ADN
The new season of in-presence courses is about to start!
Discover all the news on the new courses. Plenty of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Badges to certify skills.
One of the questions we’re asked most often in messages reaching our contact centre is the one about the start date of the next in-presence courses.
Well, it’s with great enthusiasm that we can finally announce that the first new editions of our evening courses are about to begin!
Our facility has been particularly busy over the past year, mainly due to the heavy workload that has come in on the training front delivered directly to large business clients and the work carried out within partnership programmes with the universities we’ve been collaborating with for several years.
These are important, prestigious activities — but unfortunately they meant our beloved programme of evening and weekend courses for the general public had to be sacrificed.
But 2024 will bring great news. On one hand, we’ll soon announce the opening of a further laboratory, again in Via Ignazio Persico in Garbatella, alongside Spazio Chirale (our historic site) and Punto Chirale, where individual laser-cutting authorisation courses already take place.
Together with the new space — which we’ll write about soon — we’re delighted to announce the launch of the new platform dedicated to training, which we’ve called Accademia delle Arti Numeriche.
It’s an e-learning and e-commerce platform, built with the support of the most recent LMS technologies, which will from the start support all the new courses and will gradually replace the current chirale.online platform as the formats and contents of the traditional courses are updated.
Beyond being updated in their contents — something we have always done consistently — the new courses will be supported by new methodologies and new tools for the certification and attestation of skills.
There’s a lot of important news. Let’s take it one step at a time.
The schedule of upcoming courses
The new courses will start near spring 2024.
The first course is already scheduled and published: it will start Thursday 8 February, in the usual evening time slot, and will be on one of the topics most in demand at the moment: the Python language and Artificial Intelligence.
It’s a brand-new edition of one of our best-sellers, but the content and format are completely new. For the first time in Italy, we’ll teach the fundamentals of a programming language and software design techniques including, among the development tools, not only classic IDE editors but also the latest productivity-boosting tools based on Generative Artificial Intelligence.
The final goal of the course will be to learn to design and build Artificial Intelligence applications, and the programming techniques themselves will be supported by AI. Not by chance, the course’s poster shows an AI programming an AI.
It’s a truly exceptional course.
We’ll soon announce the other upcoming courses, which will include Electronics, Arduino, Internet of Things and Analogue Photography. In many cases Artificial Intelligence will be a full-fledged part of the programmes.
The new certificate-issuing system
“But at the end of the course, do I get a certificate?”
This is by far the most frequent question that comes with requests for further information about our courses.
It’s no longer just about the proverbial Italian interest in the famous “piece of paper”: in today’s job market, attention to the so-called “certification of skills” is an ever more important topic, and being able to demonstrate through your CV — or, increasingly, also through your social profile, especially on LinkedIn — your training qualifications is something that can make a difference.
That’s why we’ve decided to adopt a more modern, more powerful mechanism for our certificates, which (it should be said) we’ve always issued.
From today we’re glad to announce that all certifications — both for in-presence and online courses — will be issued as Digital Badges compliant with the Open Badges standard.
Open Badges are image files, digitally signed by the issuing organisation, that contain inside themselves all the references that qualify the certificate.
Once the Digital Badge is included in a PDF CV, published on a social network or added as an email signature, anyone can verify the badge’s authenticity and validity in a certain and independent way.
Digital Badges are today used by very many organisations: universities, large technology providers and training bodies. We’ll write a dedicated article on this topic.
The new dedicated platform
All the courses scheduled for the new season — beyond being aligned with the state of the art of the latest technologies and tools, some of which have only been on the market for a few weeks — will be supported by next-generation Learning Management System tools.
The teaching method has been updated, including new mechanisms based on the gamification paradigm, that allow our students to better control their learning process and verify the skills they’ve acquired.
For this we’ve developed from scratch a new LMS platform, called Accademia delle Arti Numeriche, which will gradually replace the current chirale.online site — where today more than 2,000 students are registered. We’ve built it with the latest technologies, using market-leading products and tools, in partnership with the software house Fastal and Blu Sistemi and with the contribution of the Revolving Credit Fund of the Lazio Region.
Our new e-commerce system is already live on the new platform, supporting PayPal’s “Pay in 3 Instalments” electronic payments.