A thorough review to help you decide if you should use Treehouse for your e-learning!!
Introduction to Treehouse
Treehouse is an online teaching platform that provides high quality content and courses to its learners. With the main objective of facilitating and expediting the learning curve of aspiring web designers and programmers, Treehouse offers beginner to expert level courses in web design, web development, game development and mobile development. These courses are taught by a team of expert instructors and may help you in getting a coding job in the IT industry.
So, now you know what Treehouse teaches to its learners and how you can use this reputable e-learning platform to gain education.
| Pros: • A large array of coding classes, • Accessible via most of the mobile platforms, • 7 day free trial, • Enrollment can be paused and renewed any time, |
| Cons: • Requires credit card details even for the free 7 day trial • Monthly fee can accumulate |
Background
TreeHouse was founded back in 2011 by Ryan Carson, in Orlando, Florida. It was originated from previously a video-tutorial based service provider company named Carsonified.
TreeHouse is an IT based Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) provider; primarily the courses offered by the Treehouse to the general public are based around the subject areas of app, game and web development and other professionally-developed courses on IT-related topics.
After giving you a general idea of what the Treehouse is (and what it offers), I will move on to the actual review of TreeHouse. Let’s start off by discussing the courses offered by the platform.
Treehouse Courses
Treehouse offers 300+ courses on 23+ subject areas. Whether you are at a beginners’, intermediate, or advanced level, the company claims to deliver excellent content in an easy way to its 50,000+ learners enrolled in different classes.
There is a catalog at the Treehouse website that tells you about all the courses the platform offers. You can either browse by difficulty or browse by topic. All you need is to sign up to get access to the entire library. As a Treehouse student, you will get access to workshops, conferences, bonus content, and much more. Below is the list of some of the topics taught at the Treehouse’s e-learning platform.
- Android
- C#
- Business
- APIs
- CSS
- Computer Science
- Databases
- Data Analysis
- Development Tools
- Design
- HTML
- Digital Literacy
- Java
- Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI)
- JavaScript
- Machine Learning
- Learning Resources
- Python
- PHP
- Ruby
- Quality Assurance
- Security
Learning Tracks are the most outstanding aspect of Treehouse, that allow you to study a sequence of courses, taking you from beginners to advanced level.
You can also choose an even more extensive (6 to 12 months long) program known as Techdegrees. After gaining a Techdegree you may start searching for your desired job!
With a large number of courses Treehouse is a preferred choice for a large population of e-learners all across the world. I’m sure you must be wondering how much it costs to use the e-learning platform for Treehouse!!
Pricing
Treehouse gives an excellent opportunity by offering you a 7-day free trial, to check if you are satisfied with the syllabus and course content designed by them.
In this time you can check if our review matches with your experience of using the Treehouse.
You can even pause your account, and take a break, and Treehouse won’t charge you until you decide to continue your learning .
After completion of the trial period, Treehouse provides its users with three kinds of subscription-based options of payment. These include:
- Basic ($25 Monthly): Basic plan is advisable if you have no idea whether you will continue coding as your career or not, or if you are just giving it a try. I must say that the basic plan is suitable for most of the beginners out there, as it provides you with the necessary tools which are needed to get started.
But, you must not forget that with the Basic plan, you won’t be able to download or see videos offline!
- Pro Plan ($49 Monthly) : This plan includes all features of the basic plan. It offers full access to the entire course library of Treehouse. You can even access bonus content too!
The most useful feature is, you can download or watch the videos in offline mode and attend your class anytime, anywhere. This plan is extremely beneficial if you wish to pursue your coding career.
- Techdegree ($199 Monthly): This subscription plan includes every feature of the Basic and Pro plan, as well as you can take benefit from receiving live projects, personalized feedback, and comments from the industry experts.
You can choose this plan for you, if you are willing to excel in the IT field and are motivated to gain education at an advanced level.
If you have a valid ID and the desired supporting documents, you may even qualify to get a discount in the price for the subscription plan. You can even save money by inviting your friends to become a Treehouse member. You can even get a free access to Treehouse courses after making 5 new members with full membership plan at the Treehouse.
