The Pitfalls of Traditional Internal IT Training
I know many IT companies that organize internal trainings on various technologies in order to improve the knowledge and skills of employees and maintain their level up to date to meet existing market demands.
At the same time, the approach to developing internal trainings often looks like this:
Everyone who wants to be involved as a course trainer is accepted by the Education team based on the current level (seniority / grade) of the engineer.
The Education management sets or approves the course program, while the detailed content, practical tasks, criteria for the material adoption are entirely at the mercy of the trainer.
Often the only criterion for the quality of such a course is the course participants feedback.
What are the pros and cons:
Pros:
It is possible to flexibly customize the program and materials for specific current tasks of the company’s projects
Disadvantages:
Not every engineer has the time and opportunity to prepare really high-quality materials for the course, has public speaking skills, has the time and resources to prepare practical assignments. And it will be an excellent result if you manage to do two of the above elements out of three! And even one element out of three is already a positive result!
Leveraging the Power of Online Learning Platforms
At the same time, you can observe an abundance of quality materials available on learning platforms: coursera.org, edx.org, udemy.com, udacity.com, linkedin.com, oreilly.com, etc.
Large IT corporations such as Google, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon invest their own resources in the development of courses aimed at popularizing both their own technologies and popular ones. Courses from the world’s leading universities are also available both on educational platforms (video materials) and presentation materials — on university portals.
A volunteer trainer of an internal IT company course often finds himself in unequal conditions with a university teacher or a trainer of a large corporation who works on a course on a full-time basis.
The Role of the Trainer-Reviewer
The suggested approach here is to use ready-made materials to the maximum where possible. The consequence of this approach is the need for an additional role: now we need not only a trainer-course developer, but also a trainer-reviewer of existing educational products, a compiler of a “curriculum” (curriculum) from ready-made offers on the market, who will evaluate and offer the best option from available. Of course, this does not have to be one person who independently takes all the courses in a row to get an idea about them, but a person who is an aggregator of ratings and reviews from other students.
At the same time, it makes sense to direct efforts to the development of practical tasks where it is economically justified. For example, the coursera.org platform practices providing free access to course materials (usually video), but requires a fee for a confirmed certificate of successful completion of the course, where knowledge is assessed based on the results of tests and practical tasks.
The fee varies, usually 39–49usd per course or month.
Accordingly, the one-time effect of developing your own platform for an online questionnaire and developing questions with multiple answers to cover course materials that a group of 20 people listen to in the free “audit” mode of the course on coursera.org but analyze practical tasks with a trainer and send answers to tests will be 49*20=980usd.
Depending on the “cost” of one hour of the trainer’s work, it is possible to calculate at what number of “runs” of the course and the number of participants, these efforts will begin to bring “profit”.
Criteria for a “Good” Online Course
Finally, we will formulate and give examples of “good” courses:
- structured, ordered information,
a combination of both textual information and a video sequence, ideally the text duplicates the video materials; - the course requires efforts to familiarize and solve practical tasks within 32–40 hours;
- breaking course materials into modules;
- the presence of a verification task after each module, both in the form of a test and a practical assignment;
- as a bonus: information is presented in a playful way, there are interactive tasks
Successful Examples of Online IT Training
Some examples of successful execution:
- The Bits and Bytes of Computer Networking by Google through Coursera
- “AWS Cloud Technical Essentials” by Amazon Web Services through Coursera
- series of courses by IBM on coursera.org: eg “Introduction to Containers w/ Docker, Kubernetes & OpenShift” by IBM through Coursera
- “CS50’s Web Programming with Python and JavaScript” by Harvard through edx.org
- “Intro to Hadoop and MapReduce” on udacity.com
- “Software Architecture” by University of Alberta through Coursera
As an example of accessible curriculum slides for a programming course, see:
- MD Adams, Lecture Slides for Programming in C++ — The C++ Language, Libraries, Tools, and Other Topics (Version 2021–04–01), University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada, Apr. 2021
Implementing a Hybrid Training Approach
Hope the above arguments will persuade all stakeholders not to try to invent something like “one more training on Python language” but utilize existing best ones and focus your efforts on what is more important: practical tasks, quizzes, platforms for task assignment and verification i.e. what makes every learning efficient and effective.
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