Learn programming online - South African based organisation (C++/Java/Python/C#)

MartinMorrison

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Programming is a scare skills in South Africa. In 2012, I was part of a team that set up a programming education initiative - Hyperion Development - www.hyperiondev.com.

We offer our courses for free to full-time (normally university students) and prisoners in the Western Cape. As of today we have processed several thousand registrations from over 95% of all tertiary institutions in the country, and we are now the largest online platform for aspiring programmers in Southern Africa. Our primary funder is the Python Software Foundation in the US with whom we have a close relationship with.

The platform is tailored to the needs of a SA audience - low data, limited internet, and more individual and human support than typical online courses. All work is marked by hand.

To further fund this initiative, we're offering short, 3-5 week online courses for working professionals in the basics of programming, or more intermediate web/mobile/software development. These courses include daily interaction with our SA-based trainers over the entire 3-5 week period - everything is marked by humans. Trainers deliver detailed, individualised feedback, through a system we've built that allows the trainer and learner to work in near-real time on pieces of code to correct errors in coding style, efficiency of solutions etc. Courses are designed to be very flexible, and to be taken part-time alongside a busy work schedule.

Please check out our website - www.hyperiondev.com - for more information, to register for a course, or to give feedback. Happy to answer any of your questions here or through our contact form.

Would appreciate the support of the MyBroadband community who are especially in touch with the issues in IT in South Africa. It was through these forums that we heard about the governments plans to adopt Delphi nationally over Java, and this spurred us into action. We eventually managed to train nearly half of all high school IT teachers in the country for the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal Departments of Education - in Java with funding from Oracle. Very keen to continue trying to help IT on a large scale.
 
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Hi guys,

I used to study at UKZN (eventually ended up at Cambridge) and was really concerned about the lack of programming competency in South Africa. So I set up a programming education initiative in 2012 and it has grown to a pretty big project.

We offer our courses for free to full-time (normally university students) and prisoners in the Western Cape. As of today we have processed several thousand registrations from over 95% of all tertiary institutions in the country, and I'm confident that we are now the largest online platform for aspiring programmers in the country. Our primarily funder for this is the Python Software Foundation with who we have a close relationship with in the US.

The platform is tailored to the needs of a SA audience - low data, limited internet, and more individual and human support than typical online courses.

To further fund this initiative, we're offering short, 3-5 week online courses for working professionals in the basics of programming, or more intermediate web/mobile/software development. These courses include daily interaction with our SA-based trainers over the entire 3-5 week period - everything is marked by humans. Trainers deliver detailed, individualised feedback, through a system we've built that allows the trainer and learner to work in near-real time on pieces of code to correct errors in coding style, efficiency of solutions etc. Courses are designed to be very flexible, and to be taken part-time alongside a busy work schedule.

Please check out our website for more information, or to give feedback. Happy to answer any of your questions here or through our contact form.

Would appreciate the support of the MyBroadband community who are especially in touch with the issues in IT in South Africa. It was through these forums that we heard about the governments plans to adopt Delphi nationally over Java, and this spurred us into action. We eventually managed to train nearly half of all high school IT teachers in the country for the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal Departments of Education - in Java with funding from Oracle. Very keen to continue trying to help IT on a large scale.

Cheers

I am a uni student, could I check it out?
 
Hi Martin i want to find out do you guys charge for the course or what? and if there is a charge how much is it? i am fairly new to programming and googled around most people recommend starting off with python which i intend to do i know how to do basic commands in python and i want to learn more to start off my coding career
 
Hi Martin i want to find out do you guys charge for the course or what? and if there is a charge how much is it? i am fairly new to programming and googled around most people recommend starting off with python which i intend to do i know how to do basic commands in python and i want to learn more to start off my coding career

Hi Guca. Our courses are free to full-time students everywhere. We support this free teaching by selling separate courses tailored to working professionals. Please visit www.hyperiondev.com/courses to see these courses and prices. Free courses are available by clicking the sign up link at www.hyperiondev.com.

We specialise in Python so I would highly recommend one of our online courses - our founder was recently nominated for a position on the Board of Directors of the Python Software Foundation (the international organisation representing Python globally).
 
So, I see trying to teach Raspberry Pi there, just a real pity that platform is so crappy.
 
Any opportunity to interact with others will do for me. I'm a little tired of having to learn everything by myself, progress is quite slow. I'm signing Up today
 
I am more concerned on curriculumn side. Especially the web dev category, It look's like its only basic's and not including some sort of framework's to work with.
 
I am more concerned on curriculumn side. Especially the web dev category, It look's like its only basic's and not including some sort of framework's to work with.

Hi Pratlou. Our web dev courses do actually cover frameworks. The framework we primarily teach for web development is Django. Django is a powerful and popular framework for web development. Here's a list of some popular sites built on it: http://codecondo.com/popular-websites-django/. Courses are suitable for both first-time programmers or those with experience in other languages/frameworks.
 
Certainly. Trainers have industry experience in software development from companies such as Google, Amazon, Merrill Lynch, CSIR, and King.
With respect, a 3 month summer intern at Merrills is not going to teach us much.
 
Click here for a quote for workshop or online training

What makes your online training worth paying for, over the countless free online courses, many of which are run by universities?
 
With respect, a 3 month summer intern at Merrills is not going to teach us much.

Certainly! If you're one of the lucky few in Southern Africa who have strong technical experience and the confidence to learn modern languages by yourself, you wouldn't need nor seek such general technical training.

What makes your online training worth paying for, over the countless free online courses, many of which are run by universities?

There are definitely many well-developed and comprehensive courses out there - some paid and some free. A distinct feature of our paid online courses is one-on-one support throughout the entire duration of the course from a trainer. That means all your code is marked by hand, individualised feedback given on each piece of work your submit (eg coding style, approaches taken to solve a problem) and phone/in-person support given for technical issues you may run into (eg IDEs, installation). For some, a free course with more high level feedback, support, and automated marking may be more what they're looking for!
 
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Hi Pratlou. Our web dev courses do actually cover frameworks. The framework we primarily teach for web development is Django. Django is a powerful and popular framework for web development. Here's a list of some popular sites built on it: http://codecondo.com/popular-websites-django/. Courses are suitable for both first-time programmers or those with experience in other languages/frameworks.


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