Once upon a time, in an apartment block far far away...

Umuzi

• means "home" (Sort of)
• Not for profit
• Find high potential young people
• Pay them to learn
• Train them in high value digital skills
• NQF level 5 certification
• Help them get jobs, help them keep jobs

Umuzi

A day in the life...

BC (Before Covid)

And then came COVID

🔒 Locking down 🔒

• 250 odd students and a bunch of staff on site
• Computers, insurance, data, medical aid, transport...
• And most of our junior team mates were leaving for TIH in the near term...

everything we had been doing needed to change

And so we built...

First there was attendance...

But what we really care about is productivity

• Bums in chairs at specific times ❌
• Accountability mechanisms ✅
• Async interactions ✅
• Self-paced learning ✅

We had needs

• Admin, track, and deliver training...
• Report on progress
• Manage multiple learning tracks

Learner Managment System

• Allows set up of curriculums by filling in forms (rich-text) ... our syllabus already exists as a hugo static site
• Allows uploading of videos and other resources ... We can just use Youtube though.
• Track competencies with assessments and projects ... Most of the assessment mechanisms are completely insufficient
• Allow people to move through syllabus, a piece at a time ... but it doesn't resemble real work

We aimed a little higher

• Integrate with our existnig syllabus without too much pain/suffering
• reduce dependency on staff!
• simulate real work environment as much as possible
• promote healthy dev-team habits and practices
• Integrate with Github
• smoke detection

And so we built...

Also this thing

A day in the life...

Managing a group

Admin

Data requests and scripting

Under the hood

Syllabus as code

KISS

Great success!

• Learners are doing fine
• Our staff are doing fine
• Successfully ran end to end recruitment bootcamp

Infrastructure ++

Let's talk about us

Goals ++

• Make it cheaper and easier to run code schools
• Increase quality of code school output
• More schools, more grads, more high quality coders
• Less support needed for junior coders, cheaper to manage

Collaboration ++

• collaboration between students and staff of different schools via main instance
• Allow other schools to improve on the platform (open source for the win)
• Allow other schools to improve on syllabus
• Allow industry partners to improve on syllabus
• Easier in for volunteers and mentors across network

Trust ++

• Every alt ed code school is different => new industry partnerships == risky
• schools can leverage quality checking mechanisms built into platform
• Partners get easy access to student stats and reports, see growth, progress, code
• Partners get to vet the syllabus, actually look at how outcomes are proven
• Risk --