Bad experience with online programming school LearnStreet

The "learn programming online" space is growing fast. With Treehouse, Codecademy, Code School, Coursera, Udemy, Khan Academy and others, LearnStreet has some stiff competition. Let's take a look at how they stack up.

LearnStreet is pretty new. They launched in public beta in the Fall of 2012 with a million dollars in funding after some time building their idea at a startup incubator. That bodes well for them. It means they have time to build, get feedback, and tweak their product. Considering that their competition has been mostly been around for a year or more, they have a lot of ground to make up. Others were already boasting tens or hundreds of thousands of users before LearnStreet was a blip on the radar.

Summary

• Offer: Learn to program online


• Cost: $0


• Courses:  JavaScript, Python, and Ruby


• Model: Text instructions, browser console and editor, phase-based


• Direct competition: Codecademy, Treehouse, and Code School

How does it work?

LearnStreet offers programming courses in Ruby, Python, and JavaScript right now. This is a limitation of being new. They're still building their library of content and courses. The courses are similar in structure to Codecademy's "tracks" or Code School's "paths." Following a course will take you from no knowledge to having a solid foundation in a language.

Like other online programming courses, LearnStreet uses the popular "programming in the browser" model for students to get hands-on experience with code. Also, because the editor and console is custom built, they have the ability to use the space itself to direct and teach students.

Good things

It's free.

Bad things

I feel really bad right now because I don't have a whole lot of good things to say about LearnStreet right now. I considered not even writing this review, but these things need to be said and I fear that not warning students will risk them wasting time on a dud product. I feel like they badly need two people on staff:

• They need a brand new, junior developer on the teaching team to help them craft their lessons for beginners. I understood everything in the Ruby course that I followed, but I recognized lots and lots of terms that a beginner would be completely confused by. An example phrase from a Ruby lesson: "Variables are pointers to objects." That's a really bad way to explain what a variable is.


• They need a UX designer, badly. Or maybe they need to fire their current UX designer and hire a new one. Either way, the UX is bad. The split view on the learning pages is disorienting. The console moves awkwardly. The "getting started" help progression is more confusing than helpful. Everything is cramped, especially toward the top of the page. The Dev Tools page is a bunch of videos about things a beginner wouldn't know enough about to even know if they need to watch the videos. And worst, the "live help" chat has been unattended since I started playing with the site a few days ago.

I'm sure a good UX designer will help, but they should also pull back the throttle on the weird and out-of-place UI treatments. Background textures that don't make sense, buttons that look like they're straight from 2004, odd font choices, no color rhythm, and way too much stock imagery. In this area, they need to try less hard.

Not only do they need to get the right people on their team and stop with the weird UI treatments, but they need something to differentiate them. Right now, they're a poorly executed knock-off of Codecademy. It's no surprise that GigaOm compared them to Codecademy in the title of their launch announcement post. What they should be is a new, refreshing way to learn programming. Or, at the very least, do a better job at executing than the company you're copying.

I'm worried for LearnStreet. They look like they're a smart bunch of programmers and I want them to succeed because there's a need for tools like what they've tried to build. Right now I wouldn't recommend spending time learning with LearnStreet. There are better tools that accomplish the same thing without annoying the hell out of you.

LearnStreet has a website and they're on Twitter.