Most likely to be retained was the use of video for pre-recorded lectures which were used to deliver the more didactic aspects of teaching, in line with the flipped learning model. Academics regarded this as an effective way to ensure the time students spend physically with their tutors and peers can be reserved for digging deeper into more complex concepts and subject matter.
The study underlined a pressing need to provide more flexible study options on a longer-term basis to allow students to plan their learning around work, home life, and caring responsibilities beyond the pandemic. As a result, recordings of scheduled lectures used by students for revision (or studying) purposes or to catch up on sessions they may have missed were considered to be an element that should be kept, despite some resistance to videoed lectures pre-pandemic.
Another reported priority for academics was the provision of captioning on recorded content. This was mainly driven by the desire for all video resources to be inclusive and accessible. Students appreciate having access to captions and transcripts, for example when courses include complex technical language, and they are particularly helpful for those with special educational needs or English as an additional language.
A fresh approach to higher education
A staggering 44% (4) of all 18-year-olds applied to enter higher education in January 2022 according to the latest figures from the UCAS universities admissions service – that’s the highest number of school-leavers ever recorded.
The recent study (3) seems to suggest there is little appetite amongst academics for a return to the conventional didactic lecture and a clear desire to move to a more blended learning model. It seems that the experience of teaching through lockdown could therefore have a significant and lasting impact on higher education in 2022 and beyond.
References (1) Schneckenberg, D. (2009). Understanding the real barriers to technology-enhanced innovation in higher education. Educational Research, 51(4), 411–424. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131880903354741
(3) Robson, L. Gardner, B. and Dommett, E.J. (2022). The post-pandemic lecture: views from academic staff across the UK. Education Sciences, 12(2). 123. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci12020123
This essay, by Zoe Yu, age 17, from The Woodlands College Park High School in The Woodlands, Texas, is one of the Top 11 winners of The Learning Network’s Ninth Annual Student Editorial Contest, for which we received 16,664 entries.
We are publishing the work of all the winners and runners-up over the next week, and you can find them here as they post.
Endangered Languages Are Worth Saving
Every summer evening at 8 p.m. sharp, my grandma and I plant ourselves in front of the TV. Our next hour is filled with on-screen bouts of amnesia, plotting mothers-in-law, and tearful declarations of love in the rain. But what may seem like ordinary soap opera scenes are far more than melodrama and theatrics: Dialogued entirely in Taiwanese Hokkien, they’re artifacts of a once-dying language.
Linguists expect 90 percent of languages to become obsolete in the next century — and this mass extinction is no accident. Under colonial rule, learning or speaking my grandma’s native Hokkien, along with dozens of indigenous languages, was illegal by law. Schools were forbidden to teach using local dialects; formal institutions shifted to operate by the dominant Mandarin; and homegrown languages, stigmatized as coarse and improper through decades of repression by hegemonic language policies and imperialism, became a marker of backwardness. Today, more than half of native Hokkien speakers no longer use the language at home.
Unfortunately, this tragic silencing isn’t a rare practice. In the 1950s, thousands of Native American children were forced to surrender their mother tongues in boarding schools designed to eradicate indigenous identities. Even now, languages are vanishing at the hands of economic and social power struggles in which smaller communities are pressured to adopt the dominant language that governs work, entertainment and daily life. In fact, California repealed a law requiring “English-only” instruction just four years ago.
But shouldn’t we feel relief that we don’t live in the madness of a Tower of Babel society? While lingua francas undoubtedly streamline global communication, language isn’t solely a tool for business negotiations or celebrity gossip. Steeped in history and heritage, it’s a pillar of culture that built ancient empires, immortalized sacred religious texts, and stockpiled centuries of natural and medicinal wisdom. Records of past civilizations, together with poetry, music and folklore, hinge on a language’s grammatical and syntactic quirks.
The impact of language also spills beyond the past to influence ways of thinking in the present. Have you ever wondered why “death” is feminine in some paintings but masculine in others? It turns out that the gendering of nouns in an artist’s native language plays a role in how he or she decides to bring abstract concepts to life. Beyond art, researchers have also found links between language and perceptions of time, color and emotion.
Documentation projects and protective laws are already on the front lines in the battle against language death — but they won’t have a fighting chance until we realize that pruning a language tree kills more than just words. And if we don’t? Then, our rich forests of linguistic diversity will be flattened into barren wastelands, unable to support the cultures and peoples that once thrived within.
This essay, by Katherine Shao, age 16, from Mercer Island High School in Mercer Island, Wash., is one of the Top 11 winners of The Learning Network’s Ninth Annual Student Editorial Contest, for which we received 16,664 entries.
We are publishing the work of all the winners and runners-up over the next week, and you can find them here as they post.
