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---
layout: blog-detail
post-type: blog
by: Julien Richard-Foy, Vincent Derouand, and Valérie Pedroni (Scala Center)
title: "Learn Scala with Online Courses"
---

Happy new year to everyone! We hope 2022 will be of great joy, and will be a
source of fruitful collaboration between the Scala Center and the community!

As you might be listing your 2022 goals, why not include Scala in it?
Refresh your programming skills, acquire new knowledge, and get a new
certificate!

In this post, we remind you of our online courses designed for both beginners
and experienced programmers, we report on what happened in 2021, and we share
our plans for 2022.

## 2021 Retrospective

In 2021, with the release of Scala 3 we updated nearly all of our MOOCs to
Scala 3:

- [Functional Programming Principles in Scala],
- [Functional Program Design],
- [Parallel Programming],
- [Programming Reactive Systems] with Akka.

We also kept the Scala 2 versions of these courses online, but we observed
that the majority of the learners took the Scala 3 versions (e.g., 97% in the
case of Functional Programming Principles in Scala).

The only courses that still use Scala 2 are the courses that depend on Spark,
which does not yet fully support Scala 3 (see below our plans in this regard).

We also published a new course: [Effective Programming in Scala]. This
course teaches programmers all they need to be ready to work in Scala.
We are proud to report that this course was one of the [100 most popular
courses of the year 2021][rank] (out of the 2900 courses created in 2021 on
various MOOC platforms). Thanks to Effective Programming in Scala, we believe
that hiring should not be a concern for companies using Scala.

In total, in 2021, more than three thousand people completed a Scala online
course! Thank you to them for trusting us as their teachers, and
congratulations on acquiring new knowledge!

Finally, we have recently re-organized the website to have a
[dedicated page](https://docs.scala-lang.org/online-courses.html) presenting
the Scala courses from the Scala Center. We also published a short video
summarizing the main points:

<div style="text-align: center">
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rRCdnTspE_k" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div>

## Plans for 2022

In 2022, we plan to update the Spark courses to Spark 3.2 and Scala 3:

- [Big Data Analysis with Scala and Spark],
- [Scala Capstone Project].

Additionally, we plan to experiment with alternative online learning models.
So far, all our courses are self-paced and the assignments grading is fully
automated. This model is perfect for autonomous learners, but we believe
there is also a need for a complementary model, where learners would get
code reviews from experts, and one-to-one sessions with instructors. This
year, we plan to publish some of our courses under such a complementary model.

## Acknowledgements

The Scala Center is committed to providing high-quality, free, Scala
educational material. We are grateful to all the learners who pay to get
certificates of completion. Our work would not be possible without your support.

[Functional Programming Principles in Scala]: https://coursera.org/learn/scala-functional-programming
[Functional Program Design]: https://coursera.org/learn/scala-functional-program-design
[Parallel Programming]: https://coursera.org/learn/scala-parallel-programming
[Programming Reactive Systems]: https://coursera.org/learn/scala-akka-reactive
[Effective Programming in Scala]: https://coursera.org/learn/effective-scala
[Big Data Analysis with Scala and Spark]: https://coursera.org/learn/scala-spark-big-data
[Scala Capstone Project]: https://coursera.org/learn/scala-capstone-project
[rank]: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/most-popular-free-online-courses/