Two and a half years ago we launched the Otus.ru project and I wrote . To say that I was wrong is to say nothing at all. Today I would like to sum up the intermediate result and tell a little about the project, what we have done so far, what we have “under the hood”. I'll start, perhaps, with the mistakes of that very article.
Is education about employment?
And here it is not. This is for people who want to change their profession education for employment. And for those who work in the profession, education is a way to become cooler. No matter how strange it may sound, people come to us to study in order to be the best specialist. Six months ago, we conducted a survey of our students, then there were a little less than 2 of them. We asked a simple question: why do you study with us? And only 500% answered that their goal is to change jobs. The vast majority of colleagues study for their own development, to upgrade their skills, they are interested in new things in their profession. This opinion is indirectly confirmed by employment figures: we organized thousands of interviews, and only 17 of our students decided to change jobs during the entire two and a half years of the project's existence.
The second point in which we were mistaken is that we can, in principle, employ. And here it is not. No educational center is the subject of the employment process. He cannot influence him in any way and the thousands of circumstances leading to a job change. We have changed our strategy, and now we simply recommend our students to companies, and companies to our students. In a sense, we have become the media in the field of work in IT, but without intrusiveness. Now we have 68 clients (both those who are studying, and those who have completed their studies or have not started yet). This is approximately 000% of the entire Russian IT market. Plus, we have more than 12 companies cooperating with us and posting their vacancies with us. But even on this volume, we are unlikely to be able to say that we are engaged in employment. We just help people and companies meet, and we do it for free.
One course, one teacher?
When we started, we had a fantasy that in order to make a cool course, you just need to find a good practitioner with a lot of experience in production, and convince him to do the course. And then the course itself is a transfer of his experience. I even had a metaphor for this: “he saws the application during the day, and in the evening he tells you about it.” I was very far from reality. It turned out that the course is the most complex organism, which has a different structure depending on the subject area. It turned out that in addition to webinars (read - lectures) there should also be practical classes (that is, seminars) and homework, as well as methodological materials, and that's all. It turned out that at the same time a team of teachers should work on the course, that there are good lecturers, and there are seminarians, and there are assistants who check homework. It turned out that they need to be taught, and they need to be taught in different ways. It finally turned out that finding these people and selling them teaching is more difficult than finding and inviting them to the state.
As a result, we created our own school. Yes, we have created a school for teachers, and we teach, we teach much more than we have left. The profession of a teacher is complex, energy-consuming, and only one in four, after completing our training, “goes out” to the audience. We have not found a better way to select teachers other than by immersing them in the learning process. For a month or two of study, future teachers have to not only create their own course, but also teach their classmates in practical classes. During the existence of the project, we have taught 650 people to teach, 155 of them teach our students.
We won't have many courses?
Actually, how many topics are there in IT for training? Well Java, C++, Python, JS. What else? Linux, PostgreSQL, Highload. Another DevOps, you can separately automated testing. And everything seems to be. We counted on this number of courses and that we would have 20-40 people in the group. Life has made its own adjustments. So far we have made 65 courses, or as we call them, products. And we plan to double within a year and a half. Once a month we launch 4-6 new ones, "feeling" the demand for technologies, programming languages and tools. It's funny, but so far we have not been able to understand why some courses take off, while others do not. We went about the same way as with the school of teachers: we create a funnel and test the demand “in battle”. And along with this, we have grown well in terms of group gathering rates: our largest group so far is 76 people, but we often gather 50 or more students. Of course, not everyone attends all classes, but we give the opportunity to watch them in the recording.
Recently, we have broken through the 1 mark. That is, we simultaneously teach more than 000 students, conducting at the peak up to 1 classes per day. All this activity lives on our platform, which we develop ourselves from the moment the project was created. Now a team of five people is working on it, which is openly sewn up under requests for new and new functionality. We traditionally pay a lot of attention to the quality of education, we regularly collect feedback from students. Over the past year, we have radically “tightened up” our grades, and now the average score for a lesson is 000 on a five-point scale (against 25 a year ago).
What did I do wrong then? Probably in the main idea of the project. We still invite those who already have experience in the profession to study. We still conduct entrance testing so that those who do not pull through the training, first prepare for the course. We still invite to teach only practitioners who do not pour water, but say specific and useful things. We still focus on practice, projects, products and develop the community around us in every possible way. Two and a half years ago I could not believe that someone would buy from us course after course, but now it is a fact: 482 people (that is, about 13% of all students) have bought more than one course from us, the record holder here is a person who visited as many as 11 of them. We still do not guarantee employment, we do not promise to “learn a profession in two weeks”, we do not tempt with mythical salaries. And we are very pleased that here, on Habré, there are already more than 12 of you with us. Thank you and stay in touch.
Source: habr.com