Many people agree why coding bootcamps are important. The tech industry continues to suffer from a skills gap and many companies that haven’t (yet) experienced strong growth struggle to hire qualified developers. But when it comes to the ‘what,’ ‘where,’ and ‘how’ of bootcamps, important decisions need to be made. Coding Dojo, a bootcamp that started in the Bay Area, has recently opened a second campus near Berkeley. eLearning Inside got in touch with CEO Michael Choi to discuss some of the logistics required to keep abreast of in-demand programming skills in the current landscape.

On it’s face, the new East Bay campus was a no-brainer for Choi. “We’ve been operating here in San Jose,” he said. “Sometimes we have students who come from San Francisco or Oakland and it’s just too long of a drive. We’ve been hearing from our students with the next step of expansion, and they ask, ‘Could you please come closer to the city?’ A lot of these students have to drive an hour or up to two hours in the morning and the evening. A lot of that is driven by our own community.”

Collaborating With Businesses, Communities, and Local Government

But there’s a lot more to establishing a new campus than that. Coding Dojo operates brick-and-mortar centers throughout the U.S. in cities like Dallas, Tulsa, and near Washington D.C. Before creating a new bootcamp in each community, a lot of assessments need to be made.

“We also conduct location analysis to find out where are places that people want to code and, not only that, where are places where employers are in need of a lot of developers,” Choi said. “There’s also a third factor that we look into when we’re opening new centers now: the support system within the local community at the city and the state level. We’re working with a few cities right now and a few states where there’s a lot of support. The state wants us to come to them so that we can create these opportunities for the folks in that state.”

These are states like Oklahoma and Idaho. Coding Dojo conducted a survey on their learners in 2016, and they found that keeping a local emphasis is a primary concern for their learners. 

“We found that about 80-90% of students who come to our onsite school, they come within a 20 mile radius. During the summertime, sometimes we have people from other states, sometimes other countries just to learn in our schools.”

But these traveling learners are in the vast minority. The demographics and movements of Americans who study at coding bootcamps and then enter the tech industry doesn’t follow the same patterns as, say, learners who complete a computer science degree, or undergo any other four-year bachelor’s program for that matter. And that might help fill in an extra layer of detail regarding the current skills gap in tech hubs throughout the U.S.”

“I think the skills gap—it does exist everywhere,” Choi said. “In this area we live in, we’re fortunate to have a lot of good engineers. A lot of good engineers want to work in tech so they move to this area. So we have the privilege of having a lot of really good engineers in the world come to this area.”

“Even then, there are a lot of companies in this area, and they’re all looking for developers. People who have traditional CS degrees, they’re all getting snatched up by the top companies. So a lot of the medium sized companies or the startups, there’s just not enough engineers for them to hire.”

Coding Dojo Reassesses Each Campus’ Curriculum Every Year

“Companies that are using the technology that has come out in the last 3-5 years, there’s not a lot of people who know how to use them. There’s always going to be that gap, even if there’s a lot of engineers. It takes awhile for an existing engineer to learn a new language or a new framework.”

“If there was no new language or new framework introduced in the last three to five years, then all that would need to be done would be graduate more computer science students or have more people go through the coding bootcamp. But the thing is, the language that was really popular five years ago almost always isn’t popular any more.”

“To pick an example, five years ago when a lot of coding schools were popping up, Ruby on Rails was probably the most top language or framework to use. A lot of top companies were saying, ‘we need Ruby on Rails developers. And if you know how to do Ruby on Rails, we have a job for you.’ But that’s not longer the case. If you look at the East Bay area, I believe it was less than 15% of open jobs are looking for Ruby on Rails developers. So if that’s the only language and framework you know, now, it’s not as hot as it used to be.”

“Based on my personal experience, when I talk to a lot of potential employers, compared to 3-5 years ago, I still hear the same thing. They’re all looking for good engineers, they are all struggling to find them. They’re all trying to poach developers from other companies. There is a limited pool.”

“About once per year, we look at the landscape for each local market. And we determine what are the top three languages for that local market. And it’s all different. For example, here in the Bay Area, Swift is one of the popular languages and C#… people don’t really use C# that much. But if you go to Seattle, C# is in very high demand and there are a lot of opportunities. So every year we do a study on the trends. We don’t just look at what are the languages people want to learn—the demand side—but also the languages companies need—the supply side. So every year we look at that and ask ok do we stay with the current curriculum or do we take out Ruby on Rails and replace it with Java because it’s on the up trend.”

Cover Image: Christopher Robin Ebbinghaus, Unsplash.

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While coding bootcamps that seek to teach learners all they need to know to become software and web developers have taken off in the for-profit sector in much of the western world, they’ve also begun to target other communities. Since the fall of last year, Social Hackers Academy has taught displaced refugees and migrants in Athens, Greece how to code.

According to the founders in a release, they operate on the following belief: “Don’t give them fish, show them how to fish: eating, drinking, the warmth of a house or clothes will not cease to exist as a need for refugees. They are in a foreign country with no means to integrate. Unless someone provides these people with the necessary skills to be able to stand on their feet: don’t give them meals and clothes, teach them something useful to get a decent job, get a decent salary and buy what they need (exactly the goods they need, not random goods on offer) all by themselves.”

