Lessons Learned from Delivering Programing Courses Online for Retraining Serbian Workforce through UNDP Programs – A Joint Project between UCSDX and MISANU

Abstract

Brief overview of the Serbian IT sector employment situation is given. Through the summary of the past online learning experiences it is shown that online learning can be an effective tool to reeducate the Serbian workforce to serve the countries growing IT employment demands. The nature of the UN Development grants in Serbia is explained together with the details of the joint proposal from the University of San Diego Extension and the Mathematical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. The proposal consisted of a group of Java and Python courses that were delivered online in English to 34 students selected from more than 80 people that applied. The results presented show that the program was very effective with an extremely high satisfaction rate both in terms of the content and online delivery platform, and that the similar methods can be used in the future for further education of the IT workforce.