I took the Android Development Fundamentals course in Autumn 2014, which consisted of 11 weekly evening classes, each 3 hours long. The class was hosted in the downtown Seattle campus, not far from where I work, so it was very convenient.
Unfortunately, I was extremely disappointed in the class and even more disappointed in myself for not requesting a refund immediately once I realized the direction the class was headed.
Although the promotional materials for this course showcased an experienced instructor with 3 years of teaching experience, that is not who taught this class. Instead, the instructor was an entrepreneur with 2 years of Android background who had just begun teaching, and his teaching inexperience showed.
Although I don't doubt that the instructor knows his subject, the class seemed poorly planned, with many long, off-topic anecdotes and poor direction, as if the instructor were working from the most bare of outlines for his lesson plan. Topics were disjointed and the relationships not clearly explained. The instructor frequently had difficulty explaining concepts in detail and early lessons often consisted of reading bullet points from PowerPoint slides.
The code examples were typically developed ad-hoc by the instructor during class, from projects he happened to be working on, rather than being developed specifically for the class and tested in advance. This resulted in lost time as the instructor looked up syntax and attempted to correct bugs to get the code to compile and the examples didn't always clearly demonstrate the topic. Also, as a result, the example code was not available to students before or after class for study and therefore did not contribute significantly to the instruction.
In addition to my complaints about the instructor, the format of the class did not work well, and seems to be little more than a way for the school to increase revenue and class sizes without paying additional instructors. The class was taught in both classroom and online formats simultaneously, with a TA interacting with the online students and acting as a sort of bridge between the two groups.
I was in the classroom group but monitored the online class as well. I discovered that there was a lot of discussion and clarification that occurred among the online students that never made it to the classroom students. Conversely, the online students were unable to hear the student questions or discussion that occurred in the classroom and were not able to request clarification during the lecture in the way that the classroom students could. I think that the learning experience of both suffered as a result.
The equipment had a number of issues as well, including poor online video and audio performance for the first few classes, and missing or unconfigured software on the instructor's machine that had to be installed and configured during class.
In summary, I found the class to be a colossal waste of $1,000, not to mention the many hours of my time. The use of an inexperienced instructor without a well-defined lesson plan, poor class materials and preparation, the ham-handed combining of online and classroom instruction, and of course, the declaration that the last day to request a refund is *before the first day of class* are all reasons that I will absolutely never enroll in another CE course at UW without assurance that the course and instructor are on par with the instruction that should be expected from a professional university.
Instead, I suggest you go check out that well known online instruction site for an excellent Course on Android programming for absolutely free. read more