Yugabyte University Celebrates Being an ACE Awards 2022 Finalist
February 9, 2023
In January, thousands of education, success, and enablement professionals from CustomerEducation.org, voted in the annual ‘Awesomeness in Customer Education’ (ACE) Awards.
The ACE Awards recognizes programs that demonstrate educational excellence in their domain. Over 35 educational programs were nominated for this year’s ACE PROGRAM 2022 award, including Yugabyte University (YBU).
We are proud to announce that Yugabyte was an ACE PROGRAM 2022 FINALIST!
What is Yugabyte University (YBU)?
Yugabyte University (YBU) represents a strong community of business leaders, architects, developers, and administrators who share a common goal: mastering the skills and knowledge required to build fast, resilient, massively scalable, cloud native applications with distributed SQL and YugabyteDB.
No-cost learning is critical for open source communities. To help students achieve their career goals, YBU offers free self-paced courses, interactive builder workshops, virtual trainings, and professional certifications.
Since launching YBU early in 2022, the YBU community has grown to over 12,000 data practitioners and developers worldwide. Our learners have enrolled in more than 20,000 courses and have achieved over 2,100 professional certifications.
The Technology Stack Behind Yugabyte University
The ability to offer a no-cost learning and certification with high production quality is both an engineering and creative challenge. The YBU team relies on a combination of systems, vendors, and home-grown technologies to create courseware and facilitate the entire YBU learner experience.
Below is the unique combination of technology and thought-leadership that earned our team the ACE Awards finalist plaudit.
Learning Platform
Yugabyte University runs on Thinkific Plus, a powerful, scalable, customizable learning platform. This platform makes it easy to create courses, build a video library, customize the learning experience, and manage students. By using the Thinkific API, the university integrates with Accredible, Zapier, and Zoom. Because Thinkific also supports mobile devices, students who only have mobile access can still enroll and complete YBU courses.
Hands-on Labs
Learning by doing is critical for skills development. Many YBU courses facilitate hands-on learning with Gitpod and YugabyteDB Managed.
Gitpod provides an initialized, on-demand developer environment that is sourced from a course code repository and is 100% browser-based. Students can begin coding and experimenting for free without having to install and manage software. YugabyteDB YCQL Development is our latest course that offers hands-on learning labs using Gitpod.
YugabyteDB Managed offers a free sandbox cluster. The secure cloud shell integration of YugabyteDB Managed makes it easy for students to complete hands-on labs. The self-paced courses in the YSQL Exercises: Learning Path integrate directly with the cloud shell of YugabyteDB Managed.
Credential Management
Yugabyte University offers proof of completion and certification. Certification exams test students’ knowledge and professional certification recognizes their expertise. Eligible students receive YBU digital certificates from Accredible. Accredible makes it frictionless for students to receive a digital certificate and share the news of their certification with social and professional networks such as Twitter and LinkedIn.
Marketing Automation
Zapier is a service that automates workflows for over 5,000 applications. YBU utilizes Zapier to run dozens of Zaps, which connect applications and services based on triggers and events. For example, when a person on LinkedIn registers for a YBU virtual training, a Zap automatically enrolls the person into the related course and then sends the student a calendar invite for the event.
AI Video Production
With the advent of ChatGPT, artificial intelligence powered applications that generate content are getting a ton of attention. For over a year, the curriculum engineering team at YBU has been using several AI content creation tools. Most notable is Synthesia, a leading AI video creation platform. Using the Synthesia API and our own content-as-code tooling, the YBU team produces learning videos with a click of a button. Our students from around the globe appreciate the AI narrated videos that include closed captions and a consistent voice.
What’s Next?
While the team is a little disappointed not to win the ACE Award for the best program, we are delighted to earn a spot as a finalist.
We are also grateful for the opportunity to continue to serve our global community of cloud native application developers and database practitioners and will continue to produce more self-paced courses and improve the learning experience. Our dedicated and enthusiastic team invites you to begin your YugabyteDB learning journey today at Yugabyte University! You can also join our active YugabyteDB Community here for live chat with database experts and peers!