Megaconstellations: ‘Stars’ You Don’t Want to See in the Sky
During hot summer nights, my neighbors and I would peer eagerly through our telescope, eyepieces whizzing from blurry stars to the luminescent moon. Like generations before me, I dreamed of galactic battles, Martian populations and meeting Hans Solo. For thousands of years, the seemingly untouchable space has captivated the collective human imagination.
Now, vast networks of satellites that form “megaconstellations” are changing the game. Space has become the lucrative new frontier for the corporate world, with operations like SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper taking center stage in an effort to provide a global broadband internet service.
The Union of Concerned Scientists reports there are currently over 4,000 satellites in lower Earth orbit, with over tens of thousands to come. Scientists are becoming increasingly concerned with the problem of satellites “photobombing” astronomical observations. As the satellites orbit around Earth’s view, vast captures of distant stars are marred by bright streaks. Polluted images must be thrown out, potentially costing millions of dollars and devastating astronomical observations.
But the problems don’t end there. Miscalculations and the harsh space environment make the satellites especially prone to collisions and degradation, breaking into debris and “space junk.” Thousands of pieces of debris float around the atmosphere, triggering the Kessler Syndrome, where debris causes collisions, causing more debris, and increasing exponentially. As Professors Aaron Boley and Michael Byers of the University of British Columbia report, a “single major fragmentation event from one satellite could affect all operations” in lower Earth orbit. Like a catastrophic domino chain, megaconstellations may eventually render space inaccessible.
While faster internet is undoubtedly a convenience, it shouldn’t come at the cost of keeping our celestial space pristine. Ironically, the current hustle to monetize space closely resembles our own planet’s environmental predicament. When faced with new frontiers, our society tends to adopt an attitude of over-accumulation, especially in competitive markets. This spatial fix ultimately hinders our ability to benefit from these precious environments, as we focus too much on extraction, too little on preservation.
Our collective inheritance of space also means we must act as responsible stewards. Instead of scrambling to fix an irreparably damaged environment, it’s critical to take action now. One proposed buffer explained by The New York Times is a robust international regulatory regime to guide and manage the appropriation of outer space. While it’s unrealistic and ultimately stifling to halt innovation in space, modeling a convention similar to the Air Convention would enable us to harness benefits while ensuring sustainable use.
In recent years, committed, innovative educators have explored incorporating online learning into their existing curricula.
Adarsh Lathika is one of these changemakers. His passion for engineering and management has guided his work as part of the Manipal Global Education Services (MaGE) core team for over a decade. In this role, he has partnered with university leaders to implement various strategic programs—including Coursera for Campus.
With Adarsh’s leadership, the universities under the Manipal Education Framework (Manipal) saw course enrollments on Coursera increase over threefold from 71,000 to more than 250,000 in just two years. To get more students excited about Coursera, Adarsh and his team launched the Coursera for Campus Ambassador Program that engaged students as agents of change.
In this first installment of Coursera’s Bold Innovators blog post series, we talked to Adarsh about launching the program and his team’s plans for the future.
Q1. Welcome, Adarsh – Our readers would love to learn more about your journey with Coursera and how you encouraged student adoption of online learning.
From the start, we knew that getting more students excited about online learning would require fresh approaches. To create a culture of transdisciplinary learning, we partnered with Coursera to offer a broad-based learning experience.
When we started with Coursera for Campus, we needed students to feel excited about the program. With internal champions, we could personally encourage students to explore the full benefits of Coursera’s content. Assembling our internal champions meant aligning students, faculty members, and the university’s leadership. Deep, cross-functional collaboration was the foundation of our Coursera for Campus Ambassador Program.
Searching for our dynamic campus ambassadors, we conducted written tests and phone interviews to find candidates with strong communication skills. Ultimately, we recruited 99 campus ambassadors with the talent and drive to create awareness about the benefits Coursera brings to learners.
Peer-to-peer engagement is vital, but we also wanted faculty champions to support students’ onboarding into the program, so we reached out to Deans and department heads to promote Coursera. With students, faculty, and departmental leadership fully excited about Coursera, we saw strong results right from its first year.Manipal’s Coursera for Campus program is among Coursera’s top three programs globally in terms of enrollments and learning hours.
Q2. With a program that involved multiple stakeholders, how did you navigate the complex cycle of change management?
We’re proud to be the first university to adopt Coursera for Campus back in 2018. But we know that any big change, however positive, comes with challenges. Just as any successful journey starts one step at a time, we designed the Manipal – Coursera Campus Ambassador Program in phases. Our first step in change management involved boosting Coursera usage rates among students.
