Meet the drivers of Accredian’s super-smooth student experience.
Here is our Accredian Academics Team who has played a pivotal part in your journey at Accredian. We discussed the core areas of focus and competencies that help elevate the student experience at Accredian.
Malvika: Would you like to talk about the areas of focus for the Academics team?
Vishal: The Academics Team at Accredian is driven to ‘Groom Data Leaders of tomorrow.’
An important aspect is to provide a super smooth student experience. So we’re working on concepts and ideas to regularize and automate our mail chain such that our students feel more connected. Anytime a student sends us a mail, they get an automated revert with possible query resolution followed by a few helpful links and articles.
We are also continuously building a strong alumni connection. We’re building a strong community on LinkedIn such that each and every Accredian student can get connected with each other and help each other as peers in building their careers.
Malvika: At a given point of time, how many batches/students do you cater to?
Vishal: Accredian launches a batch every month. Every month we launch a batch where CDF, GCD and GCDAI students start their journey and every module is spread for 4-5 weekends.
In every batch there are students of 130+ students that start their Data Science journey together every month. On the orientation day itself, we let the students know that this batch consists of 130+ working professionals or so.
Malvika: How do you ensure that the scheduled sessions are beneficial to the maximum students?
Reema: It is not easy to ensure that everything runs like a well-oiled machine and every session is beneficial to maximum students and as such we do have a lot of checks and balances in place.
Firstly, we do understand that most of our students are working full time which means they have little flexibility when it comes to time. Naturally, we keep all our classes/events on weekends so that most of the students can attend it live and get their doubts cleared on the same day.
Let’s now move inside regular classrooms. We religiously share multiple reminders of each and every communication regarding any upcoming event, any particular ongoing track or any speaker session which is planned for our students.
That’s one way of ensuring no one misses on the communication and students stay informed and participate in such sessions.
During the classes, along with the faculty, we have Teaching Assistants in each and every session. TAs are dedicated to answering student queries on the Sessions’ chat window if in case it does not need to be discussed with the entire cohort.
The best part of attending classes live is that if you have a query from previous classes, you can go on air with the faculty and get your doubts cleared.
Now let’s move outside the classroom situations. Considering all our candidates are working professionals, they might miss out on some classes, so we make sure that the recordings are uploaded timely, so that they can go through them as per their convenience. The best part is that they have lifetime access to these recordings.
We also invite speakers from different organizations who’ve made a substantial contribution to the industry and in their domain. They share their journeys and latest trends in the Data Science and AI sector.
So this makes our students explore new profiles, new job opportunities, new developments and insights on what kind of benefits they are going to get after completing these courses.
These are some ways in which we make our live session beneficial to the maximum number of students.
Malvika: Can you share something about the diverse backgrounds of the Accredian students?
Shruti: A wonderful aspect about Accredian is the diversity of the students.
We not only have students from technical backgrounds but also students from different domains and they all grow and flourish in the same learning ecosystem!
These students are enrolled in the same courses related to Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and that’s what makes Accredian unique from different learning institutions, because we don’t have any hard and fast eligibility criteria when it comes to our students. Instead, we structure our courses in such a way that it is comprehensive for every student irrespective of his/her background.
That said, we have students from Healthcare, BFSI, IT-services, HR, Marketing & Advertising, Project Managers, Sales Heads, with 10-12 years of experience. The one thing I found common in all our students is their enthusiasm towards Data Science and they understand the future and the need to upskill early.
I believe students’ background contributes a lot in creating a healthy cohort, which we never forget to put in good use. We use the diversity and health of the cohort to help them network and grow better.
Malvika: Accredian faculty is highly regarded among the students. What filtering mechanism do we practice so that the faculty is the best across India?
Reema: I think there are two main filters.
Firstly, the experience of the faculty in his respective domain matters a lot.
Secondly, students’ feedback for the faculty’s teaching methodologies is most important here at Accredian.
I think the best thing about Accredian instructors is that they are not simply trainers or freelance instructors. They are real world Data Science, ML and AI practitioners who are working at companies like Gartner.
That way, we ensure the Accredian faculty is in sync with the industry requirements as they’re data scientists themselves holding considerable years of experience.
Malvika: How do we ensure that the Accredian students can get the best out of the faculty?
Shruti: Accredian faculty are experts in their respective domains.
Another highlight about our institution is that there is no single faculty that is responsible for teaching the entire course or program.
What we do is hire instructors who are experts in the respective fields and are working professionals employed in good organizations as General Managers, Data Scientists or Data Engineers.
They are all high-achieving working professionals in the Data Science and AI domains.
Coming to the question, apart from resolving queries ona real-time basis in the chat windows during sessions, faculty are super engaged with students beyond the classes as well.
They share their own work with students. Apart from the standardized material wonderfully crafted by our own Product Team, faculty are free to share their research papers, their material, their references, their articles and any additional pointers for our students.
Malvika: Being a completely online institution at such a large scale, how do you ensure that the student completely benefits from the experience and all queries are resolved on time?
Academics Team: Let’s first discuss the different portals dedicated to answering student queries. Firstly, we have the academics email address where students can direct their technical as well as non-technical queries.
Apart from that we have a community portal, where every incident can be directly accessed by the Product & Research Team as well . So in case if any student posts any queries, it will be resolved at the earliest by whichever stakeholder responsible.
On the community portal, any querant can get answers to their questions posted at any point of time either by a member from the Product Team or a student who’s available on the community portal and is willing to answer that query. With a current student count of 4000+, we do have a rather robust and active Accredian community.
Now coming to the queries we receive, we mainly have to deal with problems around lack of time and requests to arrange for batch transfers or pause options for the program as per their schedule.
In case queries are of technical nature, we immediately connect them to the Product & Research team.
Recently we have launched an automated answering bot system where a student who’s posting any query which has been commonly addressed before gets an automated response in the form of an article we have already drafted for that particular query.
In this case, the article discusses the resolution in detail and is immediately shared with the student without him having to wait for another person to manually intervene. This is also implemented for batch transfer or pause requests– the entire process is now automated to avoid any delays.
Malvika: How does Accredian maintain an edge over other learning centers in India?
Reema: One of our major USPs is Accredian Career Launchpad workshop.
Other institutions either charge extra or do not attach much importance to these career grooming workshops but after completing the foundation course we feel our students are prepared enough now to navigate the recruitment processes of different companies.
We focus on helping them build their Data Science portfolio from Day 1 itself which is unique.
Apart from that the frequency of Industry speaker sessions at Accredian makes us stand out from other learning centers.
In my opinion, Accredian appoints the best faculty and we keep a close check on the functioning of the different teams which is very important. Though we have a number of different teams working separately and together, we always prioritize the needs of the students and ensure minimal delays and super-efficient service.
Another important aspect is taking real-time feedback from every student. We take feedback very seriously and consequently take action whenever required with the best turnaround speed possible.
This was our conversation with Accredian’s Academics Team. If you have any questions with the student experience at Accredian, reach out to is at [email protected]
