I'm always trying to bridge this gap by learning. Lately, I've tried out two platforms, Codecademy and Coursera. These are both excellent and free resources. The material on both sites is amazing. Neither are magic. You still have to work to learn the material, but the fact that this sort of material is out there is amazing. Stop surfing the web and try it yourself.
Coursera
Coursera has a number of courses given by college professors. The courses have video lectures, homeworks and exams. There are also online discussion forums where students are asking/answering questions moderated by administrators of the course.
I've worked through a few courses (Computer networks, Algorithms, and Databases). I cannot say I completed the courses, because I didn't do all the lectures and exams, but I think I still learned a lot, which is the purpose of it all.
Coolest things about Coursera - the video lectures are insanely good. You get lectures from professors from the best schools in the world for free. If I were a paying student, I'd feel a little bit cheated!
Worst thing about Coursera - I'm not sure why, but some of the courses start and end on a fixed schedule. Once the video lectures and other material is created, I'd like for the material to just stay online so that I can go at my own pace. I found that some weeks would go too slow, and I'd be waiting on material and some weeks would go too fast. But this is a minor gripe, as many of the courses repeat.
Codecademy has a much narrower focus, to teach people how to code. Instead of video lectures, homework and tests, they have a very nice text editor that you can use to interactively code and learn.
I took the web course which focuses on HTML and CSS. Relative to my experience it was a little bit too basic, so I wanted to skip ahead a bit. In any case, due to the fact that it was gamified (I got points and badges along the way), things felt fun and I continued until the end.
Coolest thing about Codecademy - as mentioned before, the editor is great. It allows you to immediately try out the code you are learning without setting up a test development environment.
Worst thing about Codecademy - I haven't encountered anything bad yet. I wonder how things will go as I advance. I will take the JQuery course and see what that's like.
Conclusion
I plan on continuing to use both Coursera and Codecademy. I can't believe such great resources are free.
I imagine that this will be the future of learning. It is much more efficient, convenient and scalable. I am not sure if it is as effective as the traditional mode of learning, but it's working for me. Give it a try!
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