First and foremost, this class was free, so I suppose that’s meant to excuse some of the calamity and timeshare feel to it, but overall this wasn’t a great use of time. Never mind that they ran out of pizza before the event actually began.
Microphones didn’t work, wrong wifi passwords were given, and a slew of behind the scenes technical difficulties came rushing front of house while a team of sloppily dressed pseudo professionals stood up to teach code after an unnecessary history of General Assembly where they likened themselves to Myspace…
That might be why they started with a basic overview on “what is the internet”. (I know, I wish I was kidding, too.) In fairness, this is likely helpful for those who haven’t yet needed to use a computer in their careers or never learned, maybe even those who are much younger and their parents would like to get them started early, but overall this class is marketed to a much different demographic. They paid Facebook to find me and people like me. So you’d imagine they’d get more to the brass tacks with the target audience they captured – hovering near 100 people, so nothing to sneeze at.
Outside of the average hiccups like a projector issue or audio problems, they didn’t account for the strain on their wifi. Overall, they wound up with 100 hungry people unable to learn. It felt as if they didn’t actually know how many people had signed up or if this is just a larger indicator of how ill prepared General Assembly is to teach a course of this size. With this being the first impression for the majority (in a poll before we started only 8 people raised their hands indicating they’d taken a GA course previously) I’m sure I wasn’t the only one wondering is this is how all courses are run.
In the pitch for this free class (which a person’s time isn’t free, especially when they have to trek all the way to Santa Monica and pay for parking) there were some lofty goals like leaving with a “custom, working web page from scratch.” There we were, half way through the allotted time and the trainer (I’m reluctant to use the word teacher here) couldn’t even basic coding terms like ol/il/dl meant while going over her own list. With a brief pause for questions, we finally moved on to playing with some basic code.
With only 20 minutes left in the class, we had created a page with a title, header image, background color, font choice and a few paragraphs. At that point we were allowed to play with some “code by numbers” type instructions. All in all, if you’re already able to read the code that’s enabled on your own WordPress site or you’ve spent any time on Reddit, a php community board or remember Frognet, these basic classes aren’t for you unless you need a refresher.
Overall, however, this felt more like a community center with volunteers doing their best. In that light it would be great, but I’m not sure this would be money well spent when LA Community College is generally the same cost, more accessible and it leads to an actual degree.
