When Fope reached out to me on LinkedIn in February 2022 about an opportunity to join AltSchool Africa, so many things ran through my mind as I had spent 4 years building communities and the Learnable program with Genesys Tech Hub in Enugu at the time.
Still, it felt like an exciting challenge and an opportunity to do the same thing I have always done on a larger scale. I applied, went through the recruitment process, and got the job. I had just become AltSchool Africa’s first Program Manager and in about a month after I joined the team, we would go live with the first cohort of the School of Engineering with over 4000 learners ready to go.
2 years and 5 months later, AltSchool Africa’s mission has evolved to become so much more. From added Diploma Programs in Product, Data, and Cyber Security, to non-technical courses in Sales and Content Creation. So much has gone into building what the institution is today. I’m proud to say that this is where I’ve done my best work so far.
Getting individuals to learn on the internet has never been easy. More-so when they have to spend as much as 12 months doing this. From my time with the team, I’d use real-life scenarios to point out a few things that stuck that I think maybe helpful to someone out there:
One of the problems I and the team had to solve early-on was the problem of finding a suitable platform for hosting live sessions that’d be able to serve over 4000 students who were eager to start learning with the School of Engineering. None of the usual suspects like Meet or Zoom could cut it without us compromising on the quality of delivery to the learners. We had to find our perfect platform and we were running out of time.
Glad to tell you that we did find them, let’s call them company X for legal reasons(I’ve always wanted to say something like this). Anyways, company X’s product had everything we needed and we had done a number of demos to be sure it was indeed the one. I should have sensed from how intentional company X’s sales reps were during the demos that they’d want to charge us seed funding as an annual subscription fee.
After a lot of negotiations, we still ended up at a very exorbitant amount. When Sultan and Adewale said we’d be going on with company X’s product for the expected quality of delivery to AltSchool’s students, I knew I was at the right place. I remember Adewale saying “I’ll find ways to look for the money but we can’t compromise on quality”.
Here’s a sample of one of those virtual sessions.
It’s totally okay to keep building technology and improving systems/process after you’ve launched your product. This is something the team @AltSchoolAfrica has adopted quite well. We launched the School of Engineering in 2022 with learning content, a community platform, a tele-conferencing platform, and a Learning Management System.
Over time, the team has added so much more to this lineup including a student portal, an improved Learning management system, career services, global accreditations, a student business incubator, and several internal tools that help improve all-round productivity. A lot these came from implementing feedback gathered over time.