Testing Our First Remote Cohort

Time is flying with Careers in Code! The first couple months of our coding bootcamp have already gone by, and recently we had our first remote week where students could learn in our classroom at The Tech Garden or from home.

One of our instructors, Jake Beard, is a talented and esteemed part of the local tech community. Despite living in New York City, he makes regular trips to Hack Upstate here in Syracuse. NYC to Syracuse is a hike, but we knew the students would get a lot out of his instruction, so we wanted to do whatever we could to get him on board. Because we value his time and expertise, we decided to explore the possibility of having him teach remotely.

To make his participation convenient for everyone involved, we used a couple technology solutions that were incredibly helpful for conducting our first remote week. We used Zoom for video conferencing, which still allows student participation and the ability to chat with the instructor, and Repl.it for real-time collaborative programming and code editing.

This setup also served as an experiment for us to test remote capabilities, as we are intent on scaling Careers in Code and providing remote opportunities for cohorts in the future.

Since this was our first time running class sessions remotely, we didn’t expect perfection, but would use the feedback from this week to potentially shape future classes.

Here’s how it worked:

On Monday, the first day of Jake’s instruction, students came to The Tech Garden in person and Jake joined us via Zoom. We had a master laptop at the front of the room with a conference mic, webcam, and projector so he could see and hear the students. This worked fine, but overall it was difficult for Jake to hear some of the students the way it was set up, so the next few days we tried a fully distributed model.

On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, students joined the class remotely via Zoom from wherever they wanted — home, coworking space, coffee shop, etc. It was much easier for Jake to have a dialogue with students since they could speak directly into their laptop’s microphone, and this was preferred because the students had a lot of questions.

Throughout the week, our teaching assistant, David Badillo, helped students with any technical issues that popped up so their experience could be as smooth as possible. We did have some issues with Repl.it working on a few students’ computers, but overall, things went well.

Once we figured out what worked best, this experiment turned out to be an amazing success and we validated that it is possible to do a fully remote cohort in the future, something we’re super excited about as it opens doors for many new educational opportunities.

The feedback we received from the students was unanimously positive:

“It’s cool that we’re doing class remotely. As an ‘in-person’ kind of person, it works really well, almost like the teacher is in the room with us.”

“It went well. Jake is very receptive to comments about how to make his lectures more accessible, and I got a lot out of the exercises we worked through together.”

On Jake’s end, he said, “The technology worked pretty much perfectly. There was a lot of discussion, very good questions, useful feedback, and interaction on the group exercises.”

To see how the rest of the week shook out over Zoom, see the videos below: