Drake Online and Continuing Education is partnering with IBM Skills Academy to offer educational opportunities in the area of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, block chain, data science, cloud computing, and/or design thinking. The IBM Skills Academy is the integrated program incorporating a week of faculty training, pre-built curriculum, hands-on cloud based labs, use cases, quizzes, exams and badges.

All of the offerings in these areas will be non-credit and will take the form of boot camps, non-credit certificates, and smaller workshops.  To offer these non-credit workshops and seminars, we are seeking instructors to participate in the IBM Skills Academy.  Potential instructors must be good facilitators and have basic IT literacy, such as working within an operations system such as Windows, copying and pasting items, and using the Internet.  Instructors will attend training and must commit to teaching at least twice within a 12-month timeframe.  To become an instructor, there is a mandatory, weeklong training at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY.  Drake Online and Continuing Education will support the travel costs.  Instructors will be compensated for instruction of seminars, although detailed rates have not been set at this early stage.

All faculty and staff who may be interested in becoming an IBM Skills Academy instructor can contact Christina Trombley at christina.trombley@drake.edu or at extension 2506.

—Christina Trombley, Executive Director, Online Programming