Dive Brief:
- The Ohio State University College of Engineering will launch Oct. 6 its first online coding boot camp in partnership with education technology company 2U and subsidiary Trilogy Education, per a July 9 statement.
- The part-time program will run for 24 weeks and will teach participants the front- and back-end skills necessary to become a full-stack developer, the university said. Participants will have access to live instruction, webinars with tech employers and 24/7 access to tutoring, and those who complete the bootcamp will receive a certificate in full-stack web development.
- The boot camp is at least partially aimed at helping Ohio residents who were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic gain access to needed skills, Bob Mick, director of professional and distance education programs at the College of Engineering, said in the statement. The college is also partnering with 2U on the company's $3 million scholarship fund for historically underrepresented learners in tech who have recently experienced job loss or financial hardship, it said.
Dive Insight:
The news marks yet another bootcamp expansion for 2U and Trilogy, which last year launched similar programs at big-name institutions like Johns Hopkins University. The two brands have found success in the space not only by establishing high-profile relationships, but also by creating platforms that focus heavily on learner feedback and that teach skills that are most pertinent to in-demand tech roles, a Trilogy executive told HR Dive last year.
As an industry within the larger online learning industry, boot camps have drawn increasing numbers of participants in line with greater demand for software developers globally, according to a report earlier this year from developer hiring solution firm HackerRank. In a survey of hiring managers, the company found nearly one-third (32%) had hired someone who graduated from a bootcamp.
Bootcamps have also emerged as an effective way of providing non-traditional pathways to careers in tech, including for traditionally underrepresented groups. Despite a measure of controversy over the format's ability to prepare students and a lack of regulation of the space in the past, companies have slowly turned the course with the help of external oversight, HR Dive previously reported.
The pandemic has also spurred a greater interest in online learning generally, in part due to accessibility in an era where many workers have transitioned to remote work. Learning vendors, including Udemy, have reported greater engagement and interest on their platforms. Even before the pandemic, however, learning and development experts largely predicted that online learning would grow to be a mainstay of corporate training programs in the next decade.
