If we’re honest with ourselves, I think we can all admit we’d love to know something new. It’s the learning part that’s challenging! If we could just snap our fingers or wave a magic wand and instantly know how to program in Swift, for example, then we’d probably all be building apps! But, knowing things requires learning things. And that’s often what prevents us from advancing our knowledge. At Point A, I don’t know any programming languages. At Point B, I’m a fluent developer. What lies between, however, can often seem like too wide a chasm. This is why a learning-by-doing approach is so important.
Learning By Doing
What learning by doing does is recreate the Point A-to-Point B paradigm into a line with many milestones. Think of it as a trip down the alphabet, with a celebration at every vowel. This is how we’ve built our Nanodegree programs:
A – You’re enrolled!
E – You successfully completed your first project!
I – Two more projects completed!
O – You just completed your final project!
U – You’ve earned your valued and valuable Nanodegree credential!*
Udacity curricula is most definitely outcome-oriented, but your path to success is marked by notable, meaningful, and very real accomplishments along the way. At no point in the journey is your next goal out of sight.
*We can say that Nanodegree Plus is our “Sometimes Y” … not everyone one opts for it, but when you do, that’s one more key milestone: getting hired!
Keeping Pace With Technology
In addition to this being an easier, more satisfying, and ultimately more manageable way to approach the learning experience, there are very real benefits to this method as well. In many “traditional” educational environments, you learn, and you learn, and you learn. But then what? You still have to prove you know what you know, before you can get hired to do what you want to do. So the journey from learning to working is extended accordingly.
This can be a particularly ineffective model in any field impacted by technology, because the pace of change is so rapid. By the time you’ve built up the assets to showcase the skills you’ve painstakingly accrued, things have changed, and you’re back to the drawing board. A learning-by-doing model represents a viable solution to this dilemma.
Building Right From The Start
At Udacity, students begin building things virtually from Day One. Let’s look at a sampling of some syllabi from different Udacity Nanodegree programs:
Intro To Programming
PROJECT
Stage 1: Make a Web Page
You will learn the basics of how the internet works and how documents written in a language called HTML form the backbone of the Web. In the project checkpoint at the end you’ll write HTML and CSS (another language) to give your web page style.
Front-End Web Developer Nanodegree program
PROJECT
P1: Build a Portfolio Site
You will replicate a design mockup in HTML and CSS. You will develop a responsive website that will display images, descriptions and links to each of the portfolio projects you will complete throughout the course of the Front-End Web Developer Nanodegree.
iOS Developer Nanodegree Program
PROJECT
P1: Pitch Perfect
Build an app that records a message and plays the audio back through user-selected filters.
In all cases, these are only first projects, but in all cases, you build something real. A webpage. A website. An app. Real things that real people can experience. By the time you graduate and earn your Nanodegree credential, you already have a robust portfolio of projects demonstrating real skills and experience. That Udacity showcases your portfolio for you is really just icing on the cake—the point is that not only have you mastered skills, you’ve got the work to prove it. This is why the leap from hireable to hired is generally so seamless when you’ve earned a Nanodegree credential—because you’ve mastered up-to-the-minute skills, and you’re ready on Day One to go to work utilizing those skills.
So, if you want to know something new, you’re going to need to learn something new. And if you want to turn that learning into working, you need to pursue learning-by-doing. And we can help with that! Enroll today, to start learning AND doing!
