Hi everyone,
(apologies in advance for the non-core-development topic, this is best place I can think of to find Rails experts).
A few weeks ago I floated out an idea on my local (Vancouver, BC) RoR meetup of organizing an online course. In it I said,
"I'm looking into organizing an evenings RoR course and am trying to gauge interest. I've spoken with number of people who want to learn Rails, ranging from total programming beginners to professional looking to grow their toolbox. The course will be quite comprehensive - taking students through building a basic app, but also diving into the Ruby ecosystem, the Rails internals, swapping out different backends for ActiveRecord, deployment options, etc.. The goal is that at the end the students should really feel like they know Rails and can confidently use in their real work (as the other posts on this list attests, there's no shortage of opportunities for Rails devs :)). "
The full post it here: 0-60 Ruby on Rails Course in Vancouver - Vancouver Ruby Meetup Group (Vancouver, BC) | Meetup
There has been *considerable* interest. We limit the classes sizes to 9 max (both since we believe any more than that starts to detract from the learning experience and because we use Google Hangouts for live lectures).
I've been able to find local Rubyists for beginner / non-expert course, but I'd really like to find someone who knows Rails inside out to teach the 'pro' course. The typical profile of a student here is: experienced developer, usually with a related degree and at minimum a couple years experience (often java or .net) but little Rails knowledge. Obviously I can't put these guys in the same class as total programming beginners needing to learn what http is. Moreover, they want a deep understanding of Rails so they can bring it to their companies and be effective in producing real software relatively quickly (as opposed to just being able to create a basic app).
The course will be hosted on Matygo (disclosure: my startup). We've been running Computer Science courses at 4 large canadian universities for 10 months but are shifting now to provide community-targeted courses.
1) Real-time class/lectures using Google + (with extras) hangouts. This is usually 1.5 hours per week, for example Thursday 7-9:30pm PST. 2) 24/7 access to discussion boards, learning resources to read/watch/ try, and assignments through the matygo web (sproutcore), iphone, and android apps.
The idea is to take a real-world quality learning experience and bring it online using the best of synchronous/f2f and asynchronous learning. The course would run 4-6 weeks. I can help as a TA with sourcing materials, organizing, and any other logistics.
With regard to price, in my original email to the list I suggested $149 for the intro course, but given the demand and level of the 'pro' course I think something much closer to $300/seat would be reasonable (or even more if you are a recognized name). We use the app store model (you set the price, we pay 70% out).
Please let me know at paul@matygo.com is this is something you'd be interested in doing.
Thanks in advance! Hope you all have a wonderful day 
Paul
