Hi! This is Andy. It's my first time posting on the Haxe blog! I've been too busy working on the back-end things in the past few months. While I'm quite interested to talk about the enhancements I made to the haxe.org and haxelib web sites, I would like to talk about something even more exciting!
I’ve been semi-secretly building an online course to teach Haxe. It is in the form of those massive open online courses (MOOC) offered by Coursera, Udacity, and edX. It will be an introductory course, titled "HX101 Introduction to Cross-platform Development with Haxe". If it is successful, we will create a series of courses on using Haxe in different areas.
Why training courses?
The online training courses will be useful in a few ways:
Firstly, they will serve as the official learning materials, complimenting the Haxe manual, which is not organized as a tutorial but a technical documentation. Beside explanation of language features and concepts, our courses will also include quiz and coding exercises, which help learners to verify their knowledge and to have practical hands on experience.
Secondly, companies can train their employees with our courses. Recently, there is an increasing number of job postings appeared in our mailing list and the Haxe roundups. We know that our community is relatively small compared to JS's or Java's, so it is not that easy to hire a seasoned Haxe developer. One practice is to hire non-Haxe developers and train them to use Haxe. Our courses will teach enough Haxe basics for a developer to become productive.
Finally, the courses can provide some amount of long-term income for the Haxe Foundation by selling completion certificates. While we plan to offer the courses for free, we would like to sell optional completion certificates to those who archived certain grades in the assignments. The certificates will prove students' skill and will help them to apply for Haxe jobs. We also plan to enrich our paid support plans by adding some amount of free certification quota.
Our first course - HX101
We've drafted the outline of our first course, titled "HX101 Introduction to Cross-platform Development with Haxe". It is available at learn.haxe.org. It will introduce Haxe in the area of cross-platform development - from small command-line programs, to interactive web pages (both client-side and server side), to simple games (web and desktop). It sounds like a collection of many different areas, but the course will show you how Haxe brings them together and let us master all these with ease.
Our plan is to offer the course near the end of 2016. We have plenty of work to do: preparing contents, lecture videos, back-end system for registration and assignment grading etc. We're considering to set up a fundraiser where you can obtain early bird discount of the completion certificate and gain access to course preview. Stay tuned!
We need your input
We would like to hear what do you think. Are you interested in attending the course? What do you want to learn in this or future courses? Let us know by completing this short questionnaire! You can also give us an email address in the questionnaire, such that you will be notified when the course registration is open (with potential discounts on certifications).
Title banner photo: "Spring 2012 Student Hackathon Coding" by @matylda (CC BY-SA 2.0)