Phase 1: Creating Awareness
In our first year, we focused on enrollment. Each ambassador knew our core goal: Every student should be able to enroll in the program easily and complete at least one course. We empowered our ambassadors with clear descriptions of their tasks and well-articulated KPIs, as they worked with communities of around 150 to 200 learners. Ambassadors were tasked with sharing the advantages of Coursera in their classes, freshmen introduction sessions, webinars, and student clubs. We gauged ‘ambassadors’ success by measuring KPIs against various milestones in the online dashboard, and made updates as we discovered new effective approaches.
To build momentum as enrollments started increasing, we began the #LearnASkill campaign. Though we launched the campaign during summer break, it sparked massive engagement. We maintained a #LearnASkill leaderboard and offered prizes and certificates to inspire healthy competition among participating students – some students completed up to 100 courses.
Phase 2: Making Coursera a Learning Habit
Energized by the success of Phase 1, we moved the Coursera for Campus Ambassador Program into Phase 2. Here, we worked to sustain our learners’ enthusiasm for the program.
We understood that students would want to know about the benefits of continuing with more courses after completing the initial requirements. Encouraging students to reach the next level with their learning prompted us to start the #ShowYourSkill competition. #ShowYourSkill went one step beyond course completions, compelling learners to show off their newly acquired skills.
As we analyzed students’ learning patterns, we worked with Coursera to curate specific course recommendations. Through our campus ambassadors and student clubs, we shared these course curations to make learning a habit.
To help students understand how these courses would fast-track their careers, we connected them with alumni who were Coursera learners. After hearing the personal experiences of the alumni, students deepened their investments in learning through Coursera.
We also invited faculty to discover the possibilities through Coursera via online sessions and emails. As more faculty adopted Coursera, we saw a significant spike in student engagement. With student interest on the rise, we streamlined the campus ambassador program to 30 team members.
Q3. What processes did you put into place to ensure the long-term success of Coursera for Campus at Manipal?
To keep ourselves organized, we created a dashboard to track our activities as we developed the program:
Email IDs of participants
License status
Number of courses completed
Percentage of courses completed
Number of people who completed the course, and several other details
KPIs and campus ambassador leaderboard statistics
Initially, we saw around 20-25% of students complete courses. Soon, that rate reached 60%. As the team leader, I shared this data monthly with the campus ambassadors. Over two years, we also onboarded faculty champions in disciplines ranging from IT to Pharmacy, driving further adoption among students.
Q4. Can you share any anecdotes or stories that convey the impact of the Campus Ambassador Program?
Our students and faculty have heartwarming stories about their success with Coursera. One story from a learner, Urvashi Pathak, particularly stands out:
Coursera was a great help during the pandemic in 2020. I took the opportunity to enroll in several courses to upskill and improve my knowledge base. I am currently working for an IoT and Automation company. The courses I took from Coursera were related to my job and provided me with a very detailed understanding of the IoT domain, which further enabled me to apply this knowledge in my workplace.
Ramaprasad Poojary, a faculty member at SOEIT MAHE Dubai, also has high praise for Coursera:
In my opinion, Coursera is one of the best initiatives by Manipal Global. As a faculty member of SOEIT MAHE Dubai, it helped me update my technical skills in machine learning. It also helped me guide students during their project work and other courses. I have subscribed for three consecutive years and recently completed a specialization in ML using TensorFlow on Google Cloud. All five courses under this specialization were well designed.
These powerful testimonies emphasize how Coursera empowers our students and faculty.
Q5. The Campus Ambassador program was undoubtedly a tremendous success. What have been some of your personal learnings from the program, and how do you envision the growth of the program from here?
Through the Coursera for Campus Ambassador Program, we discovered so much about the minds of our young learners. Using informal platforms, such as WhatsApp groups, we gained answers to essential questions: How are our students learning? Why are they learning? What do they need to improve their learning?
With our new knowledge, we could better answer platform- and course-related queries, which increased exponentially toward the end of a semester. Some of our insights contributed to new Coursera product features, such as adding course ID in grade reports, including certificate URLs in usage reports, and removing share options for peer assignments.
The Coursera for Campus Ambassador Program is now an integrated part of Manipal’s action plan, which is highly outcome-driven.
Q6. Do you have any recommendations for fellow educators trying to promote the adoption of Coursera at their universities?
As educators, we’re usually asking our students questions to help them learn and grow. When we implemented Coursera for Campus at Manipal, we posed some fundamental questions to ourselves. These questions are highly relevant to all institutions:
What are you trying to achieve with Coursera?
What will be the benefits for your learners? What problems are you trying to address?
Which metrics will you track, and how often will you review them?
How can stakeholders such as students, alumni, and faculty serve as driving forces in this program? How can you customize your approach to meet each stakeholder’s unique needs?
Reflecting on these questions can help educators create successful roadmaps for developing learner programs through Coursera for Campus.
Q7. Based on your experience, how do online courses and platforms like Coursera help prepare students for their professional life?
