Nanodegrees

GitHub Adds Ruby Nanodegree to Student Developer Pack

In an ongoing partnership with Udacity, GitHub offers its Student Developer Pack members a month of free access to any Nanodegree program.

• By John K. Waters
• 04/04/16

GitHub, the web-based Git repository and code-hosting service, has extended its partnership with for-profit online educational services provider Udacity to offer its GitHub Student Developer Pack members a month of free access to any Nanodegree program, the two companies announced on March 17.

GitHub’s Student Developer Pack is a program that gives students free access to developer tools from 14 different technology companies, from GitHub’s own Atom text editor to Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, CrowdFlower’s crowdsourcing platform to the AWS cloud.

The company partnered with Udacity last year to develop the Ruby Nanodegree program, which includes three levels of training: Beginning Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and Senior Ruby on Rails. Partnering with Udacity to create the Ruby Nanodegree series was “a step to help close the talent gap and empower aspiring developers to gain new skills,” GitHub said at the time.

GitHub also helped Udacity to create several Nanodegree programs, including the Full Stack Web Developer program and the Front-End Web Developer program.

“By creating a project-based curriculum, we afford each student the opportunity to build a rich portfolio of projects that can be shared with prospective employers, the broader developer community, and of course, via GitHub,” wrote Udacity senior writer Christopher Watkins in a blog post. “We know directly from our hiring partners how much they value the experience, confidence, and skills our students consistently display.”

Udacity has trade-marked “nanodegree,” but the concept of an institution-agnostic micro-credential isn’t new, and the company isn’t the only provider. Coursera, for example, has partnered with Google, Instagram, and others to provide a series of “microdegrees.”

Udacity co-founders Sebastian Thrun, David Stavens, and Mike Sokolsky pioneered the commercialization of massive open online courses (MOOCs). Thrun famously abandoned the MOOC in 2013, declaring that his company had “a lousy product,” and announcing plans to shift focus from higher education to corporate training.