IT courses: what remains behind the scenes

Hello everyone, my name is Eugene Kartevets, I am the head of the training department of the IT-portal GeekBrains . We develop courses for future programmers. When creating them, we rely on the experience of industry practitioners and strive to provide a set of skills necessary for employment. I will tell you how among practicing programmers we select teachers and what we encounter when creating courses.

Only popular destinations

Usually we choose a new educational direction by two criteria. The first is the trend and popularity of some technology. We need to understand whether there is interest in it, and if so, how strong. For analysis, we conduct regular surveys and do market research. We make email-polls on the portal to find out what future students are interested in and what is popular with them now. It is also important for us that there are enough vacancies in this area. To understand the demand for specialists, we analyze job search portals - HeadHunter and others. We look at the number of vacancies, the dynamics of opening and closing. We want students to be able to find a job after graduation. If there are no vacancies, we will not open the course, otherwise graduates will have nowhere to work.

But now we are preparing to launch several areas that are knocked out of this rule. These are professions of the future - robotics and artificial intelligence. There are still few vacancies in these specialties, but it is possible to predict the growing demand for them. These courses are important for those who are thinking about what they will be doing in a couple of years, who want to work in topical and topical professions. The demand for such specialists is growing and will continue to grow.

We are developing a methodological framework

When we first started, we simply coordinated the course programs with the teachers. Those submitted the material as they considered necessary. On the one hand, it was a very creative process. Each teacher tried to make the classes as good as possible. But on the other hand, there was no stability. One of the teachers was a star, and someone was lost in front of an audience. We want students to always receive a product of consistently high quality, so we finally arrived at standardization and preparation of teaching aids for each course.

Educational-methodical manuals - a manual simultaneously for pupils and a teacher. Students use them as a textbook, repeat the material on them. The teacher checks the training manual to understand the order of topics, sees what issues need practical examples, takes additional tasks.

We have taken as a basis a systematic approach that is used in universities. Practice has shown that after the introduction of CMD, the quality of teaching has risen markedly. Teachers more quickly join the process. In fact, they get the material on which you can immediately teach. To further uncover complex topics, they can complement it. But they cannot let the questions and tasks out of the training manual.

The curriculum is written by a methodologist, and the reviewer states

At first, we used teachers to write the manuals. But then they discovered that not everyone is able to logically describe the educational material “on paper”. People are divided into two categories: those who can beautifully present, communicate with the audience, ignite the audience, and those who can clearly and simply write. Therefore, we have divided them into two specialties.

Each course has a methodologist. He sits down and prescribes everything that is in the course: he develops a program, selects the source codes of programs created in the classroom. Also, the methodologist prepares presentations and notes for teachers. However, the materials prepared by him are not released immediately into the educational process, they must be reviewed.

Why do we need a reviewer? Thanks to him, it is possible to avoid such situations, which we had while developing a course on computer networks. In the classroom, you need to explain what a network stack is. In the classic format, they first tell how the Internet works on the physical level, how data is transferred. Then the data link layer is disassembled, transport, and so on, down to the application level, which deals with the SMTP, HTTP and other protocols. The data goes through many levels up to the very top, where emails are sent and pages are downloaded. Methodist proposed to turn this pyramid and start the story from top to bottom. His explanation was very accessible, we immediately approved the plan of the lecture. But when other lecturers began to read this lecture, the material “did not lay down”. We had to redo everything and return to the traditional approach.

Therefore, now all materials are assessed by other specialized specialists-teachers. Now we have a two-stage system for preparing training materials: the author writes how he sees this course, and the reviewer checks the materials, how complete the information is from a technical point of view, how interesting it is, whether there are mistakes, whether it is possible to conduct courses on this material. The manuals are redone until the reviewer approves them.