Technology has been changing how we live for the last 25 years, and the pace of change has accelerated with the advent of smart technologies. In the job market, new graduates will compete not only against their classmates but also with graduates from the rest of the world. The skills and competencies they need will continue to change throughout their careers. In such a fluid state, the fundamentals remain important. Along with soft skills, an understanding of how to learn continuously, and the ability to work with those from other cultures.
Ensuring our learners have the skills and competencies to compete in the global workforce is our responsibility as educators. With Coursera, we’ve given our learners access to knowledge that prepares them to succeed in a world where evolving technology changes the ways we live every day.
Online learning through Coursera for Campus helps students learn from content developed by the brightest minds in industry and academia, and empowers them to be future leaders and innovators in the global workforce.
It’s been said that the more you know, the more you will grow. As you grow, so will the opportunities available to you begin to open. Free education, through Alison’s platform, is one way to encourage and empower individuals from all walks of life to change their lives and their future. Recently, Alison joined hundreds of delegates at the annual eLearning Africa Conference to discuss how education can impact the lives of ordinary people throughout Africa. One of the stops the Alison team made on their journey across east Africa was in Kenya. Here, we met some of Alison’s graduates and heard how Alison is changing their lives through eLearning. Let’s meet some of our amazing learners from Kenya.
Bonfice Kibisu – Alison courses “are very educational and very helpful to both careers and effectiveness of the worker…”
Bonfice works in the Safety Department in the aviation industry and has completed a and courses with Alison which have both been key in his career growth. These not only added to his resume but also improved his effectiveness at work.
Kelvin Kamau Jedida
Peter Mwangi – “Alison…it’s a great platform. It’s free.”
Peter is an ICT student but is a passionate hotelier at heart. To fuel his passion for the industry, he completed a course in and feels one step closer to achieving his dream of working as a hotelier.
Florence Riaga – “I’ve seen a lot of impact in my short courses with Alison.”
Florence is a nurse working in the TB/HIV Department. She came to learn about Alison in 2015 when she was searching for eLearning courses in her field to help her in her career and . Her studies have greatly improved her skills which she’s now able to apply to her job.
Sharlene Mbori – “…you are really missing out if you are not on Alison.”
Sharlene’s mother introduced her to Alison after completing her high school education and felt indecisive about what she wanted to do. Through the many courses available on our platform, she found her passion for and is proud to have her certificate.
Gilbert Namutali
We met many students, all studying various courses like photo Wilden Ratemo who used our variety of courses to that tell a story.
Advantages of eLearning With Alison
Free courses, certificates, and diplomas
Suits all learning styles
Study anywhere and anytime
Accredited courses
Acquired skills sets you up for career growth
Flexible study solutions
Alison’s platform has various products to help you take the next step in your career. From those newly entering the job market, those looking to make a career change or simply upskill their skillset, and improving the CV, we have the tools you need to get you there.
Alison Tools To Enhance Your Studies
The workplace is not always easy to navigate. We help you discover your strengths and weaknesses, your working styles and more and recommend several courses that will help you improve, enhance, and grow in the various areas.
Your mental wellbeing is an important factor in ensuring you’re the best version of yourself at home, work, and at play. Sometimes it all gets too much and can be overwhelming to cope with it all. This tool helps assess where you are and offers ways and means to help you get better.
Like our graduates in Kenya, you too can take advantage of Alison’s eLearning platform to grow and catapult you to success. So, whether you want to earn and learn with our , learn a new hobby, or equip yourself with the skills and knowledge to make that career switch, you can.
Learning to code so that you can land a job in tech can feel daunting. That’s why we’re sharing inspiring stories from Codecademy’s community — to show how people like you (yes, you!) can embark on a learning journey and end up with a totally new career. We hope these stories serve as a reminder that there’s no single path to a more fulfilling work life.
Today’s story is from Casper Tollefsen, a 28-year-old Web Developer at Telenor living in Fornebu, Norway. Read more stories from Codecademy learners here — and be sure to share your story here.
Why I chose to learn to code
“I did just HTML and CSS on and off for years. I tried my hand at university, and I did one year of mathematics. And then I switched to IT studies, but they would only teach us C. I guess that is a great way to start for system architecture, but I was fairly certain that I wanted to go into web development. So that’s when I decided to quit school. I already had the book HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites’ by Jon Duckett. And so for Christmas 2020, I put his other book, JavaScript and JQuery: Interactive Front-End Web Development, on my wishlist.”
