Oracle Academy and VTA to help 10,000 students in SL

Sri Lanka’s Vocational Training Authority has entered into a partnership with Oracle Corporation Singapore to help implement Oracle’s Introduction to Computer Science and Advanced Computer Science programs into Vocational Training Centers islandwide. Oracle Academy will be pitching in with the curriculum, training, support and certification: the idea is to provide some 10,000 students, over a period of two years, with both the skills and the certifications necessary to help them get a couple of steps ahead. The Advanced Course, for those who  can enroll, holds a great deal of promise – including detailed work on software development, design and architecture.

Whether this is implemented remains to be seen. After all, in 2012, the Ministry of Education and Oracle Academy brokered a similar deal to bring in the Introduction into the MoE’s Secondary Schools Development Program – and this was to include Java Fundamentals and an introduction to Alice, a 3D, virtual world creator that teaches students to code in a very novel way. That doesn’t quite seem to have worked out, either.

However, this new step should be significantly easier to integrate – it’s 70 Training Centers and the promise of certification to boot.