Today sees the start of a MOOC about Pharo, the object-oriented language based on Smalltalk. The video lectures are in French with English subtitles and the course pdfs are in English only. Over 2200 students have enrolled so far.

This free online course with the title "Programmation objet immersive en Pharo / Live Object Programming in Pharo" is on the FUN (standing for France Université Numérique) platform, which, to judge from its look and feel, seems to be based on Open edX.

If you haven't come across Pharo, it is both an object-oriented language, in the tradition of Smallltalk, and an open source environment. Stéphere Duscasse, who together with Luc Fabresse and Damien Cassou presents the 7-week course, gives a highly condensed summary of it in this promo video. 

The main message from the video is:

If you are either a beginner or an expert in object-oriented programming, this MOOC will change the way you program with objects: come and learn or rediscover object-oriented programming with Pharo!

The course, and its discussion forum, is now live and the first week's content covers the vision behind the Pharo community and an overview of Pharo's syntax and its object model.

A special, easy-to-use, installation of Pharo is needed to follow the MOOC and although you can follow it simply by watching the videos and doing the quizzes and exercises it is recommended that participants go deeper in the Pharo world by also doing the challenges and the mini-projects. There is a TinyBlog project that will cover the seven weeks of this MOOC and at the end you will be able to deploy it on http://www.pharocloud.com.

The course syllabus is as follows and the estimated effort per week is between 2.5 and 4 hours:

The prerequisites for the course are some experience with objected-oriented programming and it is designed to be of special interest to those teaching programming since Pharo is a good teaching tool and the course will discuss object-oriented design principles (e.g. polymorphism, message sending, self/super, design patterns). Registration is open until the course ends on June 19th. 

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