Adapting Our Strategy for Learning For Partners During the COVID-19 Pandemic
During the COVID-19 pandemic, GTK pivoted our training focus to provide courses for corporate clients at their own schedule. Most of our custom courses run between two and four days, including a live, technically realistic training environment component. We recognize that it’s really difficult for students to get the most out of a virtual class if the class is eight hours straight through. So for our virtual classes, we established a program that favors shorter classes spread out over multiple days. This is easily applied using our modular custom course structure.
For example, we provided an Applied Data Science for Cybersecurity course for a major tech company. We initially created the entirely customized course for the company using our modules, with specific, nuanced tweaks to accommodate the company’s data security needs. The class was originally slated to be in-person over two days, but this became practically impossible during the pandemic. Instead, we split the course into four sessions of approximately four hours each and delivered the course one day per week, over four weeks.
Within the virtual setting, the students response to the improved course experience was positive. Our ability to be flexible with our course structure allowed us to add an additional session to cover suggested bonus materials. For this session, we compiled supplemental training specifically to accommodate the company’s requests.
We’re looking forward to working again with this company in 2021.
