Last year, we wrote a blog introducing Unqork Academy, our self-starting hub for no-code learning. Since then, Unqork Academy has become a powerful tool for empowering our users—from internal team members to clients to partners—and fostering a supportive no-code community. To further invest in Unqork Academy’s growth, we’ve put together an Instructional Design team to build on our existing foundation and debut some exciting new changes that we’re referring to as Unqork Academy 2.0.
What’s New?
One of the most exciting new features of Academy 2.0 is the addition of learning paths, which are tailored programs that allow users to follow a path that’s most applicable to their interests and existing knowledge. Learning paths are widely regarded as the cutting edge of adult education because they accommodate a variety of skill sets and levels of expertise, and we’re excited to be able to offer a more customized Academy experience. With these learning paths in Academy 2.0, you’ll have the option to focus on particular areas like APIs, security, or building dashboards. The program is still maturing, but the first path for APIs is available now as a beta.
In an effort to better define and build out no-code skillsets, Academy 2.0 features additional levels of certification—as well as LinkedIn badges to go with them. The “Associate Configurator” is the base certification for an Unqork creator, but we’re adding more rigorous curriculums, detailed courses, and learning paths that will accompany each additional level of certification. After “Associate Configurator,” you can progress to “Expert Configurator,” before reaching the highest certification of “Master Configurator.”
We’re also adding more use cases and labs so users can continue to practice their skills. “You have to learn by doing, and that’s a big focus for us,” says Elle Faraday, our Instructional Design Lead. “As Unqork becomes more in demand with clients, you’re going to need more people who are Unqork-certified. Eventually, I’d love this to grow into a whole network of qualified people that companies can pull from when they’re hiring.” These additional labs and use case features should be fully functional by the end of the year.
Long-term Goals for Unqork Academy
Beyond the current learning paths we’re working on, we also eventually hope to add paths for Unqork sales, architecture, and so on. The goal here is to have Unqork Academy and all of its subsequent updates become part of a whole learning ecosystem, so that all of the changes and additions we include in the platform can be shared and distributed with the people who need to understand them.
“We will always want to get people excited about the world of no-code, but there’s still a lot of generalized knowledge to be gained about application development and how to approach it,” Elle says. “I could see us eventually filling in some of those gaps and putting people on the path to being builders.” In the meantime, we’re going to continue making interactive and engaging content, and we’re exploring using responsive learning that will make learning paths even more personalized.
[U]se of the Academy as a resource has nearly quadrupled since Q4 of 2019, boasting a 351% growth rate.
As always, we’ll continue to put ourselves in the mind of the user for a user-centric approach to education. Our team often learns no-code alongside Academy users, which gives us a unique advantage—we build with empathy and naturally take user experience into consideration every step of the way.
Learning With Unqork
As we were planning to roll out Unqork Academy 2.0, social distancing measures went into place—so we had to make some small adjustments. For instance, we still have live training sessions, but now they happen over Zoom. If anything, the novel coronavirus pandemic has just heightened the importance of what we’re doing and how necessary no-code applications are. Even beyond the pandemic, we plan to continue to make Academy content evergreen and accessible in the form of videos, shorter Q&As, and more.
With Unqork, sophisticated enterprise apps can be built in under a minute. Don’t believe us?
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Since launching Unqork Academy, we’ve learned not to get bogged down in teaching every single setting of our platform. Consistent platform documentation works in conjunction with our curriculum, but the Academy is an excellent standalone. We believe in showing not telling—and more than just teaching people how to use no-code, we want to teach people how to think through no-code. Our users seem to agree—use of the Academy as a resource has nearly quadrupled since Q4 of 2019, boasting a 351% growth rate. We’ve seen that as the no-code community grows, so does the Unqork Academy community—and we’re eager to continue providing more learning opportunities for our 1.4k active users.
Want to learn more about how no-code can be used at your organization? Schedule a personalized demonstration with one of our in-house experts. Also, sign-up for the Unqork newsletter to keep up-to-date on the latest in the world of no-code.
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