How a DC-based education program is getting students excited about tech with Open P-TECH (plus a free lesson plan!)
Article by India Miles • March 9, 2021
Saladin Majied is the President of Ansar Services, a DC-based program that supports community-based activities and educational programs. Recently, his team brought on Open P-TECH to supplement one of their summer learning programs and students loved it. Hear more from Saladin in this interview.
Educator interview: How Ansar Services uses Open P-TECH
India Miles: First things first, can you tell me a bit about Ansar, its origins, and your role?
Saladin Majied: Ansar Services was founded about 20 years ago by a group of people in Washington DC who wanted to do community-based work. It started off as an informal organization that sponsored a number of activities at the community level: youth activities, community cleanup, fundraising for community-based programs and activities. The intent was to do good work, particularly in under-resourced communities.
I joined the organization in 2008. About four years ago, I was asked to step into a leadership role and I just couldn’t refuse. At that time, we did some strategizing around our mission and the future of the program, particularly in how we’re addressing the challenges our community is facing.
One of the challenges facing youth in our community, as you know, is the future of work. That is, the evolution of technology and how its changing jobs and job functions. If we want to support the community long-term, we’ve got to be innovative in opening up opportunities. That’s been a main focus of Ansar and our programs.
India: How does Ansar and its programs, like UC2IT, “open up opportunities” for young people in your community?
Saladin: “UC2IT” stands for the Urban Center for Community Information and Technology. Through this program, we provide IT training and general career development for young people in the community.
We offer online technology and self-development training, as well as a number of virtual and physical outreach events (following COVID protocols, of course). At past events, for example, we brought in sophisticated robots so students could see how advanced technology is being applied.
There’s also the UC2IT Academy, which is focused solely on offering interactive learning on technology to youth and young adults in the community. We have relationships with organizations throughout the city and we work with these organizations to identify students that might be a good fit for the academy.
India: Do your programs focus on technology alone or are there other skills you hope students will gain?
Saladin: One aspect of career development, of course, is technology. But the other aspect is human development or the development of human potential. That’s something we’re all working on throughout our entire life. At Ansar, we’re interested in enabling young people in terms of their technology skills for employability, but also in terms of their own personal development.
I would extend that further and say we have an interest in the development of community. And we hope that those individuals who progress through our programs take on that interest—an interest in continuing to develop the community in which they live or are from.
A key part of the UC2IT Academy, for example, is self-leadership development. We use the term “self-leadership” because we’re asking young people to choose the direction they want to go and to start figuring out their interests.
Young people in the Academy engage in a series of sessions where they read, do exercises, and engage in discussions about various topics, such as integrity, courage, etc. The idea is to help them start thinking a certain way and hopefully develop positive thoughts and beliefs about themselves and their potential.
India: Sounds like you’re doing really incredible work. I’d love to hear about how you’re using Open P-TECH to support your students’ learning.
Saladin: We engaged with the Open P-TECH platform for the first time this summer as part of the UC2IT Academy and it was great.
It was all virtual and—as you know, India—that’s a little bit challenging. So we put together our own lesson plan to help students track their learning: in week 1, this is where you should be, in week 2, this is where you should be, etc.
What we found was that some students veered off from the plan. But that wasn’t a bad thing! When we went back to look at the subjects they were exploring, we said, well… that’s not what we had assigned them but maybe they went off exploring for a reason, maybe that’s telling us something. And it was telling us something. Students were veering off in a good way.
India: What did you learn, seeing students engage with the platform in ways you didn’t plan for?
Saladin: It was great to see our students’ broad range of interests, across the board, from interpersonal skills to cybersecurity (with those two being most popular). We learned that we can’t necessarily predict and anticipate what our young people are going to get out of a platform like Open P-TECH. For us that was certainly an eye-opener.
Our students are curious about so many things. In terms of our upcoming program offerings, we need to be mindful of this. We need to provide an opportunity for students to explore the topics and skills that interest them, understanding that this exploration may spark them to dive into some of the other technology areas.
India: How were you all able to get this done virtually? And kudos to you for doing so!
Saladin: Like I mentioned, we had a lesson plan for students to work from and we set up a progress tracker so we could see how students were advancing. We took the data provided by the Open P-TECH platform and put it into our own format. This allowed us to track where people were and how we were doing as a whole in relation to the lesson plans.
As far as holding virtual sessions, that was pretty new to us and we plan to keep working to figure out the best ways to do it. We had a virtual session each week, which became a meeting ground. While the courses are self-paced, this weekly check point allowed to connect about what they were learning, but it also added a social aspect.
India: What are your plans for Open P-TECH going forward?
Saladin: I was so, so proud of this group of students. I hope that the other classes that we have this year are just as productive and engaged as some of these were.
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