web development courses

Insert Tab A into Slot C while folding along Crease B.

Enter the compensation, including tips reported (but excluding sick pay) that are subject to Tier 1 Employee Additional Medicare Tax withholding.

Take before food once daily four times a day.

Let’s face it: the world is rife with ridiculous and often confusing instructions. If you are on your own when combatting kid’s toy assembly, tax forms, or a doctor’s prescription, you know at least you can call that 800 number, reread the IRS instructions, or ask the doctor’s nurse for help. But if you take a do-it-yourself web development course, where do you go for answers? 

What’s the Real Cost?

Suppose you compare two avenues to getting a web development education: 

  • Self-taught, online course through a MOOC (massive open online course) or similar program
  • 2.5 years earning an undergraduate degree in computer and information science with a concentration in web development

The first route requires you to somehow know, without actually having subject knowledge, what you need to be studying. You will never recognize if pre-packaged MOOCs or web development courses actually provide you all the subject content you need. Well, that’s not true, exactly. You will know, too late, when a work project requires a skill you never heard of (or learned) that your “free” course ignored. 

The second route is structured by experienced professors and industry web developers. While they may not know everything, they know significantly more than you, and they are eager to impart a well-rounded education to you, one in which you can ask questions and clear up confusion. 

The time you take going through the self-directed process is time you cannot be learning from acknowledged experts, or applying learned skills to get a better-paying job. This is your opportunity cost, even for a “free” online course. 

What You Miss Being Out on Your Own

Web development courses from accredited institutions are structured to provide essential, foundational skills that will, despite the changing world of technology, last you an entire career. This is the difference between a class and a curriculum. A class in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) gives you deep understanding of a very narrow band of web design. Compare that to the formative structure of even just a fragment of a real curriculum: 

  • Digital Imaging
  • Programming I
  • Storyboarding for Animation
  • Web Client Scripting

If you are considering cobbling together a web development education from free web development courses, consider this: if you were to pay money for a program of coursework designed by someone with your limited knowledge, would you? How can you even know what you do not know, to be able to select classes intelligently? And back to our original question: if you get stuck for answers with an online, self-directed course, who do you ask? 

Learning Takes Discipline

You can strike out on your own, thinking yourself the next self-taught Abraham Lincoln (he really did largely teach himself the law and just about everything else). You may forget that Abraham Lincoln, self-taught frontier lawyer and eventual President, is a stand-out precisely because of the rarity of his achievement. 

Few people have the internal discipline—what educators call intrinsic motivation—to follow through on complete web development courses. Some research suggests MOOC completion rates are as low as 15 percent. An undergraduate course provides extrinsic motivation—healthy peer pressure from classmates, the professor’s expectations, and family pride—to stick with and complete the work. 

Salary and Job Growth in Web Development

web developer salaryThe Bureau of Labor Statistics can present a more crucial aspect to your internal debate. The median annual wage for web developers in May, 2014 was $63,490. Can you afford to leave that kind of money on the table by educating yourself on the cheap, then being unprepared for real work? 

In a field expected to show job growth of 27 percent through 2024 (according to BLS), you simply cannot afford missteps that set you back in lower earnings. You need strong skills, current knowledge, and a structured curriculum to provide you the best opportunities for career advancement. 

Education Beats Scattershot: Earn a Web Development Degree

When you consider the benefits of a real, accredited undergraduate education, you will look at those MOOCs in a new light. Graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Computer and Information Science with a concentration in web development. Then supplement your strong education with the occasional free web development courses in a niche skill. Use MOOCs to brush up or improve existing skills, confident that you have a thorough background provided by a real education. A great place to build that strong foundation is ECPI University. A curriculum in web development at ECPI is superior to any scattershot approach you could piece together on your own. And, ECPI’s professors will answer every question you have along the way. Contact ECPI today—it could be the Best Decision You Ever Make!

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