arielcamus

Microverse | Remote only | Full time Microverse is a global, distributed school for software developers that doesn't charge students anything until they get hired.

The company is backed by Y Combinator and other top tier investors from Silicon Valley, and the team works remotely from more than 7 countries.

We have full-time students in 70+ countries, thousands of applicants per month from ~200 countries, and graduates from Nigeria to Mexico that have increased their salaries by 2-10x after completing the program.

We currently are hiring for several roles: Head of Growth & Marketing || Head of Business Development & Partnerships || Product Manager.

We offer: Opportunity to join a rapidly growing company and shape our direction and organization || The opportunity to join the whole team at company retreats somewhere around the world once every nine months or so || Work alongside a fully distributed team that lives all around the world and is from 7 different countries.

Apply here: https://angel.co/company/microverse/jobs/

I think you hit the nail on the head with this question:

#2 "Can you run a good program, online or offline, that isn't classroom-based."

In my opinion, every learning experience that requires teachers and/or a physical space is highly limited by its margins, and, as you said, will be much more sensitive to price-based competition.

If you want to increase the quality of the output, you need to increase the number of teacher-hours and real-estate-hours. Considering that labor and real estate are two of the most expensive resources you can think of, that is quite limiting.

Can we really think of a scenario where a high-quality learning experience is not limited by those two resources? I think Thinkful is doing a pretty good job. There is plenty of pedagogical evidence of the high impact that mentor-led education has (e.g. Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem). However, I think they are quite limited in a way that I consider crucial to solving the education problem:

They are very dependent on their mentor-led approach, both from a marketing and a financial point of view. That makes them very expensive and don't let them approach the problem/solution challenge from a more global point of view (i.e. only people in the US can, at scale, afford to pay $15k for a training like this, and their Income Share Agreement is only available to people in the US).

My main question here is this: What makes a mentor such an important element in the formula for student success? Is it the guiding, the technical knowledge, the accountability, the motivation?

My thesis here is that technical knowledge is not that important, but accountability, guiding and motivation are. At Microverse, we currently have students all around the world who are learning to code as part of distributed teams. They key here is that they spend almost 8 hours per day doing pair programming and holding each other accountable. We are "outsourcing" the task of holding students accountable to the students themselves.

However, there is also the motivation and the guiding aspect of the role of the mentor that students themselves can't take care of. In order to solve that, we are using quantitative/discrete input from the students that trigger the intervention of a more experienced mentor.

Also, one of my main hypothesis is that creating more content is not the key to adding value. There is already so much high-quality content available for free that only needs to be curated. And Thinkful (and almost every other player) is not understanding this part either.

Some students will think that they are paying for nothing if there are no teachers, no mentors, no physical space and no original content. However, if you flip the pricing in the way that Lambda School is doing by charging after the program, then the student perspective changes because she knows the only thing that matters is the outcome, and the payment is tied to that outcome.

We (Microverse) are the only training program that is currently offering an ISA available to anyone in the world. And there is a very simple reason why we can afford to do that: we don't have teachers, we don't create content, and we don't need to pay for real estate, all while making our remote experience accessible to everyone and while designing an experience from a motivation/accountability point of view through peer-to-peer work. All of this makes our margins way bigger, and that gives us much more room to take risks.

I launched a remote and collaborative course for more seasoned developers that I think might satisfy your needs.

Unfortunately we are not accepting more students now since we are focused on some other courses, but I'd be curious to know if this format is something that would help you.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/learn-nodejs-doing-remote-pair-...

That would be great. I am sure they would agree on a recurring meeting schedule pretty quickly. The problem is that our courses are remote/online, so they need to agree on a meeting time to do a video conference or call so they can talk to discuss their schedule preference.

I was thinking of putting them in contact using text messages since people are more responsive that way. They could even decide to make a quick phone call. Unfortunately, I have students in more than 30 different countries and sometimes they would need to make an international phone call.

I have also tried inviting them to our Slack team and introducing them to each other so they can do online calls. But people who are not used to using Slack yet tend to not be very responsive, so the back and forth takes forever and people get frustrated in the process.

