COLLEGE PARK, Md. – William Brantley from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland won a competitive award from edX to develop new online courses focused on essential human skills for the virtual age.
Out of more than 100 highly competitive submissions, only 10 were selected nationwide. This win brings a potential budget of up to $100,000 for Brantley and the UMD Project Management Center for Excellence to deliver a 3-course certification called the Citizen Developer Training Program.
"In the next five years, nine out of 10 apps (450 million) will be built by citizen developers, according to Microsoft. It's faster and cheaper than traditional software, and anyone can do it. This program will teach essential human skills for citizen developers to realize their potential in building low and no-code platform applications," said Brantley.
UMD has steadily been increasing its presence on edX, the leading online learning platform from 2U, with nearly 50 courses to date and many more funded and under development. Brantley has already built nine courses and formed two programs. In total, the Project Management Center for Excellence team has built over 20 edX courses.
"We strongly value our close working relationship with edX and are approaching 500,000 enrollments since we kickstarted our work together in 2018 with the Agile Project Management program. Dr. Brantley has been critical in building this program. Everyday we get notes of appreciation from around the world about how our UMD MOOCs (massive online open courses) are changing lives," said John Johnson, Faculty Specialist leading MOOC development in the Project Management Center for Excellence.