joshmhanson
commented
5 years ago This is a good idea, though I don't think we're ready yet to incorporate this.
From what you describe, I'm not sure if milestones are the right word. They're more like early exit points, where a student could stop/pause their linear progression through the curriculum and move "sideways", so to speak, learning the fad-of-the-week that companies are hiring for.
What's good and right about your idea is that the curriculum itself is kept pristine and timeless. What I would add, though, is that it isn't enough just to take courses on ReactJS or whatever. Especially from people who don't have a four-year degree in CS, employers need to see projects to know that students can actually do the work they're being hired for. That's why OSSU eventually needs to provide a structure for students to complete, and be assessed on, projects that apply their knowledge.
You also have to consider the overlap with the "Domains of CS" top-level section, which will contain things like "Frontend Web Development". Key to Domains is that it is meant to be (1) more general than just job preparation/milestones, because it will include targeting both industry jobs as well as graduate-level study, and (2) the driver for how students move through a curriculum, helping to determine which electives to take and what specializations to focus on within an elective.
Version 9 of the curriculum will be purely academic in nature; it will include Domains, but it will not include projects. My hope is that projects can be the major innovation of version 10. Once we have both domains and projects, we can then look at creating clear job and graduate study roadmaps (with associated requirements/projects/courses) for each domain.
ivicts
Since one of the reasons (although not the main focus) we are doing OSSU is to get an internship or job as a self-taught programmer, it will be useful to add jobs opportunities after some OSSU sections as milestones.
The benefits are three folds: 1) It serves as a bonus motivation to complete several courses or sections. 2) Get a sense for which jobs that we can apply after having the particular knowledge from finishing the courses. Since we are self-taught programmers, sometimes, one of the biggest problems is that we keep taking more and more courses because we don't know until when we have the skill needed to make projects or finding a job and stop or pause taking MOOC for a while. 3) If we suddenly wanted to find a job, we can reach that job milestones in OSSU, pause OSSU to learn something more specific (web framework, programming language, etc), and then we can continue OSSU to brush up more advanced CS foundation after getting the jobs or internship.
Examples of what I thought about:
After sections of Core Programming, we can say: Job Milestones: After completing this section and the Core Software Engineering section, you have the ability to find a job as an entry web developer. If you want to strengthen your skills as a web developer to find a job, we suggest you take the following courses:
It will be useful since version 9 of OSSU seems to be very complex.