How I made time to learn
“I became a security guard, but I knew I still wanted to work in programming. I’m an efficient learner, and I knew I could learn this myself. So I made sure that while I was working my shifts, I listened to audiobooks on an earbud. If I had quiet shifts, where I could just sit and keep an eye on things, I’d bring a book and read up on game design and programming in general. I started learning HTML and CSS shortly after Codecademy was launched 10 years ago. I’ve been in and out of courses for many years, but got Codecademy Pro through work last year when I started learning JavaScript. Then I took courses on React, TypeScript, Redux, Node, Express, and others on the Front-End and Full-Stack Career Paths.”
How I saved up enough money to switch careers
“I worked as a security guard while I studied coding. Then I was eventually noticed by Mobit, a B2B sales company in the telecommunications space. That’s where I started to do web development and got proficient at it and started to make websites and applications for companies here in Tromsø. But I was still just working on my own as the sole developer. I realized that I knew enough to make these applications and set up the systems, but I was getting to a point where, if I kept going on my own and didn’t learn from other professionals, I might get set in my ways. So that’s when I started to apply for other companies and web developer or front-end positions. And that’s how I eventually ended up in Telenor, which is one of the biggest technology companies in Norway.”
How long it took me to land a job
“Two years from when I started learning.”
How I got in the door
“I applied like anyone else, and I was interviewing with other companies. I let Telenor know that it would be a dream to work for them, because they’re the biggest company I could ever get my foot in the door with. I mean, you could stay at this company for the rest of your life, and still have challenges all along the way. So I just let them know that I am in the process with other companies too. And so they just rushed the process a little more. They got a good first impression of me from the video interviews, and they wanted to see what I could do. Over four weeks, we did all the four steps of interviews, coding tests, the personnel checks, the background checks and signing everything. Within four weeks, the whole process was complete.”
How I nailed the interview
“I tried to stay well aware of the fact that I am self-taught. They asked me leading questions that gave me the impression that a lot of the people they’d been interviewing were kind of set in their ways and had already decided that their way of doing stuff is the best way. So I just tried to stay humble to the fact that, yeah, I’ve accomplished a lot of great stuff, but I am at the bottom of the ladder. This will still be an entry-level position, which will give me a lot of room to grow. And that’s why I’m there. I want to become this resource. And I want to develop my skills with them to be able to work in huge systems eventually. And not just the small, isolated, contained websites that I make myself.”
How I evaluated the offer
“The company is based in Fornebu, which is kind of like the Silicon Valley of Norway. That’s where the biggest companies are based. Like, the other dream would be to actually go to California, and work at one of the big ones. But what’s been holding me back from actually applying abroad is that a lot of these companies have so many thousands of employees that are all really talented tech people. So how could I stand out? How could I ever be the one that is actually working on the flagship products?
Telenor is a company comparable to T-Mobile or AT&T; they build the infrastructure for communications. But they’ve recently, like in the last 10 years, started to invest more into development of applications, website builders, and stuff for other companies.
So what I’m thinking is, I will be able to work at Telenor, at this huge campus that has a lot of places to eat, a gym, laundry service — all of these things you only hear about from the Facebook campus. The standards of living in Norway are pretty great. We don’t have this huge financial gap between classes. Norway is a country where we have a lot of happiness; we always score really high on these evaluations. I know the working conditions in a lot of countries give employers the power to just fire you outright, if they’re downsizing or whatever. You can’t really do that in Norway that easily, because of the unions. So having then compared Telenor to these other big companies, but taking into account that Telenor is still in Norway, and they’re never going to move their headquarters to another country because they are responsible for critical infrastructure in Norway, I’m pretty sure this is the closest I’m going to get to the ‘Silicon Valley dream.’”
How day one & beyond went
“I start in June — TBD!”
What I wish I knew before I started learning
“I struggled for a long time with the uncertainty of my own abilities. Codecademy gives you the opportunity to join their communities and talk to other people and kind of get more of an evaluation on your skills. When I started to talk to other developers, they looked at my projects, and they were like, ‘How did you manage to set this up by yourself with no prior knowledge? You learned everything!’ That’s kind of when I started to get the picture that my spending at least three hours every single day for the past two years just learning programming and staying dedicated and disciplined did pay off.
You have to set yourself a goal. And it’s gonna be tough, especially if you’re completely self-taught and you’re not in the industry. If this is your dream, then it’s not a high price to pay. That one or two hours you spend every single day will net you the career that you’re looking for, as long as you stay persistent.
A more unconventional tip I would give, is to start listening to the industry leaders in your field. Like Bill Gates! He says that he reads at least three books every month. And it doesn’t have to be technology books. It’s just to expand your mind; you read these books, and they expand your vocabulary and your impressions of the world. That’s what I started to do, especially with a lot of these self-help books written by actual healthcare professionals and not influencers.
So like Atomic Habits by James Clear, Unfu*k Yourself by Gary John Bishop, Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell, and Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, for example. These books give you the tools for thinking and for keeping the right mindset.”