Yes, the problem with Doodle is that it's incredibly inefficient to select a lot of different available slots of time. It also forces you to make a selection for specific dates. I need something that allows you to select your weekly availability (Mon-Sun) without asking for specific dates.

Microverse.

We are launching a tuition-free and remote software engineering program based on ccollaborative and project-based learning.

Our mission is to train 1 million software engineers by 2030.

Not everyone can afford to spend thousands of dollars or was born in the right place to get access to a college degree.

On the other hand, most people don't have the superhuman willpower to learn alone from home watching videos online for 8 hours a day during a year.

We use Collaborative Learning (e.g. Pair programming between students) to create a learning experience that is as supportive (e.g. Mutual accountability) as a traditional learning experience (e.g. College or bootcamp) and as scalable and affordable as online learning platforms (e.g. Coursera, Udacity).

Clickable link:

Learn to Build a Backend with Node.js doing Pair Programming: https://medium.com/@arielcamus/learn-to-build-a-backend-with...

I think even if that existed, you would still miss one of the most important aspects of college and any other traditional learning environment: the motivational side of having a community of learners and teachers that hold you accountable and help you stay motivated.

I've just started playing with this thesis and published an article about it. I'd love to hear what you think about it: https://medium.com/@arielcamus/learn-to-build-a-backend-with...

The learner is left entirely to their own direction, discipline, and environment.

I think this is one of the main problems of self-directled learning and why, in average, is not nearly as effective for most people unless they are incredibly motivated.

I just started playing with the idea that online collaborative learning can considerably reduce that pain and I just wrote and launched a little experiment to test it:

https://medium.com/@arielcamus/learn-to-build-a-backend-with...

I totally agree with you -- staying motivated, especially if you are learning alone from home, it's incredibly difficult. I have a thesis that I have recently started to validate which is that you can considerably improve motivation in self-directed learning environments by introducing online collaborative learning. I just wrote about it and launched a little course/workshop to test the idea: https://medium.com/@arielcamus/learn-to-build-a-backend-with...

Here is a clickable link: http://www.hackerpath.org/

We are also asking people about their programming level to make sure we don't have anyone who knows nothing about programming. Our purpose with this project is precisely to explore peer-to-peer learning, so we want to force those types of interactions.

Hey wlamartin. PHP is not the only option, we support dozens of programming languages. When you sign up you pick which languages you already know. The other people will do the same. When you are matched we randomly pick one language from the a list that combines both of your languages. What this guarantees is that at least one person will know the language. If that's the case, one person will have to learn from another, and that's precisely what we want to happen.. collaborative and peer to peer learning!

It's super interesting to see how easy it is to learn the basics of a new programming language when you are coding with someone else that already knows it. It's like having a teacher just for you.

In any case, we have removed PHP from the list... everyone hates it haha.

Coderoulette: https://www.coderoulette.com/

How we built it: https://medium.com/@miriammuros/how-we-built-coderoulette-a-...

I've been using Iconfinder for many years for my websites and presentations. Free icons quality is amazing. Will premium icons be even better?

Well... we don't have the money Spotify had, but that's another problem. The main inconvenience trying to reach Europe first is that our business model requires a minimum number of users (let's say 200k) and it is much easier to reach that cap if we have global coverage than if we are just in Europe with a very limited budget.

Spotify is an example, but you can find many others like Evernote, Steam or WoW. It depends on your users willing to pay on a monthly basis. But you are the one that best know your product, if you say it'd difficult, it must be true :)

What about charging monthly? If you could set a lower value than 20-50$ per month and your client life-time is something higher than 6-8 months, you can create something more interesting.

It depends a lot of the topic of your company, but in general, you can do different things:

Contact with bloggers and journalist once your project is on air.

Also start writing a blog about your company and try to create relevant content, it is really amazing how a blog can help you at the beginning (seo, traffic, value).

Algo create a Facebook Page and invite (spam) all your friends asking them for help to spread the word. Do not underestimate your social graph, it could be really valuable.

Create a Twitter account and start sharing interesting content related to your project.