Within the framework of its cooperation with Coursera, Yeditepe University has managed for academics, students and graduates to receive education from international brands and specialists in many fields from data analysis to cyber security.
It has been about a year since the cooperation agreement between Yeditepe University and the online education platform Coursera was signed. With the agreement, academics received training for a year on new learning and teaching techniques and tools to support the increase of their research performance, while students received online educations from world-famous brands in topics such as data analysis, data science, data visualization, cyber security, project management, visual analysis, social media marketing and management with the use of the facilities provided by Yeditepe University.
More Than Four Thousand Courses Were Completed
In the past year, nearly 700 courses and certificate programs from different fields have been opened to the use of users through Coursera. More than four thousand courses were completed by students, academics and graduates.
The satisfaction feedback received from the evaluation surveys conducted at the end of the trainings was 4.7 on average out of 5. The usage rate of the licenses allocated for these trainings was one hundred percent.
A Bridge Between the Academy and a Career
Yeditepe University Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean and Learning and Teaching Unit YU-LEARNT Coordinator Prof. Dr. Berrin Yanıkkaya who gave information about this cooperation stated that programs were created for the target audience with different purposes and contents.
Prof. Dr. Berrin Yanıkkaya explained the details of the programs as follows:
"In the student program, the educations received by students created a bridge between their careers with academia and were aimed at developing them even further in their chosen fields. These education programs were also offered as certificate programs. The educational content covers a wide range of topics, from social media marketing to advanced programming and finance.
For faculty members, we offered two separate programs. One of them was a program that we can call the instructional skills program which was especially aimed at improving the learning and teaching skills of the instructors. The educations in this program were aimed at increasing the quality of online and hybrid education which entered our lives during the pandemic and continued to be in our lives afterwards. In these educationa, content was selected to present interactive and innovative teaching methods and to improve the pedagogical skills of the instructors.
The other program consisted of trainings that brought together programs that our instructors would want to improve themselves in different areas such as leadership, management, research techniques, project writing and language skills."
Prof. Dr. Yanıkkaya, who also gave information about the programs for graduates, continued her words as follows:
"In the program for graduates, we aimed for our graduates to improve themselves and to be better equipped with the certificates they are to obtain from the trainings we offer in their career journeys. The graduate program was a program that especially our newly graduated students showed interest in and benefited from.
Finally, we have created a program for administrative staff. In this program, our university employees received their own trainings from the Coursera catalog to support their career development."
"They Can Catch Up with the Professional and Cultural Trends in the World"
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Gonca Kızılkaya Cumaoğlu, Deputy Head of the Department of Computer Education and Instructional Technology Program at Yeditepe University and Coordinator of Educational Design at YU-LEARNT Learning and Teaching Unit, stated that a survey about the satisfaction of the participants will be conducted and it would cover the students, graduates and employees who participated in the trainings in the Coursera programs and completed the courses and received their certificates, she added that a study measuring the contribution of the participants to their business lives and careers would also be conducted as well.
Cumaoğlu emphasized that the program was very important in terms of catching the professional and cultural trends in the world and following the current contents.
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Gonca Kızılkaya Cumaoğlu said, "With these educations our faculty members, students and graduates had the opportunity to catch up with the standards in an international context and to master similar programs and curricula around the world."