Learn like Casper
See the courses and languages that helped them most.
Not sure where to start? Check out our personality quiz! We’ll help you find the best programming language to learn based on your strengths and interests.
Want to share your Codecademy learner story? Drop us a line here. And don’t forget to join the discussions in our community.
Sophene Avedissian, from Los Angeles,chose an article from the Opinion section headlined “Why Strangers Are Good for Us” and wrote:
I distinctly remember looking at my mom in awe as she casually chatted with the grocery store cashier. When most would answer with a few dismissive words, she seamlessly instigated an entire conversation from the cashier’s simple question of “How’s your day?” As we made our way out of the store, I turned back and noticed the corners of the cashier’s lips rise into a grin. I wondered, How can my mom so effortlessly impact someone’s day from one small, yet meaningful interaction?
As my mother seeks out these moments to connect, I avoid them. In elementary school, I hid behind my mom at gatherings as she spoke to others. In middle school, I often replied “no” to invitations to avoid the awkwardness of meeting new people. Now, in high school, I hope that by wearing my pair of rose-gold headphones, others feel discouraged to talk to me.
In “Why Strangers Are Good for Us,” David Sax identifies that engaging with strangers “connect[s] us to the community, teach[es] us empathy, build[s] civility and [is] full of surprise and potentially wonder.” Sax explains when we disregard strangers, we weaken what is at the “core of our social contract.” The technological evolution combined with the pandemic has forced “our world [to grow even more] inward and suspicions.”
I take a deep breath, slip off my headphones, and start talking to the person next to me as we both wait for our takeout order.
In recent years, committed, innovative educators have explored incorporating online learning into their existing curricula.
Adarsh Lathika is one of these changemakers. His passion for engineering and management has guided his work as part of the Manipal Global Education Services (MaGE) core team for over a decade. In this role, he has partnered with university leaders to implement various strategic programs—including Coursera for Campus.
With Adarsh’s leadership, the universities under the Manipal Education Framework (Manipal) saw course enrollments on Coursera increase over threefold from 71,000 to more than 250,000 in just two years. To get more students excited about Coursera, Adarsh and his team launched the Coursera for Campus Ambassador Program that engaged students as agents of change.
In this first installment of Coursera’s Bold Innovators blog post series, we talked to Adarsh about launching the program and his team’s plans for the future.
Q. Welcome Adarsh – Our readers would love to learn more about your journey with Coursera and how you encouraged student adoption of online learning.
From the start, we knew that getting more students excited about online learning would require fresh approaches. To create a culture of transdisciplinary learning, we partnered with Coursera to offer a broad-based learning experience.
When we started with Coursera for Campus, we needed students to feel excited about the program. With internal champions, we could personally encourage students to explore the full benefits of Coursera’s content. Assembling our internal champions meant aligning students, faculty members, and the university’s leadership. Deep, cross-functional collaboration was the foundation of our Coursera for Campus Ambassador Program.
Searching for our dynamic campus ambassadors, we conducted written tests and phone interviews to find candidates with strong communication skills. Ultimately, we recruited 99 campus ambassadors with the talent and drive to create awareness about the benefits Coursera brings to learners.
Peer-to-peer engagement is vital, but we also wanted faculty champions to support students’ onboarding into the program, so we reached out to Deans and department heads to promote Coursera. With students, faculty, and departmental leadership fully excited about Coursera, we saw strong results right from its first year.Manipal’s Coursera for Campus program is among Coursera’s top three programs globally in terms of enrollments and learning hours.
Q. With a program that involved multiple stakeholders, how did you navigate the complex cycle of change management?
We’re proud to be the first university to adopt Coursera for Campus back in 2018. But we know that any big change, however positive, comes with challenges. Just as any successful journey starts one step at a time, we designed the Manipal – Coursera Campus Ambassador Program in phases. Our first step in change management involved boosting Coursera usage rates among students.
Phase 1: Creating Awareness
In our first year, we focused on enrollment. Each ambassador knew our core goal: Every student should be able to enroll in the program easily and complete at least one course. We empowered our ambassadors with clear descriptions of their tasks and well-articulated KPIs, as they worked with communities of around 150 to 200 learners. Ambassadors were tasked with sharing the advantages of Coursera in their classes, freshmen introduction sessions, webinars, and student clubs. We gauged ‘ambassadors’ success by measuring KPIs against various milestones in the online dashboard, and made updates as we discovered new effective approaches.
To build momentum as enrollments started increasing, we began the #LearnASkill campaign. Though we launched the campaign during summer break, it sparked massive engagement. We maintained a #LearnASkill leaderboard and offered prizes and certificates to inspire healthy competition among participating students – some students completed up to 100 courses.
