One thing I learned was don't monetize until you have content worth monetizing. I don't know if I'll ever seriously monetize the YT channel at this point now that I have a stable income, but as long as I produce high quality tutorials I will have the option in the future.
If "true learning" means making $9.25 an hour and slaving away 60 hours per week while a prof makes ~200k and takes all of the credit: I'd rather be ignorant.
But side projects don't have to be profitable to bring you profit.
Let me explain, right now I'm running tutorial series on Rails & Game Dev: http://www.devfactor.io/
I make almost nothing off of the series, and don't expect to make anything in the future.
This is my second big project, the last one being an open source social network with some cool data vis integration. I didn't make anything off of that, in fact I scrapped it once it wasn't popular.
But it got me a job in the big data space. My employer was so impressed by my ability to integrate data vis (D3) into a big app, I got the job on the spot.
So I inadvertently benefited financially from my side project, even though I didn't actually make any money off of it.
Possibly that you have to pay for them, and typically don't get any time with the instructor. Also, many MOOC's just move the lecture online - this doesn't help with retention. You need interactivity.
That was my goal with: http://www.devfactor.io/ - to provide a better learning environment for free. Once the app launches, I'm hoping the additional interactivity will make it much better for retention.
Similarly, my video series: http://www.devfactor.io/ has occasional advertisements but because I target an extremely tech-savvy audience only 10% or so don't have add block installed. Of the 10% without add-block, CTR is around ~1%.
In my experience, self taught engineers are typically better with frameworks and more productive - but less detail oriented and have less grasp of theory.
CS schools naturally teach you to be slow paced, detail oriented and methodical, and it is sometimes good and sometimes bad.
I've also been building a cool web app to aggregate educational CS videos and let people navigate through them based on language and topic. Here's an early screen: http://i.imgur.com/3gbgaxe.jpg (just for showing the styling).
So I was a long-time fan of services like TeamTreeHouse, RailsApps & OneMonth.
I really am a big fan of quality education being available for everyone, and because of that I've opted to open source my CS education on YouTube.
I'm starting with Rails, and I will eventually work around to more core CS topics like circuits -> logic gates -> binary -> assembly -> c -> Data Structures -> Algorithms etc.
If you like it subscribe and I'm looking for all the feedback I can get on how to make it better :)
I spent $100 on ads, which resulted in around 25 new subscribers. The next week, I wrote a really in depth Arduino Morse code tutorial which ended up on some social networks and netted me ~100 subs.
I'd say that Google adds for me where NOT worth the price. Generating more organic content worked better.
Before enrolling at the UW, I was coding thanks to C# Primer Plus and PHP & MySQL web development.
Educational books have provided me employment opportunities (first coding job @ 100m+ company @ age 16 from self teaching) && recreational books have really changed the way I think about the world and problems (outliers, smartcuts).
Books inspired me to write, and publish my first coding book and more recently inspired me to start a free educational channel: https://www.youtube.com/devfactor
There is so much you can distill into a book, its difficult to match with other mediums.
