Page 16 - Campus Technology, January/February 2019

STEM EDUCATION
One other model is still limping along. Under the Obama administration, Educational Quality through Innovative Partnerships (EQUIP) began a limited number of pilots to encourage colleges and universities to work with “non-traditional providers of education.” The goal was to allow students — especially those from low-income families — to apply their federal student aid to cover the cost. In April 2018, the first institution finally received plan approval to begin enrolling students. The fact that it took so long to get to launch doesn’t bode well for the program’s future, said Eggelston. “The bureaucracy of those types of programs is just so much — it takes so much longer to get off the ground than what we’re used in the coding boot camp world, where students are graduating every three months.”
Boot Camp Benefits
At one point Course Report counted some 600 boot camps operating around the world. That has since consolidated: Now the count is closer to 90. But even so, noted Eggelston, “The number of graduates is increasing year over year.”
It’s no wonder that so many boot camps have materialized, explained Louise Ann Lyon, senior research associate at ETR, a research company that focuses on health equity: They’re filling a perceived vacuum in the education segment. “Universities are focused on grades and how to assess what students are learning, whereas boot camps are like, ‘It’s up to you. You’re coming here because you’re interested in learning the skills. We’ll give you tools, but we’re not going to sit around and assess if you’ve learned this and give you a grade and worry about cheating and all those kinds of things.’”
While the biggest benefit of boot camps is that they offer a ready pipeline to hiring companies and well-paying employment, that isn’t the only way they can enhance college CS programs. In a National Science Foundation project undertaken by ETR and the College of Charleston (SC), researchers also identified several other values:4
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | January/February 2019
JUST AS ONLINE PROGRAM MANAGERS such as 2U are now the workhorse for some universities that want to expand their master’s programs into the online realm, boot camps are earning a reputation for helping higher ed get a lift in areas they’re ill-suited to get to on their own.
The big consideration, said Doug Schmidt, professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University (TN), is to ask whether “it makes more sense to build [a boot camp] internally and then promote it as a continuing education series, or to partner.”
That requires the university to consider what resources are in place to accomplish a boot camp or boot camp-like experience. “It took us a bit of wrangling, quite frankly, to convince everybody that this was a worthwhile thing to do,” he recalled.
The big advantage of building organically, especially where continuing education resources exist, is to get a better deal. “If it’s your faculty or your instructors, you don’t have to share the revenue in quite the same way as you would working with a company.”
But, in the course of doing its own research, Vanderbilt found that even those places with strong CE programs had partnered with Trilogy, the company it was considering. Why? Trilogy “had really honed the curriculum in such a way that they keep it refreshed, up-to-date; the topics they teach are cutting-edge and change rapidly,” Schmidt said. “A lot of times, universities don’t want to be teaching topics thatchangeeverysixmonths;theywanttoteachthingsthatwilllastforadecade.”
Both are valuable, he insisted. “The trick as an institution is to figure out, what are your core competencies and what are the opportunities that you’re giving up by doing it in house vs. partnering? Those are the things to think through carefully.”
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