Ignite Your Future by Opting for Hybrid and Blended Courses

Education Technology Insights

1. The education sector is changing and evolving at a tremendous pace, moving away from traditional classrooms and toward virtual learning spaces. As the program director for cloud computing at Wake Technical Community College, what are some of the latest technology adoption trends you are witnessing in the education domain?

Virtual courses are very much in demand but the moving away from the traditional classroom will level out and I do not see this format going away. The reason for this is that there are students that do not do well in a virtual environment but excel when they are in the classroom and have that type of instructor interaction. This was very apparent when the COVID pandemic hit and we went 100% online for over a year.

Nonetheless, I do think that the need for the 100% seated course will be reduced. Opting more for hybrid and blended courses that combine seated instruction time and online content has been a good move to meet student needs. By providing multiple modalities of instruction requires combining educational technologies for collaboration, content delivery, assignment collection, and grading.

2. In a world where cloud computing has become one of the supporting pillars of digital technology, how do you utilize cloud at your organization to enhance the learning outcomes for students?

We want to expose students to multiple cloud technologies. There are cloud-based service providers that provide instructional content through the cloud. There are programs that want to get students certified with a major cloud vendor. This has a benefit of providing a good foundation in the cloud, knowing how a specific cloud service works, and hopefully gives the student the ability to be adaptive to other cloud service providers.

Our program at Wake Tech in Cloud Infrastructure is designed to take a different approach where we develop technical skills to setup and support cloud environments as well as knowledge of the cloud so that students can be adaptive and support hybrid and multi-cloud environments. To do this, we expose students to multiple cloud platforms throughout the degree program in the courses they take and opportunities external to the program to obtain certifications. This allows students to see how the cloud is applied directly when they are learning the Linux and Windows operating systems, how virtualization is applied, cloud storage concepts, and networking to support cloud architectures.

To further support our cloud learning objectives we have labs that allow students to directly apply their skills. This includes a Student Data Center that we use as a cloud source to deploy some instructional content as well as having hands on ability to work with hyperconverged hardware.

3. What are some of the initiatives or programs you have spearheaded during your term as the program director for cloud computing at Wake Technical Community College, and how have these programs made a difference?

When I started as the Program Director for Cloud Computing there was not a cloud program. The program in place was a Storage & Virtualization degree program. The program provided a good foundation for the Cloud Infrastructure degree program where I was able to work with industry and faculty to devise the Cloud Infrastructure program. This program update increased student technical and soft skills while reducing the credits needed to graduate in the program. We reduced the credits to graduate from a 72 credit hour Windows based program to 65 credit hours that greatly enhanced Linux skills, added Python programming, and more cloud content.

In addition to technical skills our general education electives were changed to develop soft skills so that students can better navigate working in a business environment. These included courses in communication, critical thinking, and changing up our Systems and Design course where a student works through a case study and the SDLC throughout the course, interacting with a virtual corporate manager where they need to develop project deliverables. When the Cloud Infrastructure program was launched our industry partners were very clear after we launched the program in stating that the skills that students learn in the program was what they needed.

We are still assessing outcomes but we received some great feedback from an organization that hired one of our students as an intern to work on their cloud migrations effort. They reported that the student was very valuable to the effort especially with the application of the application and understanding of virtualization they brought to the migration effort.

b5yOther key efforts to develop the program was to create and make operational our Student Data Center for instructional purposes as well as to provide hardware that is part of the cloud fabric that students can work with in our more advanced courses. Currently we are able to make these program changes with grant support from a National Science Foundation ATE Grant. This grant also provides more internships for our students and externships for faculty.

4. What is your role in implementing efficient cloud computing strategies in the education sector to benefit both the students as well as the teachers?

It is important to work with industry, faculty, and students in my role. Here at Wake Tech, one of our campuses is in the Research Triangle Park where there are multiple large tech companies and their involvement helps make our cloud direction very clear. It also gives us the ability to reach out to businesses of all sizes to be able to provide skilled graduates to support and sustain their cloud initiatives. We want to be sure faculty have time to be involved in back to industry efforts and this not only improves our courses but helps us to be able to meet industry needs.

5. As an ending note, what is your advice for other senior leaders and CXOs working in the education sector?

Senior leaders need to understand the cloud so they can position their programs to develop the right skills for their students. Obtaining cloud skills goes beyond just having student become certified with a service provider such as AWS, Google, Azure, and others. Rather, programs need to be able to help businesses in all industries that are adopting cloud technology with cloud migration strategies, cloud sustainability, DevOps, cloud security, etc., that encompassmultiple cloud vendors and on prem cloud services. I have been able to expand on this in the education sector not just through Wake Tech but also being able to address these topics with some depth in my master class lectures in Cloud Computing through CalTech’s Center for Technology and Management Education (CTME).