The Web Academy

Last week I did a presentation at The Educational Challenge Conference in Houston. As often happens when I speak at one of these conferences many of the attendees come up to me after the session and ask me about getting training in computer or web skills.

As I have written in other posts here, there are several paths one can take to become a technology professional. I have NOT ever outlined a path that does not require any money on the part of the learner. In most scenarios, the learners are responsible for paying for college courses, buying books, or self paced learning software.

Today I am writing about one the free options. If you are interesting in learning web programming skills but you can’t afford to take classes or buy the learning materials you may be interested in The Web Academy. The Web Academy was born out of the desire to serve, according to their website.

I first learned of the The Web Academy from a mutual friend via Twitter. I immediately connected with the founder Eric Hamilton, on Facebook to learn what I could do to help him accomplish his mission of exposing more young people to web technology. The Web Academy provides FREE web design courses to the community and low cost web development services to non profit organizations and low income businesses.

100% of their course work is distance learning taught by live instructors in real time. In exchange for offering FREE web classes to their students, they require our students to take on at least 3 web development projects. Working on these real life web projects with real web clients gives their students actual work experience in the web industry.

During class time, students are able to interact with their instructors and ask questions, just like being in an actual classroom. All you need is a computer, and a broadband connection and you are able to take these classes and learn a marketable skill free of charge.

What are you waiting for?