For the past few weeks, Akvelon and many companies around the world have asked their employees to remotely work from home in order to help protect their employees, clients, and communities from the spread of COVID-19.
Our transition to a remote global team was fast and smooth, and Akvelon has taken several measures to ensure that all employees can continue to support our clients effectively, from hosting more video conferencing calls to enhance communication with valuable face time to providing IT equipment to several employees whose home offices needed improvements so they can work efficiently.
Akvelon has also taken measures to continue employee education by quickly adapting several of their technical classes so that employees could take them remotely, like our Kazan office’s “Azure Cloud Basics” introduction course.
Azure Cloud Basics Introductory Course
Taught by Ansar Kadyrov, a .NET software developer at Akvelon, this course originally had 17 attendees and was set to have in-person weekly lectures over two months before our employees had to be asked to work from home about halfway through the course. Thinking quickly, Ansar was able to adapt his course by continuing his lectures online via Skype.
Akvelon’s “Azure Cloud Basics” course was originally taught in person every week
The “Azure Cloud Basics” introduction course covers:
- Azure’s infrastructure
- Azure products and services
- The value that Azure delivers and the issues that it solves
- Detailed analysis of Azure’s App Service, Key Vault, Cosmos DB, and API Management
Each of his lectures consists of a service idea explanation, a theory/concept presentation, and a small service demo.
Employees are now attending these lectures virtually via Skype
Tips to Prepare an Online Course
Ansar provided several tips for anyone who is interested in transitioning the courses they teach to online or anyone who would like to begin teaching online courses:
- Research online resources to get a better idea on how to change your course formats from in-person to online before you begin teaching. At first glance, there may not seem to be many differences however keep in mind that there are differences in how attendees ask questions, how you should interact with your audience, and how you should restructure the lessons
- Use YouTube tutorials to get a better idea of how to teach your lectures. They’re a great, free way to see other people teach in action and will help you understand what things you must focus on and how to present your content in an online format
- Focus more energy and time on practical topics and the demos which you will present as many attendees find these to be the most interesting and important part of the lesson
- Prior to each lecture, make sure that all of the equipment you are using is set up and working properly, like your internet connection, your workstation including your laptop or PC, and all software and programs that you are using. This will help you minimize potential technical problems you may have during the lecture
- This last one is very important – make sure that you turn off notifications on all of your devices, especially if you’ll be sharing your screen, and also let your family know that you’re going to have a meeting
Akvelon is happy to have employees like Ansar who are able to quickly adapt to unprecedented situations like these. Thank you for your help continuing our employees’ education, Ansar!