The team consists of three co-founders who quit their jobs to dedicate themselves to the bootcamp full time and over twenty volunteers. Of these volunteers, 17 are experienced developers and teachers who aid in the education process, often from remote locations via Slack. For their curriculum, the founders have decided to focus on full stack web development. They also operate in partnership with Hack Your Future, a proven bootcamp for refugees based in Amsterdam.

With the skills they impart, they believe their graduates will be able to earn average annual salaries reaching above $60,000.

From Ippei Leads: check out the best online course for web development.

Responding to an Ongoing Problem

While the simultaneous refugee and financial crisis in Greece made major headlines in 2011-2012, the hype has largely died down since. Both problems, unfortunately, persist. The unemployment rate peaked in mid-2013 at above 27%. Since it has fallen to 21%. That rate, however, comprises only Greek citizens. Refugees and displaced migrants face radically higher barriers to enter the workforce.

The mass migration of displaced people has not stopped. It hasn’t even really ebbed. In 2017, an estimated 11,000 landed in Greece from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the DRC alone. Over 60,000 people have sought refuge in Greece. Of that number, only 7,803 have been relocated in the past three years. While many do not see Athens as a permanent home, there is little indication that migrants will have any other choice in the near- to mid-term.

How Social Hackers Academy Is Doing

Unlike many coding bootcamps that promise jobs upon completion of the program, Social Hackers Academy has conducted some extensive outreach to potential employers. According to the NGO, twelve tech companies in Athens alone are interested in hiring their students once they complete their program.

The bootcamp launched in September of last year. In December, they began a second run. In total, the two classes comprise of two dozen students. Unlike many other coding bootcamps, the co-founders have more realistic expectations for the success of their graduates. They believe that somewhere around 60% of them will be able to truly benefit from the skills they learn and land a job in the tech industry.

Like any NGO, especially those operating in Athens, the founders of Social Hackers Academy are constantly on the hunt for funds to stay up and running.

Their biggest operating costs at the moment are renting office space and acquiring laptops for their students.  They could especially benefit from laptop donations, especially as so many professionals have old devices kicking around.

To donate or learn more about Social Hackers Academy, visit their site, and follow them on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

This post has been brought to you in part by Ippei Leads.

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Among MOOC providers and other online programs, disrupters tend to gush about job success rates, filling skills gaps, and the democratization of education.

But one subject is almost always left unspoken: student support.

As 2016, 58 million students were enrolled in a massive online open course (MOOC). Millions of others participated in some other kind of eLearning, non-degree program or bootcamp.

At the vast majority of these institutions, support services come in the form of a Help page, a Contact Us portal, or worse, an FAQ.

At Udemy, which currently is training over 15 million professionals, the support page offers frequently asked questions and topics to search for help, such as “Getting Started” and “Course Taking.”

At Bloc, an online coding bootcamp that accepts 100% of their applicants, students pay as much as $19,500 in tuition. In return, Bloc offers Career Support to help graduating students land a job.

What we know

Whether it’s mental health, financial support, IT troubles, course requirements, or just figuring out how integrate education into daily life, student support services are indispensable in any higher learning institution.

But by and large, most research regarding support services focuses on traditional brick-and-mortar college campuses and targets what has become known as “traditional students.” These are the 18-24-year-olds who may have never held a job or left home for any significant amount of time before coming to study.

Beyond the fact that most students today are non-traditional, little is known about the needs of online learners and how it affects their education.

Studies tend to focus on individual programs, which can vary widely. One exception was conducted by Lin Muilenburg and Zane Berge all the way back in 2005. (Their findings have since been confirmed by several independent research teams.) The authors looked at several different institutions and found that some 52% of students who dropped out of an online program did so because they lacked some kind of administrative support.

Need varies by demographic

When it comes to brick-and-mortar institutions, many studies have found that student support services, especially for certain populations, is tantamount to the quality of education itself in terms of teaching effectively.

Another study, which focused on demographic breakdowns, found that 40% of white students on campus felt overwhelmed most or all of the time. That number was over 50% among blacks and Hispanic students.

These findings are especially concerning for online education because, among accredited online degrees, U.S. minority populations by far make up the majority of the student body.

There is no typical online learner. People tend to choose online programs because they can improve their knowledge or employment outlook on their own time. They can continue their role as parent or breadwinner or caregiver, all while studying. It seems likely that online learners could benefit from support services to a greater degree than “traditional” students.

It doesn’t have to be like this

There is no reason that online learners shouldn’t have similar access to student support services. While they may be separated from their instructors by thousands of miles, myriad options exist to bridge the gap. Email, live chat, and especially live interactive video streaming can allow counselors to reach students.

But in online learning programs across the board, live interactive video streaming is shockingly rare. Support services aside, even most lectures have been recorded in advance and foster little social interaction among students.

According to Professor Scott Martin, who cofounded Scriyb, a live video streaming platform, there are two reasons for this.

“One, education institutions are trapped in their legacy LMS (learning management system) license deals, as many vendors control so much institutional, student, and assessment data, schools and colleges are terrified of the heavy lift [to adopt new technology].”

“Two, many LMS vendors are just now moving to the cloud, truly required for streaming.”

But even with the availability of platforms like Scriyb, it seems unlikely that the most successful for-profit online educators will incorporate student services any time soon. Their model is working. If nothing’s broken, why would anyone fix it?

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