually do at schools, while people who need more time, have the flexibility to study longer and still be consistent.

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The next group tutoring "batch" starts this August.

Thanks for the reply. That seems like a lot of value for $199 (meeting multiple times per week). I run a digital marketing agency and group training would be a great way to train my team. That said, I don't think many organizations would be able to meet multiple times per week. I think once per week would still be of plenty of value. Just food for thought. Best of luck with your training site!

Thanks a lot! We really like to teach, so helping people learn new skills in programming is very satisfying for the whole team. I think that helps :)

This all sounds awesome! Just to echo what another user said, I would love to sign up for the pro version but meeting 3x a week is a little tough! Will you ever have a once a week version of this at a reduced cost?

We might have this in the future. Right now we offer the flexibility of choosing your own time and day to meet. So, some people might skip some meetings but we encourage to make the best out of each and every one of the meetings.

Do you foresee Profound expanding into the DevOps space? For example, Profound may in the future offer a series of courses (including the signature real-time course feedback/etc.) that focus on Kubernetes (kubectl, k8s API, etc.) and surrounding concepts.

Yeah, would be awesome to have DevOps courses as well. It's actually one of the most requested career paths. So, I hope we'll manage to create a great DevOps course in the near future.

What concepts would you be most interested in? Are there any specific technologies you think are the most important for the current jobs?

how long the python course will be free? or is it different / trimmed down version of a paid course module? Does the free course include advance stuff like webpage, APIs etc? can you elaborate on this?

The course will always be free. We believe the best educational materials should be accessible to everyone. The more advanced stuff like working with REST APIs and databases will be present in another course what's coming soon. And that course will be completed as well. All our courses will always be free always.

Can someone let's say not anymore in their 20ies be that good to pursue a career in computer science field? Thank you for your help. I've been searching for something like this for so long.

Absolutely! I was talking to a friend of mine recently and he told me that his father started getting into programming at the age of 50. He had a strong background in math and after practicing with online courses for a couple of months, he was already pretty good at writing complex C++ programs. Right now he's a very strong C++ developer.

If you have enough dedication, you can probably do this at any point in your life. A strong background in math/physics/logic might be a big bonus.

Do you have any options available to take courses without logging into 3rd party applications?

Sure, you can use email/password authentication (Sign in with email) which would not ask you to log in to any 3rd party application.

Many tech companies like Google, MSFT, etc offer online certifications and claim that their courses will help close the digital divide.

Yet those same companies rarely, if ever, hire graduates of their own services to work at their companies.

Do you think digital education/certifications will one day supplant a bachelor's degree, such that tech firms will hire the bulk of their programming employees from those ranks?

If not, what do you think the traditional undergraduate degree offers that coding certifications do not?

I think most of the online courses lack in-depth advanced concepts. That is probably the aspect where the traditional undergraduate programs shine.

We try to change that by including more in-depth concepts and practical exercises in our courses.

In the long run, I think both online and traditional educational institutions will undergo some changes. Online platforms will most probably include some kind of community-building component (schools and universities are really useful for this).

The traditional educational institutions will probably try to get more scalable and might remove bottlenecks like manual homework checking, or in-person lectures.

I recently graduated from a Full Stack Web Dev bootcamp and am currently looking for a job, but am struggling. What kinds of opportunities do you suggest for people coming out of your course, or similar courses?

We don't guarantee employment but we provide guidance and feedback on how to apply for jobs and where to look for the best offers (for people who sign up for a Pro membership)

It seems like a big jump from free to $200/month. I'm not arguing the $200 isn't a good value but I think for a lot of people who might need more than the free courses offer and aren't already in the industry will likely not have $200/mo in disposable income. Have you thought about cutting back some of the premium offerings and introducing some mid tier plans?

Yes, that's actually a great idea and we might do that in the near future. Right now we try to fully focus on one offering and provide as much value with that as possible.

There are a lot of coding platforms that offer courses for free (e. g. Freecodecamp.org). What is unique about your offering?

All the concepts are explained with many supplementary exercises to make sure you fully master the material. So, the content is pretty in-depth. Besides having free courses, the platform also provides a way of signing up for group tutoring sessions to make sure the students make consistent progress and not get stuck halfway. Most of the online platforms have ~5% completion rate, so 95% of people don't even get to the end. Group tutoring sessions are really helpful to make sure the students get from 0 to hero.

What completion rate do you have?

We'll have great numbers to share pretty soon.

Naïve question, sorry: Why would someone with no programing experience (me) want to learn Python? I find the idea of coding appealing, but struggle to find a reason for acquiring the knowledge. It's like a city apartment dweller taking a tree pruning course.

