Partner Article

Is crowd-teaching the answer to IT skills crisis?

Whether checking our bank statements, updating our Facebook status or texting our friends, computers underpin everything we do. Yet most of us know very little about how computers actually work, and the next generation risks knowing even less. This is a significant issue for UK businesses that needs to be addressed fast.

Computer science, and in particular the art of coding and software development, is almost completely neglected at the schools level and woefully under-represented at universities. Even in the US, the global leader in tech, less than 2.4% of college students graduate with a degree in computer science - fewer than 10 years ago. The situation in the UK is likely even worse. This is a ticking time bomb for the country’s long-term position as a leading knowledge economy.

Education at all levels is key, and the government can be credited with taking the first steps to address the issue when it took the bold step of suspending the existing ICT curriculum for 11-16 year olds in September last year. The government turned to the IT industry itself to architect a replacement that was fit-for-purpose and put more emphasis on how computers actually work (i.e. by teaching coding) over how to use the latest version of Microsoft Word.

Recognising the issue and suspending the out-dated curriculum was an important first step. However, we suggest that a more radical solution is needed if we are to prevent the new curriculum from befalling the same fate as its predecessor of becoming out-of-date and irrelevant. We believe that the world’s software developers, working together, can do a better job of providing the learning materials, infrastructure and motivation needed to train the next generation of developers. We might be wrong, but we believe this ‘crowd-teaching’, collaborative approach is a better solution to the problem than one designed by committee.

We want to take collaboration and really put it to good use in the world of education. The web community is an incredibly resourceful, innovative, and adaptable resource that should be given the opportunity to play a role in solving the skills issue. It has already achieved some great things with the likes of the Raspberry Pi project and Code.org making a real difference in recent years. Online tutorials already exist for almost every coding problem out there. All we need to do is to collate this content into a resource suitable for education. Through the collaboration and iteration of this content we believe that the community can provide teachers with a post-curriculum resource that is always relevant, 100% free, and builds on the collective teaching of everyone who uses it.

Codio has a role to play by providing the free platform on which the community can share its resources and learn to code, but we want to know what others in the business and IT world think about the idea and to suggest how they themselves can contribute.

By Freddy May, CEO, Codio

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Codio .