Phase 2: Making Coursera a Learning Habit
Energized by the success of Phase 1, we moved the Coursera for Campus Ambassador Program into Phase 2. Here, we worked to sustain our learners’ enthusiasm for the program.
We understood that students would want to know about the benefits of continuing with more courses after completing the initial requirements. Encouraging students to reach the next level with their learning prompted us to start the #ShowYourSkill competition. #ShowYourSkill went one step beyond course completions, compelling learners to show off their newly acquired skills.
As we analyzed students’ learning patterns, we worked with Coursera to curate specific course recommendations. Through our campus ambassadors and student clubs, we shared these course curations to make learning a habit.
To help students understand how these courses would fast-track their careers, we connected them with alumni who were Coursera learners. After hearing the personal experiences of the alumni, students deepened their investments in learning through Coursera.
We also invited faculty to discover the possibilities through Coursera via online sessions and emails. As more faculty adopted Coursera, we saw a significant spike in student engagement. With student interest on the rise, we streamlined the campus ambassador program to 30 team members.
Q. What processes did you put into place to ensure the long-term success of Coursera for Campus at Manipal?
To keep ourselves organized, we created a dashboard to track our activities as we developed the program:
Email IDs of participants
License status
Number of courses completed
Percentage of courses completed
Number of people who completed the course, and several other details
KPIs and campus ambassador leaderboard statistics
Initially, we saw around 20-25% of students complete courses. Soon, that rate reached 60%. As the team leader, I shared this data monthly with the campus ambassadors. Over two years, we also onboarded faculty champions in disciplines ranging from IT to Pharmacy, driving further adoption among students.
Q. Can you share any anecdotes or stories that convey the impact of the Campus Ambassador Program?
Our students and faculty have heartwarming stories about their success with Coursera. One story from a learner, Urvashi Pathak, particularly stands out:
Coursera was a great help during the pandemic in 2020. I took the opportunity to enroll in several courses to upskill and improve my knowledge base. I am currently working for an IoT and Automation company. The courses I took from Coursera were related to my job and provided me with a very detailed understanding of the IoT domain, which further enabled me to apply this knowledge in my workplace.
Ramaprasad Poojary, a faculty member at SOEIT MAHE Dubai, also has high praise for Coursera:
In my opinion, Coursera is one of the best initiatives by Manipal Global. As a faculty member of SOEIT MAHE Dubai, it helped me update my technical skills in machine learning. It also helped me guide students during their project work and other courses. I have subscribed for three consecutive years and recently completed a specialization in ML using TensorFlow on Google Cloud. All five courses under this specialization were well designed.
These powerful testimonies emphasize how Coursera empowers our students and faculty.
Q. The Campus Ambassador program was undoubtedly a tremendous success. What have been some of your personal learnings from the program, and how do you envision the growth of the program from here?
Through the Coursera for Campus Ambassador Program, we discovered so much about the minds of our young learners. Using informal platforms, such as WhatsApp groups, we gained answers to essential questions: How are our students learning? Why are they learning? What do they need to improve their learning?
With our new knowledge, we could better answer platform- and course-related queries, which increased exponentially toward the end of a semester. Some of our insights contributed to new Coursera product features, such as adding course ID in grade reports, including certificate URLs in usage reports, and removing share options for peer assignments.
The Coursera for Campus Ambassador Program is now an integrated part of Manipal’s action plan, which is highly outcome-driven.
Q. Do you have any recommendations for fellow educators trying to promote adoption of Coursera at their universities?
As educators, we’re usually asking our students questions to help them learn and grow. When we implemented Coursera for Campus at Manipal, we posed some fundamental questions to ourselves. These questions are highly relevant to all institutions:
What are you trying to achieve with Coursera?
What will be the benefits for your learners? What problems are you trying to address?
Which metrics will you track, and how often will you review them?
How can stakeholders such as students, alumni, and faculty serve as driving forces in this program? How can you customize your approach to meet each ‘ ‘stakeholder’s unique needs?
Reflecting on these questions can help educators create successful roadmaps for developing learner programs through Coursera for Campus.
Q. Based on your experience, how do online courses and platforms like Coursera help prepare students for their professional life?
Technology has been changing how we live for the last 25 years, and the pace of change has accelerated with the advent of smart technologies. In the job market, new graduates will compete not only against their classmates but also with graduates from the rest of the world. The skills and competencies they need will continue to change throughout their careers. In such a fluid state, the fundamentals remain important. Along with soft skills, an understanding of how to learn continuously, and the ability to work with those from other cultures.
Ensuring our learners have the skills and competencies to compete in the global workforce is our responsibility as educators. With Coursera, we’ve given our learners access to knowledge that prepares them to succeed in a world where evolving technology changes the ways we live every day.
