This is a review on the online “Coding Bootcamp” from UCF. It really should be called “Web Development Bootcamp.” It says “Web Development” on their website https://bootcamp.ce.ucf.edu/coding/ but I did not see this page when signing up for the class. This program was a referral to me from a family member and I talked with a recruiter for the class over the phone. I told her what I was looking for (mostly interested in C++ or other low-level programming) but she did not make it clear that it was a web development program. After a little over a month with the six-month program and realizing the direction of it, I wrote a dissatisifed email to the program director asking to be removed with a refund and was told I was not within the 2-week cancellation period so nothing could be done for a refund. I dropped the course still and tried to salvage my investment by speaking with the Career Director to see if I could use their Career Services (helping you set up self-marketing and networking to find work) for IT in general and was told “as a matter of policy, I am unable to work with students who do not complete the program.” This was a complete waste of $10,000 which is especially crippling when I am still trying to even start a career.
As for the content of the course, it explains the basics of programming very nicely in the first several lessons where you are given coding challenges to try to solve basic and intermediate mathematical and logical problems within the Ruby language. After that, though, is the HTML section which is horrendously short for what is supposed to be a web development course. The HTML lessons are very rushed to get you into the Ruby on Rails section which is a large portion of the course. You start frequently seeing in the lessons “how this works isn’t important” or “this will be explained later” (“later” often being a synonym for “never”) which is honestly fine for teaching practices in very subtle moderation but when so much explaination of how Ruby on Rails and HTML works is skipped over and rushed to get you to the end of the class that it becomes so difficult to follow. I found myself looking up my own tutorials online and just clicking the next within the bootcamp website beacause the teaching material just was not there. I did not get far enough into the course to see how teaching Javascript was handled but it’s good to see that it’s included because Ruby on Rails is a very niche and not widely used framework whereas Javascript is a useful skill in many, many more jobs.
If you are looking to start in web development and make web pages this may be a good choice for you. Personally it’s not what I wanted to do. The main reason for the low review is that the bootcamp staff seems to care more about taking your money and keeping it than they are concerned about helping you start a career. Now I have a $10,000 student debt and no job to pay it off. For this reason I will never recommend UCF’s programs to anyone.