One of my few "FOMO" things from my younger years is I missed out on going away to University. My friends who did tell amazing stories, made lifelong friends, and got to learn in detail things that fascinate me.
The problem was money, or lack of, even though the UK is one of the better places for affordability of higher education.
Instead of going to higher education I left full-time school at the tender age of 15.
Fast-forward to 1998 and we’d just got married or were getting married, I can't recall exactly. I had a decent job, and some spare time so I decided it was "now or never" to get that degree.
I applied to the Open University which is the main distance learning organisation in the UK, to the point where their programming was on the regular BBC TV schedule, at least back then. They took into account the further education classes I had taken in night classes and day-release, plus some of my work experience, so I didn't have to start from zero, but still there was a big hill in front of me to climb.
Here’s the main book that accompanied the class (Now including WWW! 🤭). As you can see, it is very much of the time.
I really enjoyed some of the classes, in particular the Smalltalk/OOP programming and the user experience and usability class.
The course was my first introduction to real online courseware, versus the homebrew stuff we had built for the local community college. In that courseware were student discussions, a lot focused on how useless it was to learn Smalltalk!
While I understood their position, and was frustrated by how abstract the work we were doing was (hovering frogs were a substantial motif I recall), learning the "pure" OO of Smalltalk helped me a great deal in other object oriented languages.
Regardless, back then apparently the course was incredibly successful (emphasis mine):
There have been a number of approaches to facilitate teaching Smalltalk. The LearningWorks environment developed by Goldberg is used for the Open Universities course M206 entitled ”Computing: An Object Oriented Approach”. By their own account it is the world largest computing course with over 5000 students. LearningWorks builds on the VisualWorks Smalltalk product and uses learning books to guide students from small to larger sections of the Smalltalk world
I found a web page that included some of the assignments, check out the frog classes - good job it wasn't a vocational course!
My daughter came along in 1999 and was born super early, and then I immediately lost my newly acquired job, so sadly no degree for me.
It's still something I think about trying for again, partly because I enjoy learning, and partly to see if I could do it.