Julien Richard-Foy, Vincent Derouand, and Valérie Pedroni (Scala Center)
Happy new year to everyone! We hope 2022 will be of great joy, and will be a source of fruitful collaboration between the Scala Center and the community!
As you might be listing your 2022 goals, why not include Scala in it? Refresh your programming skills, acquire new knowledge, and get a new certificate!
In this post, we remind you of our online courses designed for both beginners and experienced programmers, we report on what happened in 2021, and we share our plans for 2022.
2021 Retrospective
In 2021, with the release of Scala 3 we updated nearly all of our MOOCs to Scala 3:
- Functional Programming Principles in Scala,
- Functional Program Design,
- Parallel Programming,
- Programming Reactive Systems with Akka.
We also kept the Scala 2 versions of these courses online, but we observed that the majority of the learners took the Scala 3 versions (e.g., 97% in the case of Functional Programming Principles in Scala).
The only courses that still use Scala 2 are the courses that depend on Spark, which does not yet fully support Scala 3 (see below our plans in this regard).
We also published a new course: Effective Programming in Scala. This course teaches programmers all they need to be ready to work in Scala. We are proud to report that this course was one of the 100 most popular courses of the year 2021 (out of the 2900 courses created in 2021 on various MOOC platforms). Thanks to Effective Programming in Scala, we believe that hiring should not be a concern for companies using Scala.
In total, in 2021, more than three thousand people completed a Scala online course! Thank you to them for trusting us as their teachers, and congratulations on acquiring new knowledge!
Finally, we have recently re-organized the website to have a dedicated page presenting the Scala courses from the Scala Center. We also published a short video summarizing the main points:
Plans for 2022
In 2022, we plan to update the Spark courses to Spark 3.2 and Scala 3:
Additionally, we plan to experiment with alternative online learning models. So far, all our courses are self-paced and the assignments grading is fully automated. This model is perfect for autonomous learners, but we believe there is also a need for a complementary model, where learners would get code reviews from experts, and one-to-one sessions with instructors. This year, we plan to publish some of our courses under such a complementary model.
Acknowledgements
The Scala Center is committed to providing high-quality, free, Scala educational material. We are grateful to all the learners who pay to get certificates of completion. Our work would not be possible without your support.