This is a **solid path** for those of you who want to complete a **Computer Science** course on your own time, at **little to no cost**, with courses from the **best universities** in the world.
In our curriculum, we give preference to MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) style courses because these courses were created with our style of learning in mind.
The first one is a motivational video that shows a guy that went through the "MIT Challenge", which consists of learning the entire **4-year** MIT curriculum for Computer Science in **1 year**.
The second link is a MOOC that will teach you learning techniques used by experts in art, music, literature, math, science, sports, and many other disciplines. These are **fundamental abilities** to succeed in our journey.
[Introduction to Probability - The Science of Uncertainty](https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-probability-science-mitx-6-041x-2) | 18 weeks | 12 hours/week
[Divide and Conquer, Sorting and Searching, and Randomized Algorithms](https://www.coursera.org/learn/algorithms-divide-conquer) | 4 weeks | 4-8 hours/week
[Graph Search, Shortest Paths, and Data Structures](https://www.coursera.org/learn/algorithms-graphs-data-structures) | 4 weeks | 4-8 hours/week
[Shortest Paths Revisited, NP-Complete Problems and What To Do About Them](https://www.coursera.org/learn/algorithms-npcomplete) | 4 weeks | 4-8 hours/week
This guide was developed to be flexible. Ideally, it can be consumed in a linear approach, i.e. you complete one course at a time, but in reality different people have different preferences with regard to how many courses they wish to take at once, and different courses are available at different times and have wildly different time requirements.
Any course that is part of 'Core CS' section should be available either regularly, in self-paced format, or in archived form. Some of the electives are only available once in a while.
1. Copy [this](https://trello.com/b/9DPXYv5f) board to your personal account. See how to copy a board [here](http://blog.trello.com/you-can-copy-boards-now-finally/).
-`Extra Courses`: cards with that label represent courses that was added by the student.
-`Doing`: cards with that label represent courses the student is current doing.
-`Done`: cards with that label represent courses finished by the student. Those cards should also have the link for at least one project/article built with the knowledge acquired in such course.
-`Section`: cards with that label represent the section that we have in our curriculum. Those cards with the `Section` label are only to help the organization of the Done column. You should put the *Course's cards* below its respective *Section's card*.
-`Extra Sections`: cards with that label represent sections that was added by the student.
The intention of this board is to provide our students a way to track their progress, and also the ability to show their progress through a public page for friends, family, employers, etc. You can change the status of your board to be **public** or **private**.
If you are serious about getting an online education comparable to a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, you should absolutely take **all** of the courses under the 'Core CS' section.
These courses are equivalent to about 3/4 of a full bachelor's degree in CS. So if you want to really complete your studies, then you should select one of the specializations to finish out your program, such as one in Artificial Intelligence or Big Data.
If you are able to devote 18-20 hours per week to this curriculum, taking 1-3 clases at a time, you could hypothetically finish the Core CS section in under 2 years. A specialization would then take you a few more months.
You must focus on your **habit**, and **forget** about goals. Try to invest 1 ~ 2 hours **every day** studying this curriculum. If you do this, **inevitably** you'll finish this curriculum.
> See more about "Commit to a process, not a goal" [here](http://jamesclear.com/goals-systems).
**OSS University** is **project-focused**. You are encouraged to do the assignments and exams for each course, but what really matters is whether you can *use* your knowledge to solve a real world problem.
After you finish a course, you should think about a problem that you can solve using the acquired knowledge in the course. It doesn't have to be a big project, but rather it should show the world that you are capable of creating something useful with the concepts that you learned.
It won't make sense to do a project for *every* course, as some are purely theoretical (e.g. calculus). But anytime you gain practical skills (e.g., a new programming language), you should use it right away to **validate** and **consolidate** your knowledge.
Put the OSSU-CS badge in the README of your repository! [](https://github.com/open-source-society/computer-science)
- Markdown: `[](https://github.com/open-source-society/computer-science)`
- HTML: `<a href="https://github.com/open-source-society/computer-science"><img alt="Open Source Society University - Computer Science" src="https://img.shields.io/badge/OSSU-computer--science-blue.svg"></a>`
- [Projects](https://github.com/karan/Projects): A list of practical projects that anyone can solve in any programming language.
- [app-specs](https://github.com/ericdouglas/app-specs): A curated list of applications specifications and implementations to practice new technologies, improve your portfolio and sharpen your skills.
- [FreeCodeCamp](http://www.freecodecamp.com/): Course that teaches you fullstack JavaScript development through a bunch of projects.
- [JavaScript Projects](https://github.com/javascript-society/javascript-projects): List of projects related with the [JavaScript Path](https://github.com/javascript-society/javascript-path).
You **need** to have in mind that what you are able to create with the concepts that you learned will be your certificate **and this is what really matters**!
In order to show that you **really** learned those things, you need to be **creative**!
Here are some tips about how you can do that:
- **Articles**: create blog posts to synthesize/summarize what you learned.
- **GitHub repository**: keep your course's files organized in a GH repository, so in that way other students can use it to study with your annotations.
The important thing for each course is to **internalize** the core concepts and to be able to use them with whatever tool (programming language) that you wish.
To show respect to all of our students, we will keep a [CHANGELOG](CHANGELOG.md) file that contains all the alterations that our curriculum may suffer.
Our students can trust in this curriculum because it has been **carefully planned** and covers the major **core topics** that a conventional Computer Science program covers.
You can [open an issue](https://help.github.com/articles/creating-an-issue/) and give us your suggestions as to how we can improve this guide, or what we can do to improve the learning experience.
You can also [fork this project](https://help.github.com/articles/fork-a-repo/) and send a [pull request](https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests/) to fix any mistakes that you have found.
If you want to suggest a new resource, send a pull request adding such resource to the [extras](https://github.com/open-source-society/computer-science/tree/master/extras) section.
The **extras** section is a place where all of us will be able to submit interesting additional articles, books, courses and specializations, keeping our curriculum *as immutable and concise as possible*.
We also have a chat room! [](https://gitter.im/open-source-society/computer-science?utm_campaign=pr-badge&utm_content=badge&utm_medium=badge&utm_source=badge)
> **PS**: A forum is an ideal way to interact with other students as we do not lose important discussions, which usually occur in communication via chat apps. **Please use our subreddit/group for important discussions**.
