Finland's "Full Stack Open" Available to English audience

Finland’s educational system is famous for three reasons: its pedagogical outlook, its technological excellence and its openness to the world.

Sticking to the latter, University of Helsinki’s “Full Stack Open 2019” which familiarizes students with the basics of modern web application development, initialy taken in Finish only, has been made available in English too, under the permissive Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license:

“We wanted to make the course available in English as a way to offer Finnish university education for free to an international audience”

Learning part aside, the course aims to directly involve the participants with the industry, by initiating collaborations, hackathons and interviews upon graduating.

However it is important to note this participation, obtaining credits, submitting exercises as well as taking the final exam are available for the students of the University of Helsinki only.The rest of the world can enjoy it in its unsupervised version without all that administrative stuff getting in the way.

The main focus is on building SPA’s with React which inter-operate over RESTful APIs with backend services build with Node.js. Also lately introduced is doing the same but over GraphQL.Other topics include debugging applications, configuration, managing runtime environments and interacting with NoSQL databases.

Good programming skills are required as a prequisite, although surprisingly, “previous knowledge of JavaScript” is not.

Split in 9 parts, counting from zero, the modules are:

Part 0:Fundamentals of Web apps
Part 1:Introduction to React
Part 2:Communicating with server
Part 3:Programming a server with NodeJS and Express
Part 4:Testing Express servers, user administration
Part 5:Testing React apps, custom hooks
Part 6:State management with Redux
Part 7:React router, styling app with CSS and webpack
Part 8:GraphQL

Cutting edge material certainly.

To follow along, the source code can be found on the project’s github repo, of course.

One could say that a bricks and mortar university that offers such highly sought after material free of charge has lost its senses, business wise. Not under the Finish mentality.