This week, we’ve relaunched our Learning Rails podcast as a free online course. What’s the difference between an online course and a podcast? Content and delivery.

Content

In the Learning Rails audio podcasts, we focus on the concepts that underlie Ruby on Rails. We like audio podcasts because we can listen to them anywhere, and it’s a fine medium for explaining concepts.

But when you get to coding details, audio obviously doesn’t cut it. So now that we’ve covered all the core concepts in the eight episodes of Learning Rails, we’re switching to screencasts. In the screencasts, you’ll see our screen as we build a Ruby on Rails application, starting from scratch. We’re excited about the possibilities here and we’ll be releasing the first screencast within a couple weeks.

When you want to reproduce what you’ve seen in a screencast, it’s very helpful to have access to all the code being used. So we’ll be publishing the code under an open-source license and providing a repository that everyone can access.

We’ve recast the “show notes” pages as “lesson pages,” and we’ve enabled commenting on these pages. So participants in the course can post questions on each lesson page, and we’ll answer them there.

With this combination of features, we feel that “online course” better conveys the gist of what we’re offering than does “podcast”.

Delivery

You can still get all the podcast and screencast episodes by subscribing to the Learning Rails feed using iTunes or other software. But there’s a couple limitations with this:

• Feeds are oriented toward showing the most recent episodes first, which is fine for a news podcast, but for a tutorial series you really want to see the episodes in chronological order. Some feed readers only show the first few items on the list, so if we put the lessons in order then some users will never know there are new ones.
• The audio and video files delivered by the podcast don’t provide active links, so it’s harder for us to point you to the code repository and other resources.

So we’ve added an email delivery option, which we’re encouraging everyone to sign up for. By signing up for the course via email, you’ll get a message for each lesson, so you’ll get them in order. And with each lesson email, we’ll provide other relevant links, and set some context for the audio or video.

There’s two signup forms, depending on whether or not you want the audio podcasts and then the screencasts, or just the screencasts:

• Learning Rails Course Signup—sign up here and you’ll get all the lessons, starting with the audio podcasts and then moving on to the screencasts. You’ll get one lesson every three days.
• Learning Rails Screencast Course Signup—sign up here if you’ve already listened to the audio podcasts, or if you feel comfortable with the concepts and want to go straight to the coding. You’ll get the first screencast as soon as we release it in early April, and they you’ll get them as fast as we can put them out.

We love feedback!

We’d really like to know how the course works for you. You can leave general comments here on the blog, or post questions or comments on specific lessons on the lesson page.