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How to create offline coding-bootcamp-like experience for your online school

There is nothing more noble than teaching something to someone. You are gathering the information you gained from your own teachers or experience, and passing it on to your students.

However, in today’s digital time, there are many things that need to be done in the exact order to deliver a wonderful experience that exceeds offline experience. Let’s cover a few of them.

Why does it make sense to run an online coding academy today?

If you’re teaching programming online, it makes so much sense to run it online.

  • The cost of running it is low. You do not need physical infrastructure like classrooms to teach.
  • Everything can be taught with a mix of video + practice (more on this later)
  • Platforms like Fermion exist – built specifically for this use case.
  • Can be conducted by even one person. There are many examples of people earning crores (millions) in years just by teaching on their own.

Where do offline bootcamps excel?

Offline bootcamps excel at selling the idea of interactive learning. Their biggest point is that there is no neat and tidy way to distribute exercises, and make people practice in online environments.

Community is also a point there but that’s subjective to every student as well.

How to beat the experience provided by offline coding bootcamps?

When you compare your online course against an offline bootcamp, you want to maximize your benefits because offline has a strong appeal. Here’s every angle you can play on:

  1. Education quality (subjective)
  2. Pricing
  3. Interactiveness
  4. Community
  5. Live classes

Here, education quality is of course subjective to every student, and because I know you’ll bring your best content online, let’s focus on other parts.

Let’s discuss them.

Make your courses interactive

The next time you want to teach a React.js topic to your students, guess what would they appreciate more:

  1. A 40-minute recorded lecture
  2. A 30-minute live lecture (available as a recording later)
  3. A 30-minute live lecture followed by exercises they can practice and results you can see

A similar question, next time you’re teaching Java Springboot, or docker, or Kubernetes.

See the increasing “difficulty” going from point 1 to point 3? While almost every online bootcamp provides the ability to have live classes, why do very few have coding labs?

What does an interactive coding lab look like?

Here’s a demo of an interactive coding lab:

What you see here is years of work, available at a click of a button for you:

  1. Fully managed infrastructure
  2. No variable cost to you as business owner
  3. World-class experience for your users
  4. Ability to evaluate test results
  5. Ability to run long-running tasks

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Why is it so hard to have coding labs?

Because building a reliable infrastructure that can run coding labs is almost a company, not a feature!

Take a look at Replit for example. They have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to accomplish this. However, it is not suitable for content creators building their online academies.

On the other hand, fermion, a platform for technical content creators, allows you to embed any coding lab. Every programming language and technology, included but not limited to, is supported on Fermion:

  1. HTML/CSS/JavaScript
  2. Every frontend framework (React, Angular, Vue, etc.)
  3. Rust
  4. C#
  5. C/C++
  6. Java/Kotlin/Springboot
  7. Swift
  8. Kubernetes/Docker
  9. …and many more

How can I make my courses interactive with Fermion?

Simple, just schedule a demo with us and we’ll show you how you can do that in a few clicks. Here’s the link: https://sales.fermion.app/demo

Fermion supports:

  • Ability to create any coding lab
  • Add evaluation to it
  • Get test scoring in an individual/batch manner
  • Inspect code of the user, leave feedback and point suggestions

Make use of community

Building a strong community is crucial for the success of any online coding bootcamp. It can really improve the learning experience and provide value that rivals or even surpasses offline bootcamps. Here are some ways to leverage community in your online courses:

  1. Create a dedicated discussion forum: Set up a platform where students can ask questions, share experiences, and help each other. This could be a custom forum on your website or a private group on platforms like Discord or Slack. This is also supported on Fermion.
  2. Encourage peer-to-peer learning: Facilitate study groups or pair programming sessions where students can collaborate on projects and learn from each other.
  3. Host regular Q&A sessions: Organize live sessions where students can ask questions directly to instructors or industry experts. This adds a personal touch and helps clarify doubts in real-time.

Conclusion

Running a coding academy is tedious. You have to do marketing, brand building, content creation, and scheduling. Let us help you with the technology so you can focus on expanding your business. Schedule a demo today and let’s start.