| | Anonymous | Having finished the Coderspace 13 week Bootcamp on 20th December, I feel the need to warn people about this course.
The coderspace website gives the pretence that the instructors are experienced. The lead instructor taught the class for the first three weeks and to be fair he is a good teacher. We were told that another instructor was joining later in the course to teach PHP and databases. When the other instructor started much earlier in the course than we were initially told (he ended up doing a lot of the javascript frameworks as well as PHP & Databases) the quality quickly deteriorated.
Class time was often spent with the new instructor reviewing his code to see why it was not working and also changing the lecture slides which the students would often advise him that they were wrong and full of mistakes. Having paid a substantial amount of money for an ‘intensive’ bootcamp I was not expecting the classes to be run this way and at the very least the lecturer should have prepared his code and slides to make sure they were correct.
Feedback was given midway through the course to the lead instructor / MD as the class was becoming frustrated and we felt the need to share our views to improve the quality of the teaching and hopefully help the business moving forward. None of it was taken on board and if anything the lead instructor further distanced himself from the course and was not around as often (possibly preferring to develop the online learning side of the business rather than rectifying the problems in the classroom).
Teaching did not get any better and many of the students resorted to online courses in the evenings to make up for what they were not getting taught in the classroom.
The new lecturer was not very knowledgeable on the subjects he was teaching. When asked questions he would often be unable to answer and would say ‘It will all make sense shortly’ which a lot of it never did!!
The Coderspace website also claims to have links to major organisations who are their hiring partners, including BBC, NHS and numerous local software development agencies etc.
A networking event was organised in the Coderspace class room to bring in employers (which we assumed would be the hiring partners listed on the website). Unfortunately the lead instructor cancelled this event a few hours before it was due to take place. A second event was scheduled which took place on 19th December. 1 company turned up who only had an apprentice position available. This was the final kick in the teeth for the students who had all worked really hard developing their portfolios to show the ‘hiring partners’.
The group of students have since found out that the ‘lecturer’ that was brought in to teach us the majority of the course, who was left on his own for most of the time is in fact only 18 years old and does not have any teaching experience and only being 18 has very limited real world commercial developing experience. With a class size of 13 students of mixed abilities and ages how can any teaching establishment assume that an inexperienced 18 year old is ok to be left on his own to teach the group? – It is for this reason that the new instructor lied to the group claiming he was in his 20s. Luckily we found an article on him online from 2016 when he was 17 years old.
Sadly the feedback from the first cohort of the Coderspace bootcamp to try and bring the course up to the specification it was being marketed as was ignored resulting in the 13 students walking out with no links or offers from any of the ‘hiring partners’ listed on the website. We have also had to give a considerable amount of extra time (and extra cost) to teach ourselves correctly through online resources and to pick up on topics that were listed on the curriculum but never delivered by Coderspace.
Should anybody wish to take the Coderspace Bootcamp please allow extra funds and time for the additional learning you will need to undertake. |
