EPFL Extension School
The EPFL Extension School is part of the The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL).
Aim #
The Extension School’s aim is to make new technology accessible to all learners – providing affordable education and improving digital skills.
We had 18 months from brainstorming til going live. I needed to come up with a program that would be relevant for the next 5 years, and I needed to help create a learning platform that would be easy to use for both students and teachers.
Tasks #
I needed to define and create the curriculum, the content, the capstone projects, and the grading system for the HTML, CSS, Sass and JavaScript subjects in the Web Application Development program.
Actions #
I created a curriculum with a focus on best practices, web standards, accessibility and design systems.
In order to meet the deadline I created an internal system for planning and tracking my progress, and thus would know within a day or two if I was on track or not. It helped me stay on track, and it also helped me communicate my progress to the rest of the team. The rest of the team then used the same system to track their progress.
Results #
By the end of the project I had produced around 200 articles, videos, quizzes, exercises, and capstone projects.
Thanks to the emphasis on best practices, web standards, and accessibility, the students are able to create responsive websites that are accessible to all users, and that are future-proof.
And thanks to the design system, the students have a good understanding of modular concepts found within all modern frameworks.
And my spreadsheet, ahem, tracking system - helped the team and I to deliver all five MOOC courses in time for launch.
In the years after the launch hundreds of students of all demographics have enrolled in the program, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. One of the students even went to start their own web company after completing the program.
And importantly, the Extension School reached the target of making a profit within three years.
Lessons learned #
Teaching: I studied the methodology of teaching and psychology of learning in order to explain complex concepts in a simple way, useful for explaining the same concept in different ways. Never use words like "just" or "simply" when explaining something.
Video: Writing about code is one thing, but talking about code while recording the coding is another thing. I wrote scripts and prepared code examples, practiced, recorded, re-recorded, and edited the videos until I was happy with the result.
Learning: The best way to learn something is to teach it.
Prioritizing: Some of the subjects that was part of the original curriculum got cut due to time constraints. The original concept was for everything to be video, but we quickly discovered that would be too time consuming. So I only made videos for walking through the code examples after the students had read the articles and done the exercises.
I also built the design system, the front-end for the Extension School website, and contributed with UX for the learning platform.
After launch I transferred to a teacher/mentor position where I supervised, assessed, reviewed, provided feedback and support to students in 1 on 1s and online.
I had the pleasure of meeting and guiding almost 200 students to completion, learning just as much about their backgrounds and reasons for learning to code as they learned about coding. To see the positive changes it made to people’s carriers and life trajectories was truly satisfying.