Online learning through Coursera for Campus helps students learn from content developed by the brightest minds in industry and academia, and empowers them to be future leaders and innovators in the global workforce.
Maybe you’ve seen a job posting recently for a Network Engineer and wondered what they do, and just as importantly, how much they make. Network Engineers are specialized professionals who function as the backbone of many organizations, keeping computer systems, networks, and databases running. If you’ve taken a few programming courses, you might even already have some of these skills.
Ahead, we’ll take a look at what exactly it is that Network Engineers do, what you can expect to make as a Network Engineer, and the training required to get into this line of work. The job title might sound intimidating, but it’s actually a relatively attainable career path if you practice your coding skills.
What does a Network Engineer do?
Network Engineers are responsible for the design, maintenance, and operation of communication networks. These networks could include local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), company intranet, phone systems, wireless networks, extranet, and even cybersecurity measures to keep information on these networks safe.
On a more granular level, Network Engineers perform many tasks that keep businesses running on a day-to-day basis. Each day could bring a new challenge and a new set of problems to solve, like:
Upgrading hardware (e.g., routers, hard drives, etc.)
Recommending new platforms, systems, and processes
Designing and improving networks
Troubleshooting issues
Managing wireless networks
Implementing new firewalls and network security
Monitoring and analyzing network traffic
At first glance, you might be thinking that this sounds a lot like a Back-End Engineer, but there are key differences between these professionals. Network Engineers deal heavily in hardware and the specifics of networks, while Back-End Engineers are a type of Software Developer that create and maintain the systems, applications, and databases needed to run programs. So Network Engineers are a little more invested in specific hardware and communication systems, though they still know programming languages in order to integrate with the back-end systems.
In a sense, Network Engineers build, optimize, and maintain the highways that the other Software Engineers need to travel on every day. But in addition to that, they can provide the communication networks that every employee at a company requires, like their phone system, internal network, and file transfer programs. In that sense, they are essential to keeping teams connected to business data and one another every day.
How much do Network Engineers make?
Network Engineers fall into the category that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calls Computer Network Architects. On average, Network Engineers make $120,520 per year. Because these engineers are in high demand with a particular skill set, the occupation can expect to see a 5% salary growth over the next decade, which is higher than the overall average in the U.S.
Keep in mind that this number is an average, so if you are just starting out, you might make less than six figures. But as you gain experience in the field, you can increase your pay through raises and bonuses. Plus, depending on the state or industry you’re in, some companies will pay more for a Network Engineer than others.
Because this is a more specialized job title than, say, a Back-End Engineer, the data on salaries from state to state are sparse. But you can likely expect that salaries in tech hubs will be in the higher five figures to six figure range, because the competition for top talent is high. If you have a degree in the field under your belt or online certificates of relevant courses completed, these could also help to bump up your starting salary — so don’t forget to include your training on your technical resume.
What skills are needed to become a Network Engineer?
As you may have gathered, the specific jobs that a Network Engineer does can vary drastically from industry to industry. You might be specializing in phone network systems, or you might be dreaming up the next networking standard to be pitched to a management team. Careers in programming can lead to just about any industry you’re interested in, so do your research and whittle down your top companies and job descriptions. Then, you’ll be able to hone in on the exact skills you’ll require for the career path you want.
Programming
Network Engineers need to be problem-solvers, big-picture thinkers, and yet still be meticulous in their work, from properly setting up a wireless network in a business to coding the latest version of security into the network. You’ll need to know how to program in at least one language, such as Python, Ruby, or Java. Each of these will allow you to learn the essential concepts of programming; and then if your new job requires additional languages, you’ll be able to transfer over the conceptual basics.
Practical training
Don’t be discouraged if some jobs require practical training. You can learn the basics in our online courses. But the learning you’ll do on the job will be targeted to your chosen industry, and you’ll get to accelerate the process by being immersed in your daily duties. Each company will also have its own coding standards, styles, and individual tech stack that you’ll have to get used to. Anticipate the learning curve when you first get hired, and you’ll be in a growth mindset and ready to absorb what you need to understand.
Computer science skills
Network Engineers require a foundation in computer science. If you’re just starting out on your learning journey, check out our Computer Science Career Path, which will teach you the coding skills you’ll need. If you already have experience in programming, consider leveling up some of your skills or adding on new specialties, like cybersecurity or computer architecture. Retaking a course is also a great way to refresh your memory and practice your programming before you apply for a new position.
Staying nimble
The technology landscape changes rapidly and constantly, so just know that your learning journey doesn’t end when you land a job. Becoming a Network Engineer means staying on top of industry trends, continuing to optimize your networks, and taking additional courses in the future in order to do your job even better. There’s nothing stagnant about a career in coding, and choosing to pursue network engineering is a great way to keep things exciting at work.