User Interface
The interface of Treehouse is quite simple. After your sign up, Treehouse asks questions to check your interest and experience level and then recommends a learning track according to your past experience. During the free trial, you may also receive occasional emails with reminders about what tasks you must work on next and reminds you of when is your trial ending. The left menu provides a quick access to the forums, class listing, help and account settings. The Dashboard shows how much you have progressed in your course. You can also access Workspaces, to practice coding outside of the coursework. At a time, you may use up to 100 workspaces, each workspace has a 50MB storage limit.
After landing on the Treehouse homepage, you can simply sign up for a 7-day free trial period.
After you become a Treehouse member, you’ll see a very user-friendly interface that you must be very familiar with. It’s easy to use interface is one of the most attractive aspects for the users
You’ll easily find link for Techdegree at the website’s header and then search for the job-ready programs for users belonging to all skill levels and backgrounds.
Without signing up as a Treehouse member, you wouldn’t be able to access any course for your learning. After landing on the course page, you’ll find links like “what to learn” (including the entire list of topics), “teacher” (that would lead you to the teacher’s page), and the “course syllabus” (which includes the details of course content).
Here, you can also find links to Treehouse Community and Tracks.
Tracks are a bunch of workshops and courses that will give you guidelines about a whole technology (from beginner to proficient skill level).
Treehouse community includes a large number of students always ready to offer help and encouragement to keep you going.
Quality of Content
I know that as a student your main interest lies in finding out about the quality of content offered by the Treehouse. Who would want to pay for something that provides low quality stuff to its users. So, here is my review about the quality of content at the Treehouse.
There are many websites that offer free access to their content, but you’ll see that the quality of their content is compromised. Unlike those websites, Treehouse has a unique approach. During the free trial, Treehouse allows you to access each and every course including those that contains the finest content and you can complete the entire course during the 7 days free trial.
Also, you can easily find many positive comments left by most of its users about the high-quality of course content and online classes offered by the Treehouse.
Learning Experience at Treehouse
I’m sure you must be interested to know about my personal experience of using Treehouse for my learning. Before writing this review, I enrolled myself at the Web Design Track, which was 51 hours long. The intro video (which included the basics of CSS and HTML) lasted for nearly 4 minutes. I used it as a guide, and managed to build a simple website after the class. As a beginner, I fairly enjoyed my experience of developing a website but if you have some prior knowledge and experience in coding you can even build something more advanced and do something that you’re more interested in.
During the class, I saw pop-ups with useful keyboard shortcuts, and I was also taught how some of the codes look like; for instance the symbols for open tag & close tag. After watching some videos, I had to complete a Code Challenge to check what I had learned. I received points for every challenge that I completed.
After submitting the code challenge, the instructor assessed my work and gave his feedback and suggestions for the mistakes that I made. I also filled longer quizzes during my learning to check my knowledge, though I also had the option skip them. I believe, the quizzes were very helpful to check my learning—not too difficult and not too easy. I gained a badge after each quiz that I passed. My instructor also sent me a congratulatory message after I earned my first badge, which was a nice gesture. You can even unsubscribe if you don’t like to receive such emails.
I found both their guest teachers and full time teachers to be highly professional. Most of them hold many years of experience and solid technical background.
You will not get a certificate on completion of basic Treehouse courses. However, you get a certificate after completing a Treehouse Techdegree.
I’m sure that you’ll find my personal experience of using this e-learning platform to be helpful in deciding if you should use Treehouse for your online education.
Conclusion
After reading the above analysis, you can say that Treehouse is one of the most significant platforms to learn coding. If you are someone who is willing to start tech career then it’s worth trying a 7 day free trial of Treehouse, and you can simply switch it off if you are not satisfied.
You can begin with their basic course and subscription and if you wish to pursue your coding career, you can get subscription of their Techdegree program. If you consistently follow through its content, you may be able to handle your first coding job in maximum 6 months time. I’m sure this is what you are looking for, isn’t it?