SOUTH AFRICA
Pioneering Riaz Moola, South Africa’s inspirational founder of coding boot camps which have gone global, is about to get another feather in his cap – his skills innovation efforts at bridging the gap between higher education and technology have led to an exciting partnership with Africa’s largest distance-learning institution.
Through his start-up Hyperion Development, or HyperionDev, Moola is now preparing to take its much-vaunted computer science skills training programmes into academia where the young tech upstart meets higher education.
Moola told University World News that, to formalise skills training for the world of work, his company has signed an agreement with the business entity of the University of South Africa, Unisa Enterprise, to launch a computer science boot camp for students.
This is a departure for HyperionDev that, since 2012, has been closing the global tech skills gap by offering online education through boot camps that has been hailed as an accessible alternative to traditional university degrees.
“So, it [the Unisa Enterprise initiative] will be a programme that helps students study through our format of learning. But, then, students are allowed to go further and do a computer science degree, taking three years if they want,” Moola said.
Best of both worlds
It is a huge step in bridging the gap between what people call an alternative credential, which is a boot camp or career accelerator as opposed to a traditional degree. Now students can get the best of both worlds.
“Students will receive a qualification accredited from a recognised tertiary institution, in addition to the skills required to get job-ready quickly via our boot camps,” he said.
Moola believes the increasing inaccessibility and high cost of university education augur well for the edtech sector, and HyperionDev’s own future, which currently dominates the education alternatives sector. Moola reckons this sector is the biggest in the world operating in this space with a global market worth reportedly US$297 billion.
Teaming up with Unisa Enterprise will open doors to more opportunities for collaboration.
“This is our first partnership with a university; it’s going to be amazing. Unisa is very excited about it. We’re excited about it and believe that students in South Africa will respond very well to taking a programme that has got the best in terms of follow-up, method of delivery, boot camp one-on-one mentorship, and offering the alignment the industry needs with the university’s own reputation and credentials.”
Moola said HyperionDev, which is backed by Facebook and Google and has trained 100,000 students to date, co-designed its tertiary curriculum offering with Unisa Enterprise.
But it will not stop there. The company is talking to several public and private universities, not only in South Africa but also in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.
“There’s just a huge demand for high-quality online education and very high interest from universities and how they enter that space with partners,” Moola said.
While the COVID-19 pandemic has fast-tracked the move to online learning, Moola said his boot camp has been delivering online training in South Africa, Africa and throughout parts of the world since long before it became the norm.
“The other thing [about] the pandemic is that it’s also really quickly changed the view of the universities regarding online education. More of them are suddenly thinking and discovering that they need to invest more in online education and platforms,” he said.
As a result, Moola reckons that the ability to deliver effectively online is even more important for an institution of that nature than one that maybe has a lot more in the way of traditional on-campus delivery.
He described HyperionDev as a career accelerator, not offering degrees, but critical skills aligned to the qualifications roadmap that focuses on what one needs to learn quickly to get a job to become, for example, a software developer, web developer or data scientist.
Developing scarce skills online
An estimated 10% of professions are expected to disappear and be replaced by artificial intelligence by 2030, according to a September 2020 report, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development announced in a media statement. The focus of HyperionDev over the past decade has been largely on developing scarce skills via online delivery.
Moola said the growth of technology must be viewed against how people consume media and information online, so it is not strange that online education has been accelerated.
“A very small percentage of students studied fully online, and only in the last 10 years has the idea of a fully online masters degree or undergraduate degree become more common.”
Moola believes that the world is now at an online learning stage where it would have been only by 2030 had it not been for the pandemic. But, he added, it still may take a while before university degrees migrate fully.
In the early days, when HyperionDev began, Moola recalls there was scepticism about its offering and the online model, but this was eventually overcome as students who enrolled were soon in demand by employers.
The company’s ‘Graduate outcomes report’ on the performance of their graduates reveals that students are getting back the investment in tuition fees in salaries earned four months after completing their studies.
“With that type of data and information, there’s less scepticism, especially as people can go online, verify that by looking at the thousands of profiles of graduates out in the market on LinkedIn for various employers and read their success stories.”
Moola is confident of the space HyperionDev operates in and is determined to plough back by offering scholarships for students in need. In August 2021, the company secured one of the largest Edtech Series A crowdfund rounds, raising more than US$3.43 million in 12 weeks through combined private investments and public crowdfunding.
This milestone will help the Facebook and Google-backed coding boot camp specialist drive its global expansion programme and enable US$239,786 million to be given in scholarships.
But he admits it is tricky when it comes to understanding the role of universities and what his team is doing in the education space.
“We are not trying to replace universities. We are working with tertiary institutions to help them launch new types of courses that help them to enrol new students, or support students through their traditional programmes, so there will always be a place for the traditional university model.”
This article was updated on 27 September.