I wonder what manner of chat/discussion tool they'll use to enable this sort of remote-bootcamp experience. Basecamp? Something similar?
If students could watch other people be guided through challenging problems, even a day or two later, replete with code snippets, that might be quite effective.
We use a custom built application for our program. There's a discussion board that Chris and I monitor often and students questions are answered typically in a few hours, sometimes in minutes. We have a chat room too, where students work together to solve problems, and we are there often to help out.
Teaching wise, we follow the "flip the classroom" model - there are lecture videos and we use the live sessions to tie up all loose ends, demo and live code, and do code critiques.
For the curriculum, we have looked at all that's available online but in the end decided to build our own - most online materials either teach concepts in isolation or try to teach too much all at once, which is very overwhelming to students. We crafted a curriculum and refined it from over one year of teaching, and we want to introduce concepts slowly and plenty of exercise before students move on to new topics.
All our courses are project based - our students will write code on their own (not copy and pasting!) for 3 projects, with increasing difficulty, with the last one being a production quality e-commerce app.
Check out our site and I'm happy to answer any questions.
I’m a Rails Tutors student and can have only nice words about the pedagogy, material and teachers (Kevin and Chris) used in this course.
Good material, project based course, interactive chat/forum with other students and live sessions (with live coding) done by teachers is a huge difference when you are learning new topics online.
I’m a self-learning guy but with Rails taking this course is one of the best decisions I have done.
I agree with you that watching the teachers coding the problem solutions is a big difference when you are learning. It’s much better than reading the result in a book because you can ask questions and interact with teachers.
I am also a former student and really enjoyed the class.
The mailing list has been instructional, as well. It's nice to know that, if you run up against a problem, there's help from the instructors and fellow students.
If students could watch other people be guided through challenging problems, even a day or two later, replete with code snippets, that might be quite effective.