That's a great question. Learning how to write programs can be fun and interesting. You might have some idea in the future that you might want to build (like a website, a mobile app, or a game). You would feel way more confident in evaluating ideas and pursuing them. Yet, if you exclude the possibility of ever having to deal with coding, then it might not be the best thing to invest much time on it.

Follow-up question! Can I use Python to build on-line databases?

Could you please elaborate a bit more on what you mean by online databases?

I work with people who use MS Excel as a database; not for making calculations, but searching and sorting to identify tasks, who's responsible for the task, at what state is the task, the date something was updated, etc.

It drives me bananas because I know what a spreadsheet is for. "If only we had a proper on-line database where people could record and update this information," I hear myself say too often.

Can Python be used to create something like this?

Yeah, definitely. Creating and updating tables like that can be done with a library called pandas. Yet I think your specific use case has already been implemented in a lot of software solutions available online. Tracking tasks and responsibilities can probably be done with Jira (if I don't miss anything).

Interactive courses are great, but often hard to build. Have you considered making your internal tooling for building these available publicly so that there will be more interactive content available in general?

We currently support having individual creators on our platform. It's now in beta, so if someone wants to create a course or contribute to it, we can grant permission to a limited number of people if they contact us.

You're absolutely right about the difficulty of creating interactive content. That's especially true for programming courses that give instant feedback to learners. Creating a single course might take several months of hard work.

In our opinion, it's worth it :)

Is this course only available to this within the US? Or can folks outside the US (and the west in general) be able to take advantage of it?

The course and the whole platform are available for everyone across the globe. Any person interested in learning programming can access the platform.

We are even planning to add translations for the content in different languages so that the educational content is accessible to more people.

I’m quite frankly terrible at math and have been since elementary school, yet I’ve always had a fascination with coding and computers. Is pursuing this career path still worth it for someone like me?

Absolutely! You can start building hobby projects on your own and improve your portfolio. Most of the time l, coding does not require math (it might be very helpful during the interviews though).

So, you can start with side projects and learn the core concepts of software engineering and later start applying for jobs.

What are some examples of hobby programs? Tbh I often have a hard time even understanding what one can do with code, and it makes it really hard to focus without some kind of tangible end goal.

That's a really good question! The projects might depend on your interests and you're best motivated when you see value in the final result.

In the past, I wanted to learn Java, so I started developing apps in Android (it was more than 7 years ago). One of the projects that I did was creating a multi-language spell-checker app. There were a lot of those in the play store but none of them actually worked well. So, I created and published it and it reached about 100k downloads in a year without any kind of marketing or ads.

A really good example of a hobby project that might even turn into a startup was basically developed in front of everyone's eyes by Kalle Hallden on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5tVJtjoxKzpxnc9ventef-1sgvoR8nqG

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The bottom line is: find some problem that's interesting enough for you and try to solve it by creating a program.

I've always heard that Python is the best language to learn first. Do you agree? If so, why Python over other languages like C++?

My first language was actually C++. I used to participate in competitive programming olympiads, so knowing C++ was very important. Yet, Python is way easier to start with. The syntax is easy and in most cases, there is one easy way of doing things.

Python is pretty high level, so starting to learn with Python is easier than the lower-level languages. Yet, it's also very flexible and you can even operate with low-level APIs if you wish.

I think it depends on your long-term goal of what you want to accomplish by learning a language but Python is one of the best ones to start.

If it’s free, how do you generate revenue for your company?

We offer group tutoring in our Pro plan to help with regular practice.
With regular group tutoring sessions, learners get unstuck and progress faster. The sessions are also a great way to make friends in the community of learners. This really helps with keeping the motivation high.

The group sizes are relatively small - 4 to 10 people. So, we try to dedicate as much time per individual learner as possible to really provide value, while also creating a community of learners which is also very important in the long run.

So I am taking the course starting today and I am liking it. I am taking another course later this month that should end with a beginners certificate.

Would this help me open doors to python jobs if I still like it enough?

This will help you learn the most fundamental concepts and gain some hands-on practice. Getting a job offer usually includes a bit more work. Some places ask for algorithms and data structures, others ask for portfolio projects or prior experience. So, after finishing the course there is still some path to go to get a job.

Do you kindly have any recommendations on where to get that experience?

I am a full time recruiter right now and I am trying to get out of that field

I'll try my best.

Practicing algorithms and data structures can be done with Leetcode (https://leetcode.com/problemset/all/). Platforms like HackerRank (https://www.hackerrank.com/) and Codeforces (http://codeforces.com/) are also great. They can definitely be useful when learning algorithms and data structures. I can't recomment any one particular course to be honest though. We will have one on Profound soon, but until then you can use these platforms which are really great!