How do we recruit a team

Suppose we want to open the Kotlin Programmer course. First of all, we are looking for a methodologist who will develop the program. When selecting a methodologist, we look at the level of training. Experience in the profile must be at least three years. It is advisable to have publications on the topic of the course and achievements in the professional field. We are trying to look for specialists such as, for example, Igor Simdyanov, who has developed and conducted several courses here. Igor is a co-author of over a dozen books on programming, including bibles for PHP developers, books on PHP 7.

The methodologist provides his vision of the program, the concept and the finished separate unit of the training manual as a test task. We appreciate the overall approach, the depth of the subject and the coherence of the presentation. If everything is in order, the person joins the team. As a rule, several methodologists work on the project, who in parallel create different levels of the course.

Work on the course goes from one to six months. Methodists and reviewers work together. Materials are checked immediately after writing. Wait, when the course will be ready, and then review, it is inappropriate. It may happen that something important will be missed in the course, then it will have to be redone. So we lost a few months developing a course on the Spring framework for GeekUniversity. With a weekly review such situations are excluded. Manuals in parts come to the reviewer, who immediately gives feedback. Unsuitable material promptly sent for revision. That is, we can understand at an early stage that there are problems, or that the methodologist cannot produce good content.

Methodists themselves also review each other. Make sure that the topics do not overlap and are consistent. We are developing several courses at once in one profession, so one level should flow into another. The load on the students should gradually increase, and the materials should be balanced to flow into the “homework”. It is especially important to work in concert when preparing a program in which students complete one large project during two courses. All this is achieved only by dense teamwork.

We are always happy to fill the team with talented programmers who want to share knowledge. Join the team here .

Who else is working on the course

We pass the approved training materials to editors who “brush” the text. Experience has shown that technicians have excellent knowledge of the subject, but
make grammatical mistakes. Therefore, the editors read the manuals, check spelling and grammar, and make the material more structured. The designer works on the visual design and presentation preparation.

Then the materials are transferred to the quality department, in which they see what happened as a result. We have internal quality standards for courses without reference to specialization:

• There must be a balance between theory and practice.
• The theoretical and practical parts should correlate with each other.
• The material should be enough for in-depth study by all comers.
• There should be homework of different levels of complexity.
• Each lesson should have a separate plan.
• Must be the best practices.

When the program is completely ready, the course can be taught by two already - a methodologist and a reviewer. It happens that someone's personal or family circumstances change, and he cannot remain a teacher. But this rarely happens. First of all, we are interested in the specialists who prepared the program, then conducted courses on it. Often, we are immediately looking for additional teachers, because the flow of students is large, and the number of places in the group is limited. After this, we announce the new course, approve the dates of the next flows and open the record.

Regularly monitor the quality of the course

After the start of the course, work on it does not end. We monitor students' results, and they evaluate teachers so that we can improve the learning process. The quality department constantly monitors objections, dissatisfaction and wishes of students. As a rule, the course is led by the specialist who wrote it. Therefore, it receives feedback from students from the first classes and makes adjustments without delay. It is our constant practice - after learning to collect wishes and make changes to the program.

Many technologies are quickly becoming obsolete. We try to keep track of this and update course programs as needed. To do this, we order a review from a technician who gives comments and comments on what needs to be improved and revised. Additionally, the quality department monitors student feedback: what was difficult and what was not clear. When the amount of work and blocks for improvement are clear, we send a course for revision to the specialized methodologist. He fixes bugs, makes recent changes. Then the reviewer checks, and after its approval the course is considered updated.

We try new formats

Now we are experimenting with a new learning format - we are creating online courses with high-quality video lectures. For them we are looking for cool, trendy and promising areas for which there is still no rabid demand. Having chosen a specialty, we analyze the market in order to understand what should be included in the training program, what knowledge and skills a graduate should possess. It is important for us that a person is not just considered a specialist, but could work by profession. Initially, we graduated courses exclusively on mega-popular professions, for example, a Java programmer (more than a thousand vacancies). But now we can afford to do niche educational projects that will be in demand in a narrow professional circle. They will be only with us.