An online course, "An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python", on Coursera

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As a programmer by profession I've wanted to start learning Python. I signed up for An introduction to Interactive Programming in Python on Coursera in September. It was a free course from Rice University. Now that the course is complete I wanted to share where I thought it did well and where it could have benefited by stepping away from the ideas of traditional courses.

The material in the course was presented through lecture videos and online programming examples. Each week of the course consisted of lectures, followed by quizzes and mini-projects that required knowledge of that week's material in order to complete. Because the course was supported by professors and teaching assistants at Rice University there was support for students via online forums and chats, although I never used any of these resources.

Capture of a video of Joe Warren, one of the professors at Rice University

The presentation of the material was clear and the production quality of lecture videos was good. The instructors kept the lectures short enough, <10 minutes per video, which made it easy to find time and focus to watch the videos in one piece. I did make use of the 2x playback option because they were a bit too slow for me. Sometimes they tried their hand at humor but I wouldn't have missed it if they hadn't.

At times the structure of the course felt out-of-place being presented as an online course, as if it were a traditional class that you showed up to that was wedged into the online format. Even though the course materials were solid it wasn't enough to make a good course into a great course.

The weekly quizzes, for example, were part of the course grade. While passing the quizzes did force you to know the material necessary for the mini-projects, a lot of the material was busy work. Many questions required you to simply look things up in the Python documentation, which you would probably do when implementing the mini-projects in any case. Some questions required the implementation of Python code to calculate or determine values. Even if you understood the concepts and could implement and use the material, you still had to do the busy work to implement the code to calculate the answers to questions. If you didn't do this busy work your overall grade would suffer, even if your mini-project scores were high.

A core technical component of the course was CodeSkulptor, a web browser based Python interpreter/editor developed by one of the professors. CodeSkulptor makes it nearly effortless for someone to start editing and running Python code on any computer with a modern web browser. The professors made the course more welcoming by making it easy for students to quickly edit and run an example Python program. CodeSkulptor was used throughout the course to help test behavior during quizzes and to edit/implement mini-projects.

CodeSkulptor.org showing the default program template

CodeSkulptor provides a simple "Save" button that when clicked saves your code into the cloud and updates the url in the browser. This means that you can save several versions of your assignment and visit the matching urls to go back to older versions. Having both the browser based interpreter/editor and the cloud saving means that students can get started right away writing and running Python. Students can skip downloading and installing stand alone Python and various libraries to enable graphics or sound, or how and where to save files and how to submit them for grading. Homework assignments were submitted by submitting the url from a saved version of your assignment, copied and pasted from the browser's address bar. The cloud based saving was used throughout the course.  Each mini-project came as a url to a saved python code template for that particular mini-project. Clicking on the link would open up CodeSkulptor with the mini-project template filled in.

Using a web based tool like CodeSkuptor was a great idea and likely contributes to a much lower rate of early student dropout by making it easy for students to get started.

Here are some screenshots of my versions of some of the mini-projects.

Memory game

Blackjack

Rice rocks - Asteroids clone

The mini-projects were the area where the course did well. They let the student exercise their knowledge to build a project that had some functionality. The instructors provided templates which let the students focus on selected areas of learning rather than implementing boilerplate code. The mini-projects over the course of the class ranged from the classic memory game, to blackjack to a form of Asteroids, with a steerable, movable ship. It was fun to fill in the missing parts of the games and watch them start working.

The course pacing felt like a hold-over from traditional courses. Some online courses, such as the ones from Udacity, enable the student to progress at a pace of their own choosing. This Coursera Python course was spaced over a set period of time. The materials for each week were presented at the beginning of each week and unfortunately it wasn't possible to see what the next week's materials, quizzes or mini-projects were. In the case of the mini-project, it wouldn't make sense to permit the entire mini-project to be visible ahead of time as the mini-project templates sometimes built on and included the previous week's mini project solutions.

The course did a good job of presenting the material but unfortunately the overall presentation and format brought back memories of boring busy work in high school and showed its roots in traditional classes. It wasn't that the course wasn't good, it was well done and presented, it just felt like a traditional in-person class that was converted to an online course. The mini-projects were the best part of the class. They were interesting and provided real-world applications of the programming principles taught in the class. I'll probably take another online course in the near future and I'll be keeping my experience with this course in mind when selecting the next class.