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There are several ways to gain real-world coding experience through projects. One is by contributing to some projects on GitHub (which might be hard for a starter). Another can be getting an exciting idea and working on it. A great example of such a person who did it publically is Kalle Hallden: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5tVJtjoxKzpxnc9ventef-1sgvoR8nqG He started creating a gym tracker app and released it to the app store. You think of an idea that would be interesting for you and create an app/website/game after finishing the course and having enough knowledge base to do that.

Do you need a college degree to make a good amount of money in tech? I know you can get a entry position long as you can demonstrate that you have the skills, but wat about wanting to move up the latter?

From my experience, people get to the mid and senior positions after demonstrating good performance on entry-level tasks. Therefore, I would say that experience and actually having the skills is more important than a college degree.

I have participated in many interviews and all of them concentrated on the actual skills of the candidate and prior experience and not degrees and titles.

Not trying to start anything here but can anyone not using server side apps tell me what advantage I would get from learning Python?

There are many things one might do with Python. Data Science and Machine Learning are great examples. Scripting and ethical hacking are other. Python is even making into the front-end: https://pyscript.net

So, the possibilities after learning Python are very broad. You can do really a lot of things.

Are the projects in increments of "print hello would" and then "design a chess game"?

The progress is very gradual. It starts with printing basic things and then develops gradually to more advanced concepts like lambda functions, working with files and using built-in data structures

What is your technique in teaching Python?

We concentrate on the practical aspect. To prepare a person for a job where they will be coding, the best preparation is to practice coding.

We use many interactive exercises and mini-projects to help learners actually master the concepts and move forward confidently. Every new topic is explained with complementary exercises. So, you actually learn by doing (to the point where the only way to make progress on Profound is by writing code).

Does the practical component of Profound bear any resemblance to Tinkerlearn (from way back in early iOS days - pre-Swift)?

I have always thoroughly enjoyed that method of learning, namely by seeing what the code does, mapping that to the tangible functionality in the live app, and then partaking in guided troubleshooting to galvanize understanding around any particular concept - learning by tinkering.

As a student getting feedback is very important. Profound Academy focuses on giving instant feedback to enable students to learn at their own pace. Traditional schools and universities usually require several days or even weeks to check the homework and then hand out the checked versions to students. That slows down the learning process and affects the quality of the learned material. With instant feedback, students know exactly at every point that they have mastered the topic and they have a good understanding of the covered material.

In terms of Profound, what are some ways in which instant feedback is delivered to the student?

All the exercises are checked automatically by the platform and evaluated in a matter of seconds. So, you get the verdict on the code you've written in the matter of a single click.

This greatly improves the speed at which the students can learn the material and move forward confidently.

I teach computer science at a cyber charter school and have almost zero background in coding. (Long story) After teaching our current courses for a year, I’m realizing that our intro to JAVA and Python course needs a rewrite. Would your course integrate into our LMS (Moodle) if I can talk my admin into using it for the Python portion?

We don't currently support integrations but I would be happy to work on it to make the course available for more people.

A couple of questions I'm very curious about:

What level of knowledge does the current course provide? How do you see the integration with Moodle? How many students are there in the course?

I had less than 50 students in each semester-long class. It’s a beginner level intro to JAVA first then the same topics but in Python for the second half of the course. All grading is recorded by me in Moodle but there are computer-graded quizzes that are logged immediately with no teacher input. If direct input wouldn’t work, the teacher could input scores if there is a record available from your system. Is that enough info?

Great! Our platform does all the grading automatically, so that part should be relatively straightforward. I guess we can work on the Moodle integration in the near future to help teachers use our courses as part of their syllabus. Thanks for the provided info! I'll be happy to keep in touch and update you as soon as we have something ready!

I’m a teenager and I find it very hard to keep focus with coding do you have any tips?

There are probably different good answers to this. I think one of the most important things when learning a skill is the environment. When you're surrounded by people who constantly talk about one particular thing with excitement and passion, you're very likely to get passionate as well and might spend sleepless nights working on a thing.

For me, that used to be in high school when I started coding and there was a group of people who participated in competitive programming olympiads. We had weekly meetings and some competitions every week as well. I started to get into it little by little and at some point, I used to spend most of my day coding and trying to solve a challenging problem (this might even be at night).

I would attribute this interest to the competitive nature of the competitive programming and the environment of other students that had the same interests. If you find great people with the same interest in coding, you most probably will be able to progress faster and will keep your motivation high.