Online bootcamps have experienced explosive growth over the past few years. Not only do they offer an opportunity to pivot your career - with bootcamps in everything from software engineering to tech sales and everything in between - but many offer flexible payment options that help overcome barriers to entry often found in traditional universities.
As these programs grow, managing bootcamp operations can quickly get overwhelming. Making sure learners are on track to completion and preventing drop off along the way can become a daunting task. Fortunately, with grit, wit, and no-code tools, you can build an operations machine that will scale with you and help ensure that nothing (and no one!) falls through the cracks.
As bootcamps scale, these tasks become ever more time consuming:
Sharing live events: Many bootcamps rely on live online learning to generate the kinds of transformative experiences produced when we learn alongside a cohort of our peers. In a bootcamp’s early days, making sure learners know exactly where and when to attend these sessions can be as simple as sending out a few calendar invites. As bootcamps grow, making sure learners have access to exact times, dates, and join links for all events can be extremely tedious and prone to human error.
Tracking Attendance: For many bootcamps (especially those with ISA’s or whose bottom lines depend on a successful outcome for each learner), attendance is mandatory. Although this can be tracked manually while a bootcamp is small, tracking attendance across multiple cohorts, instructors and sessions can quickly get out of hand as a bootcamp grows.
Sending out reminders: Since attendance is often mandatory, bootcamps employ ways to ensure their learners know exactly where and when live sessions are happening. Sending event reminders via various channels - email, community platform, etc. - is key to meeting learners where they are and boosting attendance numbers.
Intervening with students: There are some telltale signs that a student might be struggling: they’re missing classes, not submitting assignments, or not engaging on your community platform (Slack, Discord, etc.). When a student exhibits these signs, a simple check-in can often mean the difference between dropping out or sticking it out. Of course, as student populations grow, so does the challenge of tracking and catching these signs in time.
As these tasks get increasingly time consuming, you can build out automations for repetitive tasks to manage your growing bootcamp. Here are a few we’d suggest:
Calendar Invites: Get calendar invites automatically sent to your students when they sign up for your program.
Attendance tracking: Don’t bother manually counting learners in a given online session. Set up an automation to auto-pull that attendance data.
Event Reminders: Automate event reminders to the tools your students use (i.e. Slack, Circle, etc.)
Auto-flagging: It’s important to detect when a student is at risk of falling off, so auto-flagging students who meet certain risk criteria (i.e. didn’t submit 2 assignments or missed 3 classes) can be hugely helpful.
Curious what no-code tech stack you should use for your live online learning program? Check out our suggestions here.
Zapier lets you set up automations to move data between different web apps. Here are a few examples of Zaps you can create:
Calendar Invites:
Trigger: Someone signs up for your program via an Airtable Form
Action: Send relevant Google Calendar invites to that person
Attendance tracking:
Trigger: A live Zoom session ends and the Zoom attendance report gets created via the Zoom API
Action: Send that report to your Airtable database
Event Reminders:
Trigger: A Google Calendar event is about to start
Action: Send reminder for event to Slack
A Virtual Event Manager (VEM) takes care of the hairy logistics of creating, sharing, and collecting data from live online events.
Virtually, for example, automates all of the processes listed above (and more). Here’s how:
Calendar Invites: When you create an event in Virtually, you can set a toggle to automatically send Google Calendar invites to specific groups of students.
Attendance tracking: Attendance is tracked for all events created in Virtually. That attendance data is immediately accessible on the platform and can be auto-exported to Airtable.
Event Reminders: Virtually lets you create up to 3 automated reminders for each event you hold that are sent by email, Slack, or both.
Auto-flagging: Virtually allows you to determine specific risk criteria (missed 2 classes in a row, etc.) and flags students that meet those criteria so you can take action and intervene.
Want to learn more about how using a VEM can transform the backend logistics for your bootcamp?
Schedule a demo call with a Virtually team member to learn how to simplify your event management or get started for free.
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Laura Marks is Head of Customer Experience at Virtually